by Brian Daley
He'd decided he would give Blackguard no satisfaction beyond his death, if it came to that; he'd already scouted out a cliff, two bodies of deep water and an unguarded maintenance machine, besides a number of toxic substances. In a pinch, any would do for a little improvised suicide.
Having profited modestly from Alacrity's various schemes and cons, Gute seemed content. He'd kept Alacrity's advice in mind, never being too greedy, and also kept his end of the bargain. His joy at owning a Spican atlas was funny and a bit sad. Gute's people, a few small tribes of them, were the only native inhabitants of that part of Blackguard when the Betters expropriated it, and were the only ones tolerated in that hemisphere. Almost all worked for the Betters.
Alacrity still saw no escape from Blackguard, and his luck couldn't hold out much longer. More and more ships were arriving for the Wild Hunt; with each arrival Alacrity's dread grew that this would be the starship from which Dincrist would disembark.
Security at the spacefield was just too thorough for anything like a hijack and getaway. As the nerve-fire from the permanent actijot fields there doubled with every step, one attempt to approach the off-limits areas had convinced him of that.
Simply ankling off into the bush was no good either; the jots could be activated through comsats that were part of the all-embracing Mark-X Talos Worldshield defensive system the compounds used to control their planet. The Betters could locate, disable, or kill him anywhere on Blackguard.
He still held out hope that Floyt could do or find out something of use, but that was fading fast. Nine days had passed since the incident at the Citadel Compound, and Alacrity had heard nothing from the Earther. There was only word that he was working in some capacity or other at the Central Complex, under the aegis of Baron Mason. Alacrity had seesawed between desperate hope and deep despair, praying to see Floyt show up with a pilfered ship, some way of deactivating the jots, a gun or the keys to the complex, but tormented that it would instead be Dincrist, with Sile and Constance, to take him away to a compound room with restraints, nerve rays, and flensing beams, all the obscene paraphernalia to which so many of the Betters seemed drawn.
Still, a part of him maintained, the harp, the harp … He tried to hold tightly to that memory, that affirmation of his life's most important question. He shook himself now, bringing his attention back to matters at hand.
"Okay now, Gute: watch close. Here goes—"
He was interrupted as clumps of palette-ferns parted at the edge of the clearing.
Both men jumped up in alarm, Gute bringing up the fright-light prod, the only weapon they had. At the edge of the clearing stood a young human male, maybe sixteen on the Standard scale. He was weaving a little, and blood seeped from the cuts and scrapes he'd gotten slithering and crawling, running and crouching in the undergrowth.
The kid was marked as a quarry, in a dermal stain that made him look like some kind of animal, a blotchy rust and green with a dotted white midsection. Alacrity supposed it was meant to imitate prey from some Better's homeworld and wondered whether the kid was someone's personal enemy or just unlucky.
The quarry's flimsy indoor soleskins were in shreds and his feet were in bad shape. He panted for breath, eyes starting from a face with sunken cheeks. He looked at them as if he'd never seen a human being before.
"Hide me?" He said it with the hopelessness of someone who'd suffered Blackguard's cruelties to the end of prayer and endurance.
"Psyche's sake, kid," Alacrity grated, pocketing the cards, "how'd you get here?" The hunt had swept the area earlier, supposedly driving before it or capturing all quarry.
"I hid in a nook in the rocks … doubled back … " The boy panted, shaking so badly he could hardly stand. "You've got to help me."
He took a quavering step forward; Gute swung up the fright-light and gave it a quick burst. It flared, its brightness and heat driving the boy back.
"You did not elude them," Gute said. "They only let you live a little longer, to play with you. They do that sometimes. Go on, run! You can't stay here."
The look in the kid's eyes was unbearable. Alacrity pleaded, "Gute, my god, we can't just—"
"He can't stay here!" Gute yelled into Alacrity's face. "The Betters will find him. The Betters always find their quarry. Always! Is that what you want, to bring them down on us?"
Alacrity couldn't answer. Finally he slowly rippled his hand to Gute, almost a waving motion, a negative gesture—the local equivalent of a shake of the head.
"Please help me," the boy said, but defeatedly, in his oddly accented tradeslang.
"We can't even help ourselves,"Alacrity told him, his voice cracking, knowing it really wasn't an answer at all. A nervous tic moved the corner of his mouth; he was helpless to control it.
"I'm not going to let them take me. I won't let them do those things to me again," the boy said, taking another step toward them. This time even the blare of the fright-light couldn't make him back away.
He was in tears now. "I won't let them … do … those things to me ever again!"
With a curse Gute threw down the fright-light and whipped his actijot unit out of his raggedy loincloth. Setting it, he swept its invisible beam at the boy. Alacrity shied away; the unit would affect any jot it hit.
The boy made a forlorn sound of pain and fell back, sobbing.
"You want us to die too?" Gute was yelling, half mad himself. He gave the kid another jolt. "Go! Run! Get away from here!"
"Stop it!" Alacrity knocked down the jot unit and went to the kid's side. Gute brought it up again, centering on Alacrity, hand wavering. In the end he held his fire, looking anxiously into the sky.
Alacrity knelt by the quarry. The kid was wailing like a lost soul. He threw his arms around Alacrity's leg.
"Don't let them … don't let them … "
"Listen to me. I said listen to me, god damn you!" Alacrity shook the kid until his teeth rattled, held his chin so their eyes met. The quarry was gulping, hyperventilating, saliva and tears and snot mixing on his face.
Alacrity said slowly, "A hundred meters or so over that way there, there's a cliff. The drop's maybe sixty, seventy meters. Take it head first, to be sure."
At first the boy's face clouded up with incomprehension. Then he understood, and an awful emptiness came into his eyes. He looked to Gute, whose face was like a graven image's.
"Listen!" Gute snapped. They heard it far off: banshee horn, piercing and discordant.
The quarry gave a strangled cry and pulled himself up by Alacrity's shoulder, drawing him off balance and leaving him on all fours in the dirt. The boy staggered off in the direction of the cliff, weeping and moaning but moving as fast as he could.
Gute stood over Alacrity. "Is that why you make sure you know the lay of the land? To know what cliffs are near? What else have you spied out? Rivers? The mires?"
Alacrity pushed himself up. "Among other things."
Gute looked him in the eye. "Don't think too much, Shipwreck. You might make me decide you're too dangerous to know."
They broke off glaring at one another as a rush of air came over the low treetops. Down swooped a single-passenger flier, a rostrum crafted of nielloed metal with a facade in the form of a Niflheim sphinx-face. The man flying it stood upright, hands on the controls.
He was well built, wearing spiked wristbands and a sheath of skinfilm that made his hide look like oily blue snake hide. His mask was the mythical Second Breath villain, the evil, mocking Knave of Knives.
Alacrity and Gute stood rooted, as they'd been taught, hands out from their bodies, chins high to show their collars. The hunter waved his actijot baton at them, a big, elaborate Better's model, all gemset, polished nightquartz. The rostrum came to a hover as they looked up into the ravening knave-mask. The eyes they saw belonged there. In his other hand the hunter took up a nervefire lash.
He knew they weren't quarry but hesitated over them anyway, the lash sizzling and coiling in the air. This had been a big hunt; he'd drawn bloo
d and slain quarry that day. There was no counting on his sanity.
Alacrity stared up at him. Like all Betters, this one had another life on another planet that must be kept absolutely separate from Blackguard. And when you're there you think a lot about here, don't you? Alacrity thought. You wish life could be like this all the time. You headcase.
The hunter seemed to reach a decision. Seeing the narrowed eyes behind the mask, Gute and Alacrity got ready to run from the lash.
Just then another aircraft arrived, a lepidopter, a jeweled marvel built in the shape of a luminous butterfly. In its saddle of carved jade were two more hunters, a woman dressed as a braided, metal-sheathed dagger-dancer from Synod, and behind her a man in costume as a slavetaker from Friends' World, his bone armor chased with strange whorls, snapping a razorwhip.
"Where did he go?" the woman called. "Are those quarry down there?" At her knee was a quiver of neurobandilleras. The hovering lepidopter beat its radiant wings, stirring the leaves.
The Knave of Knives left off his contemplation of Alacrity and Gute, letting his lash dangle by its wrist thong. He consulted some instrument on the sphinx-face rostrum, then pointed toward the cliff. "That way!"
With a wild hunting call he soared off in that direction, cracking and crashing the nervefire lash right and left. The 'dopter went after.
Then more of the Wild Hunt passed overhead: a winged war god in antigrav harness; an antlered forest spirit on a phallic jetstick; an imitation warlock on a surface-effect flying carpet; a shouting Grim Reaper on a robotic horse that galloped across the sky. They carried lariats, catchpoles, nets and bolos, snarley-balls and tangle-flails.
Demonic music came from somewhere. They winded horns, gulped from wineskins and skull-cups, brandished ancient weapons and modern ones, howling frenzy.
More came, fanning out overhead: ghouls, fire elementals, overample mother-goddesses, hooded inquisitors and witches in flowing, transparent veilsmokes, each using a unique small flier or lifting device. Some had quarry draped over a saddle bow or cowling, or hung by the heels from a rail or bowsprit. The quarry all bore tags identifying the hunter who'd taken them. A few were still alive.
Alacrity and Gute held their pose, watching the fly-over, not daring to move for fear of attracting a dart or beam.
Then the night band was past. The two slowly lowered their arms. They could see the Wild Hunt circling, not too far away, and hear the sputter and crackle of the whips. The laughter sounded demented.
Alacrity hefted his sling of tagging equipment and started for the circling hunt. Gute caught his arm. "Have you lost your mind? They won't pass you by twice!"
"They will if I don't get in their way. Just doing my job, remember?"
"Part of your job is to stay clear of them." Gute's hand rested on his jot unit. "I'm not getting myself punished just because you feel sorry for some other offworlder. What makes this one any different?"
"I don't know. Just that I saw him, I suppose." Alacrity turned and went on, gambling that a man who'd coveted a Spican atlas and longed to visit the stars wouldn't lay him out in agony with an actijot control unit.
In another moment Gute was by his side. "At least keep down, you idiot! There—through the bushes along there."
They ended up creeping forward, hearing the quarry at bay before they could see. Parting the spinnaker grass, they looked across the forty meters or so of open land leading to the cliff.
The quarry was crouched in a heap. Every time he moved or tried for the edge one or another of the Wild Hunters would drive him back with a fiery lash or a thrusting catchpole. A neurobandillera hung from the kid's back; Alacrity couldn't see why he was still conscious.
The man in the knave mask floated near the brink, looking down on his prey, his lash swirling sparks and discharges around his head. A woman dressed like a robed angel, face hidden by misty veils, riding a hovercraft shaped like a flaming chariot, dove in. She was shaking out a biocling net, preparing to end the game. A two-faced merman shot coruscating darts here and there, to keep the quarry in his spot.
The kid was more dead than alive, wanting only the mean clemency of the cliff. The hunters weren't about to grant it; there were still the special entertainments of the compounds. The kid got to his knees. Alacrity was amazed. The angel circled, her net spread, and the knave grabbed one corner to help.
"Gimme that," Alacrity whispered to Gute, snatching the jot unit. Before Gute could stop him, he fired the silent, invisible beam into the quarry's back.
The kid found one last instant of life in that wash of pain, lurching forward. Alacrity ran the charge to the top; the quarry fought forward through lashes and flails, the bandillera bobbing in his back, ignoring the lesser pain, disregarding their cries.
He plunged off the cliff head first. A chorus of cries and outraged howls went up from the creatures of the pack. Gute and Alacrity couldn't follow the kid's fall, but watched as the masks and veiled faces did.
The knave looked around. Gute and Alacrity stayed stock-still, hunched down among tufts of spinnaker grass and palette-fern. The mad eyes passed their way, and Alacrity couldn't tell for the life of him if he and Gute had been spotted.
Hunters were winding their horns now, some of them diving out of sight for a closer look at the remains. The knave floated his rostrum over to the lepidopter, taking a drink from a flask the slavetaker offered him.
Gute drew Alacrity into deeper brush and shadow. Alacrity handed back the jot unit. They took a brief breather, both of them shaking, sitting with heads down. Then they rose and circled around a thick stand of coral trees, coming to the cliff from another direction, trotting in answer to the summons of the horns. Neither had said a word since Alacrity fired the unit.
The Wild Hunt had been going on since the previous night. It was midafternoon; most of the participants were getting tired. They were already climbing higher, making a last, halfhearted scan for prey but already thinking of the divertissements that had begun back in the compounds by then.
As Alacrity and Gute doubletimed out into the clearing, even the lovely butterfly-chopper was rising gracefully, winging home. Only the original hunter was left. He descended to hover near the two taggers, who waited with heads lowered.
"Look at me."
He bobbed gently in his sphinx-facade flier, his skin showing oily, well-cut highlights. They shifted nervously.
"You there; you're not a local."
Alacrity made a quick twitch of the shoulders, tilt of the head. "That's right, Lord. I'm offworld."
"You, the other one; go tag my catch. Be quick about it."
Gute swallowed. "But, Lord—there won't be anything worth—"
"Don't you question me!" The nervefire whip spat and flared, throwing off sparks. Gute scurried away, familiar with the layout of the area, to make a roundabout descent.
When the two were alone, the knave-mask asked Alacrity, "What made you think you could spoil my kill and get away with it?"
Alacrity only got out, "I don't know what you're—" The torture of the jot stole the rest of his words from him and turned his nervous system into a webwork of pain. He found himself flat on his back, fighting to suck in air.
"You're not a local; what are you doing in the central labor pool? Answer me!"
Alacrity couldn't, because at that moment the Better hit him with another charge, sending suffering into every part of him.
"Well, it doesn't matter," the hunter decided. "I told my friends I'd bag my last quarry live, and you'll do."
A definite violation of the operating rules of the compound, to kill a Central Labor worker or take one as prey, but not too troublesome.
The knave eased his rostrum a little closer, muscles rolling under the oily skinfilm as he centered the jot baton on Alacrity. A sudden hiss and a cracking explosion sent smoke, steam, and burning specks spurting up out of the hunter's back. He let go his controls and the baton, and started screaming a second later. Alacrity thought for a moment that th
e jot unit had shorted out or the flier had malfunctioned.
The sphinx rostrum tilted, settling toward the ground as the Hunter ignored his controls, collapsing against them in pain. Alacrity realized then that the man had been shot. The knave sagged, barely conscious, as the flier grounded at the edge of the cliff.
Alacrity's head was clearing. The hunter was moaning weakly, pawing clumsily at a wound he couldn't reach.
Alacrity scrabbled and slid forward on his back, digging with his fingers, hauling, drawing his feet up close. When he was near enough he kicked out flat-footed, slamming the soles of his feet square into the Niflheim sphinx. The light flier bounced back off the cliff.
He had a last view of the knave flailing helplessly, losing his grip on the rostrum's rail, already half out of it. A long shriek trailed away.
Alacrity, up on one elbow, gazed around. Blinking up into the sky of Blackguard, he saw a splendid female figure in a gorgeous white-on-white combat costume, like some Third Breath valkyrie. In one hand she held aloft a white battle rifle with a scope the size of a top hat. She descended in a triumphant swoop, standing on a chrome-bright, contoured, skeletal flight frame.
Her helmet had sweeping, aerodynamic vanes, and its reflective visor was cast in the cold beauty of a Diana. Rifle held high, she swept down at him with an exultant war cry. He decided groggily that his troubles might not be over yet.
Whoever she was, she was good. She braked and set down like a snowflake in the winter garden, alighting from the minimal flier with an agile leap, the rifle held level.
Alacrity was back on his feet by then. "Um, I didn't get to see; did you happen to notice if that son of a bitch splattered when he hit?"
The voice was muffled by the visor. "I wasn't watching. I couldn't take my eyes off your lanky body." She stowed the rifle in a boot attached to the flight frame, then pushed up the visor.
It was Heart. The Nonpareil. "Nevertheless, Fitzhugh, would you very much mind moving around downwind? Phew!"