by Gardner Fox
A door opened to his touch and he found himself staring in at a small nuclear reactor. Surprise held him rigid. A reactor, here? In the depths of the old Crenn Lir city of Andelkrann? It was not possible. Then common sense caught hold of him. The reactor had not belonged to the Crenn Lir. It was the property of the Lyanir.
The big city would be difficult to heat, at best. The Lyanir would have to have some way of making their lives as comfortable as possible. This motor was their answer to the problem. It would feed heat and perhaps coolness during the worst days of summer, to the rooms of the inhabited section of the city.
He was turning away when a thought struck him.
On bare feet he padded down into the huge chamber that housed the motor. What he needed might be here, but he must go carefully, the stunner in his hand ready to hit and hit hard should he be discovered.
A nuclear reactor needs little attention, once it has been set to functioning. For hours at a time it would be left to itself. Yet being a machine, there would be things to go wrong with it. Bran hunted for what must be down here, a manual of some sort that would tell when and where to look for trouble.
And with it, a floor plan of the house fed by the reactor. His eyes hunted for a desk, a cubbyhole of sorts. He found it in the shadows of a heat exchanger, a little table covered with papers.
He went through them carefully before he found what he needed, and spread out the map on the tabletop. Scanning its diagrams, he began from the heart of the maze, the reactor chamber, and worked outward. Though he spoke the Lyanir tongue, he was confused by the written language; yet he could understand enough to locate the great tower in which Gron Dhu had placed Peganna.
He began to memorize the tunnels and the stairs he would have to cross before he stood in the tower itself. There was a wall chronometer near one of the doorways which showed the hour of dusk. Bran tried to think back, to remember what he had learned of Lyanir custom during the weeks he had been on Kuleen. Soon after dusk, the dining tables would be groaning with food, yes. And Gron Dhu with Alvar Drexel, if he were still here, would be at one of those tables.
Bran checked his stun gun, then moved out.
Only one person touched his vision on the ramp to the upper floors, a man with the ornate double-axe on his jerkin that showed him for an officer. Bran hit him in the head with the stunner and left him unconscious. The man had been downed from behind; he might never learn who had done it, nor who had stripped him of his uniform.
There was more danger on the main floor, since there were more people moving about on their tasks. Bran hugged shadows for a little time, then decided to trust in the stolen uniform he wore. He walked easily, unhurriedly. Nobody even glanced at him.
He was up three flights of marble stairs and at the great oak door—a new one, since the old had powdered long centuries ago—before there was trouble. The guard left at the tower entrance saluted crisply and maintained his wooden face while he told Bran no one was permitted beyond this point.
There was no avoiding it. Bran hit him with his fist, a side-wise blow that traveled six inches, no more. It drove the man’s head halfway around on his shoulders and banged him into the oak door, where Bran pinned him with a hand lest he betray what had happened by falling.
There was a key to the door. Was it on the belt of the man with his back to the planks and his head lolling so loosely? No, by Lur! It was somewhere else. There was no desk here with a drawer. Nor was there a peg with a keyring hanging from it.
Sweat touched the Wanderer as he stood there holding up a senseless man. To have come so far and—now to fail! Desperately his eyes searched. Nothing! He was tempted to use his stun-gun on the lock to see if he might jar it loose. The solution to his problem made him chuckle. He lifted his fist and knocked. There was movement on the other side of the door. “Open up inside,” he said crisply. A key turned. The door opened. Bran shot from the hip right into the middle of the man staring at him on the other side of the doorway. The stunner had the kick of a mule. The man went down in a heap.
Bran propped up the outside guard as best he could, to simulate a man on duty. Then he pushed the other man out with him and locked the door from the inside.
He took the winding staircase three steps at a time, confident there were no more guards. Nor were there. The door to the tower rooms pushed open to the flat of his palm on its wood.
Peganna was sitting at a window, staring out at the moon-drenched land. Her shoulders were rounded, her hair loose and unkempt, as though she did not care how she might look. Hands on fist, Bran surveyed her.
“A fine figure of a girl in love, I must say!”
Her head swivelled and her eyes grew enormous. Her lips opened, quivered uncontrollably. She started to tremble.
Bran held out his arms.
She flew to him, was crushed and held tight for long minutes. When he let her go she was laughing through her tears. “Was there ever a man like you? How in the name of Lur did you do it?”
“It was my luck, mavoureen. And the good use I make of the brain God gave me. Is there any way out of this place except the way I came up?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Hmmm. It will be awkward.” He scowled and, putting her aside gently, went to stand at the window. Below him in the moonlight was the city of Andelkrann, half in ruins, half with the touch of fires in its buildings, where women cooked and feasted with their men. It was a far drop to the pavements below, even to the nearest roof.
On the opposite wall was a second window. Fifty feet below and ten feet across with a gap between the walls was a roof with a long pitch to it where a man might stand without fear of falling backward. Bran studied it, then turned to look around the room.
There was a couch and a small table with a chair. No bedsheets to tear into strips, no rug to the stone floor to shred and make into rope. Bran sighed and removed the jacket of his stolen uniform.
“There’s no help for it, Peganna. This will never form a long enough rope but we’ve got to make the try.” His strong hands tore the jacket in half. He knotted the sleeves together and slipped out of the trousers.
He wore his fur kilt and leather jerkin, now. The jerkin he removed and began to tear into strips. The woman watched him almost breathlessly, looking from the window to his working hands. Suddenly her lips tightened and she bent to rip the hem of the gown she was wearing.
“No,” protested Bran, “there’s no need for you to ruin your pretty clothes. We’ll make enough of a thing to hang from with what I have.”
“That ‘thing’ won’t reach fifty feet and you know it, Bran Magannon. Now be still and—here! Give me a hand with this where the seam is sewn.”
The gold brocade ripped to the tug of his fingers. To her upper thighs he tore it, then shredded it across. His eyes touched her legs a moment as he grinned, “You have fine legs, acushla.”
“Keep your mind on the rope, Bran Magannon.”
“I’m only thinking that you’ll be able to run faster now,” he told her and laughed as she swung a palm at him.
When the rope was finally knotted together, it was pitifully short. Even Bran looked dubious, though he carried it to the window and fastened one end to a chairleg, propping the chair sidewise to the wall across the window.
Gingerly he crawled through the window, holding the rope which he played down along the side of the tower wall. Peganna was watching him with wide eyes, hands lifted to her long silver hair, twisting it up and about her head in a topknot.
“Peganna darling,” he said worriedly, looking down.
“Hold your tongue, Bran. Remember—you belong to me.”
“Why, so I do. I’d forgotten the little dice game we had.”
“Then give me your hand and hold the rope.”
She put a leg over the sill and rested a foot on his shoulder. Gently she slid out, sliding down his back, locking her legs to his thighs and clinging to his chest with her arms.
“Am I heavy?”
<
br /> “Save your breath,” he growled.
Hand over hand Bran went down the makeshift rope until its end was a scant three inches from his fingers where he had tied a knot to prevent their sliding off.
He looked below him. The roof was close to fifty feet down and ten feet across, above a long fall to death on the ancient cobblestones. He drew a deep breath.
“I’m going to swing you out, acushla—and drop you.”
“Do it fast. Fast—so I can’t think!”
She let his right hand take her wrists and hold them. He lowered her slowly, while the muscles of the hand and arm that held the rope knotted with convulsive strength. Back and forth he swung her, like a pendulum. Moonlight touched her upturned face with its heights of silver hair and Bran felt his heart lurch into his throat at sight of her.
“If you miss, I’ll follow you down,” he whispered.
Her eyes opened to stare up, bravely.
He said, though it cost him needed energy, “I couldn’t stand to be without you again, mavoureen.”
She smiled and as she smiled, he let her go, at the end of her swing with her feet pointing at a tangent to the wall. She dropped like an arrow and Bran knew an instant of stark terror when it seemed he had not properly calculated the distance. Then her feet touched the rooftops and her legs crumpled and she sprawled full length on the tiles.
Bran closed his eyes, then opened them.
It was a simple matter for him to grip the rope with both hands, to prop his feet against the wall and use it as a springboard to propel him more than a dozen feet straight out so that when he fell he landed a little beyond Peganna.
He whirled and caught her, kissing her.
Overhead the lone moon of Miranor turned endlessly about its parent planet, its silver beams made a pallid fire of her hair as Peganna clung to him, shaking uncontrollably.
“I was so afraid, so afraid.”
“No more than I was myself.”
She nestled against him. “Just hold me for a little time, Bran. Until my heart slows down.”
It was foolish to kneel here holding the girl he loved for all her world to see them, but the perfume of her hair and the taste of her kisses on his lips made Bran the Wanderer a man without a worry. He let her go when he felt her fumbling at his belt-pouch.
“Here,” she said, holding out two pills.
Bran laughed. He caught Peganna and held her while mirth convulsed him in its grip. After what they had been through, those two pills against the radiation still on Miranor were anti-climactic.
“I put them in your pouch because I knew you’d never think to take them otherwise,” she told him, glee shining in her green eyes. “Now go on. Swallow one.”
He did as she ordered, then lifted her to her feet.
They were still far from safety, but they were in the open and there would be a way off this roof to the streets. In the streets there were shadows where a man and woman might hide as they ran.
SIX
DAWN FOUND them on the outskirts of the city, crossing a great square. Bran walked with the stunner in his fist and Peganna a step behind at his elbow. His luck had held through the night, all the way from the tower. There had been few travelers in the darktime hours, and those few they had avoided easily enough by hiding when they approached.
When the open country stretched before them, Bran halted.
“Where do we go now, mavourneen?”
“Into the hills, to the hide tents of my dravi.” The dravi was her clan, Peganna explained. The clan was the foundation on which the entire structure of the Lyanir was based. A dozen clans made up a dravi, and there were fifty dravi in the entire nation. Upwards of ten thousand men, women and children comprised a single dravi, united by the loyalties that had come down from the days when the Lyanir had hunted with stone axes.
“We will be safe there. Gron Dhu won’t dare risk the anger of the clan chief. It’s a form of sanctuary.”
Bran was dubious but could think of no alternative. Gron Dhu would dare anything to get what he wanted, even if it meant stamping out an entire clan. His only hope was that the warriors needed for such a task might refuse to obey his order.
His hand caught her fingers, but as he went to step out across the grasses, she held him back, telling him she had enough exercise for one day. There would be air-sleds in the buildings on the rim of the city, that were used by royal messengers in a hurry.
“I am still queen of the Lyanir,” she informed him proudly. “Those air-sleds belong to me.”
Bran grunted but went where she walked. He was surprised there had been no alarm, no search parties out for them. When he mentioned this to Peganna, she laughed harshly.
“Gron Dhu is locked away with the scientists, examining the blue egg. They have been making tests of it for the past six days. Gron Dhu is highly excited. He is as confident as I am myself the egg will open a vault. It gives off a type of radiation that might unlock a door, once it’s fitted into its cradle. He has no time for you and me, darling—not yet, at least.”
“And Alvar Drexel?”
“Gone back to Earth to offer its politicians a fortune in flame pearls to let the Lyanir submit to Earth empire as one of its conquered peoples.” Bitterness tinged her throat as she said, “Gron Dhu will make a fine rayanar! Already he has sold his people into slavery.”
They moved silently through the red dawn.
The air-sleds were lengths of highly polished wood and metal that reminded Bran of big surfboards. Twenty feet long and between three and six feet wide, depending on whether they were to carry one or two passengers, each was fitted with a miniature motor and eight small jets protruding from its stern. They were so light to handle, Peganna was able to slide one forward on its four retractable wheels, then lie face down behind the transparent wind canopy.
She explained the controls to Bran as he strapped her down. “This lever is for speed. This is for elevation. This is for maneuverability. Any questions?”
He laughed and slapped her rump.
“I could fly this stick in my sleep. Get on with you. I’ll come after directly.”
He waited until she was airborne, then strapped himself on his own sled and shifted its three sticks. The sled rolled easily across the ground, lifted with a whine of air tearing through its vents. The canopy protected the flier from the rush of air, though there was a breathing mask attached to a tank of oxygen beside the controls. It did not make for a comfortable ride if a man were nervous by nature, but it was a smooth one.
Ten minutes after he was aloft, Bran realized he was enjoying himself. The sled was a splinter under him so that the only sensation he could liken it to was actual flying. He could spiral into a dive and pull out. He could stand on his tail and go straight up. He could parallel the ground at a speed that was governed only by his ability to breathe the air through which he raced. For fast couriers, there was the oxygen mask.
Yet he and Peganna made good enough time, even without the masks. They slipped like bullets above a world where the vegetation was stunted and lacked vitality, where the trees were small, where water was a problem since the oceans had long ago dried up and only the lakes and mountain brooks survived, fed as they had been for millennia by underground streams.
In the distance trees made a green carpet over the low, rounded hills and a blue haze above a valley showed where grasses grew between gaunt rocks. Except for the invisible radiation that was everywhere, this might still be a pleasant world on which to live. The pills which the Lyanir were forced to take made it intolerable, Bran knew. The pills gave them life but it was a form of slavery against which their proud spirits rebelled.
Ahead of him Peganna swerved her sled. Obediently he followed, to watch the ground change below them into a series of rocky uplifts sloping toward higher ground. The terrain was different now. Gone were the meadows and the fields of grass, for the timber line was below and trees bent by the wind, and thick layers of moss, went on without end, up in
to the regions where a cold morass of towering groundsel took over.
Peganna pointed.
Bran could see hide tents sprawling across a level where yellow moss lay like a carpet and tall heathers rose upward toward the clouds. A hunting party drew back as they darted overhead. A woman filling a jar with water from a mountain stream paused to wave.
Then they were lowering groundward, flashing above the yellow moss at a height of ten feet, five and lower. Sled wheels scraped and bounced as the fliers swayed to a halt.
The tents seemed deserted. Peganna swung off the sled and stretched, staring around her. When Bran came to stand at her side, she frowned.
“Where are the people?” she asked.
There was an utter stillness in the air. Then there was a clang of metal on metal and the roar of excited voices. Peganna whirled and ran, with Bran beside her. Where the rock slope dropped away to a mossy amphitheatre, the clan clustered in a great circle about two men.
The men faced one another with shields on their left arms and swords in their hands. One man was old, with gray in his hair and in the beard that moved where the wind caught it; the other was young, with a deep chest and long arms. He held his shield low, looking over its rim at the older man.
“Give way, Parkan,” he called. “There’s no disgrace to step down from the chieftainship.”
“Only when you prove you can fell me, Avrak!”
Peganna shivered and drew closer to Bran who put an arm about her middle. She whispered, “It was so in the old days, before we left Lyanol. I had thought the old ways forgotten but I see they were only suspended in our long trip across space. The clan may get a new chief this afternoon.”
The younger man was attacking, swinging his blade in great slashes that dug deep cuts in the shield that held him off. Bran watched with an almost professional interest, having fenced on more than one Space Fleet team for the honor of representing the Service at an Olympiad. He was a stranger to the shield, though, and found himself fascinated by the ease with which Parkan swung his about to intercept the rain of blows that came at him from all directions.