“You see?” said Picyt quietly while the shadows brooded about them. “Far, far different from the unfortunate Bban’n. Perhaps on your world it is a source of pride to be small of stature and dark of skin, but if it is not, then think on having a height like mine with the thews and strength of a warrior and a face to rival the sun in glory—”
Wanting no poetry, Blaise cut him off with a skeptical “Why me? Why not anyone on this planet? Why not you, since you obviously want to rule here?”
The maskless Picyt narrowed his eyes, then smiled faintly. “You have the technological advancement we have lost. And you have no interest in our politics. Take the position, n’ka.”
Blaise considered the proposal without much interest. “No, Picyt,” he said, shaking his head. “No deal. I’ll give your people a few lessons on engine repair, but I won’t trade off this.” He tapped his chest. He was what he was. His pride would not let him accept Picyt’s offer and deny himself.
Picyt looked displeased, but he said, “Another arrangement can be made to replace this disappointment. Very well, n’ka, but we will talk again.” With a swift movement he pocketed the translator, replaced his mask, and strode to the door, where he snapped out an order. At once the door opened and the Bban guards gestured for Blaise to come out. In minutes he found himself deposited back in the cell with Saunders.
She sat up on her bunk, glaring at him. “I see you didn’t get away.”
He shrugged, moving over to his bunk with his thoughts still on Picyt. He did not trust the priest’s quick acceptance of his refusal. Absently he said, “Ready to call a truce yet, Saunders?”
She reddened. “Never!”
“Oh, don’t be stupid!” He frowned at her. “Demos, Saunders, if you’d meant to slit my throat, you’d have done it days ago.”
“Killing you is not—”
“Institute regulations. Yes, I know.” He shook his head, wondering why she couldn’t thrust aside Institute brainwashing and think for herself.
“If you weren’t a drone, Omari,” she said icily, “if you hadn’t been born in a vat, you would realize that justice is best dealt by trial, not by strifer. What did they want with you?”
“Why should I tell you?” he retorted.
She jumped to her feet, her eyes flashing with accusation. “You have sold us out! Omari, you filthy piece of—”
“Shut up!” He snarled at her so viciously, she fell silent, her face draining of color. He took two steps toward her, his fists clenched and his pale eyes cold. “Anything that is to my advantage, I take, Saunders. And if you want to survive on this planet, you had better learn the same lesson quickly.” His shouts echoed around the narrow room. A tense silence followed. Finally he eased out a harsh breath and uncurled his fists. “As a matter of fact,” he said, looking away from her white, strained face, “I refused.” He coughed. “We may never get out of here.”
“We will,” she said in a low, almost inaudible voice.
He looked at her in surprise.
She met his gaze, her eyes hardened, and she drew her shoulders erect once more. “I will take you back. For now we work together. But don’t expect more than that. I never give up, Omari.”
That was it; he could never trust her. Accepting the fact, he smiled mockingly. “Saunders,” he said, “neither do I.”
Three days later his patience had worn considerably. Twice a day a bottom section of the heavy door was wrenched open and a tray of unappetizing, unvarying food was shoved through. They had seen no one but each other in that time, neither was inclined to talk to the other, and both were growing heartily tired of such proximity. The cell might be similar in size to the Forerunner’s bridge, where they had rubbed shoulders daily for seven months, but then they had had duties to occupy them and shared no open hostility. Now there was only confinement and hatred.
Saunders paced up and down the length of the room incessantly. Her reason was exercise. Blaise, knowing better, lay on his bunk and contemplated the ceiling, his mind working idly on the question of what made the square of pale illumination there. Like Picyt’s translator, it was an incongruous note of technology in a culture that had thus far appeared to be completely barbaric and backward. Blaise considered. Obviously Picyt had spoken the truth. But why hadn’t he returned to try to persuade Blaise again? And if he had accepted Blaise’s refusal, what was intended for them next?
Saunders abruptly stopped her pacing, glanced at the ceiling, and then glanced at him. “We’re under surveillance, aren’t we?”
He was startled. That thought had not occurred to him.
“Up there, where the light is,” she said with a shrug. “I feel someone watching. Don’t you? You look at it enough.”
“Feel?” he said sarcastically. “I thought you were trained to rely on Institute training, not hunches.”
Her eyes flashed. “Look, Omari, just because you didn’t think of it…”
“All right.” He gestured to cut her off.
“Yes. And here’s something else for you to chew on.” She pointed at the ceiling. “Suppose they’ve bugged this room with one of their translators?”
Blaise sat up, even more irritated by that idea. He was annoyed with himself. Clearly he was being an idiot in underestimating the Bban’jen and their masters. There were too many unknowns around him for him to dare relax or judge yet. “I take it back, Saunders,” he said slowly. “You are not useless. But I wonder—”
He never finished his sentence. A sudden clatter outside the door brought him to his feet. He waited, eyes on the door, as the heavy locks ground back. It slammed open with customary force, scarring the wall behind it. A squad of black-cloaked soldiers leaped inside to fan out, half crouched, rods drawn and aimed. Outside, a pair of torchbearers stood with tall flaming brands in their hands. Slight of build and scarcely taller than Saunders, whose height topped Blaise’s by three inches, they wore ragged, rough-spun cloaks of a grayish-brown color rather than the uniforms of the Bban’jen. Nor were they masked. Without obstruction their eyes glowed red and feral through the deep shadows beneath their hoods. Bban musk wafted thick and nauseating through the stale air, and from the shadows came low, excited clicking muffled by masks and restless stirs.
Swallowing down a surge of revulsion, Blaise exchanged glances with Saunders, whose lips were thinned and colorless. She questioned him with her eyes, but he hesitated and gave his head a slight shake, conscious of prickling dampness in his palms and a tightening line of tension stretching out between his shoulders. Counting the torchbearers, it was eight against two. He did not like the odds.
Rather than just stand there and quake, Blaise took an assured step forward, smiling slightly to conceal the knot in his stomach. “What—”
A bolt of blue fire crackled across the room, frying ozone in the air and blasting into the stone floor close enough to Blaise for him to feel the heat of its passage. Recoiling with an oath, he dropped flat, rolling against his bunk in anticipation of a second, more accurate blast. None came. After a second his heart ceased pounding madly, and warily he rose to his feet, wincing a bit at the pull of a sore muscle. Saunders also picked herself up off the floor and stared bleakly at the blackened mark smoking between them.
The Bban’jen stood impassively in their black masks.
“Don’t make any more stupid moves, Omari,” snapped Saunders, her voice croaking unsteadily.
He was annoyed, but he took the advice.
Just then a tall Bban with a scarlet band of rank at his collar—possibly the same officer who had given Blaise the dead soldier’s clothes—strode in at a furious pace and barked out something that set the guards snapping to rigid attention. The officer glared at each of them, clicking his jaw behind his mask, then swung to Blaise and spoke with an impatient gesture.
Blaise looked at him blankly and shrugged.
With a snarl of impatience the officer reached beneath his cloak and pulled out a translator, which he tossed to Blaise. Catching it
deftly, Blaise turned the metal disk over in his hand, hefting the weight and noting that it was smaller than Picyt’s translator and tarnished. But it worked.
“…is your mask?” the officer was saying. “Quickly. Wear it and come.”
Blaise obediently walked over to his bunk and picked up the mask, which he’d been using as an unsatisfactory pillow. But he did not fit it into place.
“Why?” he asked, staring at the officer. “What is the mask’s purpose?”
“What difference does it make?” put in Saunders nervously as the officer set a hand on his knife hilt. “Quit stalling, Omari, before someone decides to shoot at us again.”
The officer drew himself more erect. “The mask,” he said sternly, “is of need. Wear it and come. An!” Gesturing, he spun on his heel and strode out.
With a grimace Blaise motioned Saunders to precede him and fitted the mask under the hood of his cloak, gasping at the stuffy restriction of air. It took a moment to adjust to the reek of musk, which had not completely faded. Every sense on the alert, he walked out of the cell, the Bban’jen moving into formation behind him. Scarcely had he stepped out into the passageway when he was seized by the arm, pulled to one side into deep shadow, and shoved forcibly through a narrow split in the wall.
Stumbling in an effort to keep his balance as he plunged suddenly into a dark, damp place as cold as the pit of hell, Blaise whirled in alarm and tried to return to the passageway. But before he could do so a faint humming sang through his ears, and acute nausea and dizziness gripped him. No! he thought in anger, clinging to the damp stone wall with numbed fingers. He wasn’t weak anymore. This was no time to—
The darkness smothered him like a living thing, robbing him of breath. He gasped, suddenly flattened by an unseen force that seemed to crush him to nothingness. Then he blinked and cringed at the unexpected blaze of light that struck him like a blow. Equally abruptly the cold, damp, and dizziness were gone. Bewildered, he lowered his hand and turned slowly around, blinking behind his mask at the bright sunlight flooding in through the wide mouth of an immense cave.
“So this is the intruder,” said a rich, petulant voice out of nowhere. “It does not wear the jen uniform well, does it, Aabrm?”
Blaise whirled and stood half crouched, his heart thudding as his dazzled eyes strove to see through the inner gloom of the cave. His fingers clutched harder around the hard metallic surface of the medallion as it translated the sneering voice that echoed and boomed at him from a point he could not find.
“A puny type of creature, this n’ka,” agreed a second voice, its rough, accented tone smoothed by oily obsequiousness. “It does not even realize that the seizert has brought it here to us, noble leiil. Obviously Picyt tries to play an intrigue of trickery, seeking to make us think this n’ka a creature of superior intelligence. We need not fear.”
“Chi’ka!” snapped the rich voice, deepening with anger and filling the cave.
Silence, abashed and total, followed.
Blaise stood where he was, just short of the sunlight penetrating partway into the cave. Outside, a dry desert wind blew a desolate sigh across the stony slope stretching down from the cave’s lip. He kept his back turned to the unfamiliar landscape of ridge and dune of black coarse sand, featureless save for an occasional jut of gray tor lifted against a sky of pale amethyst. Realizing that he had been brought here by some sort of teleportation device, the sophistication of which was incompatible with the rough stone dwellings and crude ways of the Bban’jen, Blaise gripped the translator tightly in his hand and spoke to the interior of the cave, which lay wrapped in dark mystery.
“My name is Omari,” he said evenly, his voice coming back at him from inside the stuffy confines of the mask. For an instant he was tempted to tug it off, but he did not, choosing to accept the officer’s word that wearing it was somehow necessary. “My spaceship crashed here due to a malfunction caused by the black sun. I mean you no harm and do not understand why I am held prisoner.”
Mocking laughter was the response to this diplomatic overture.
“Prisoner?” said the rich voice. “But you are not. You are dead, n’ka.” The voice grew louder, and Blaise stiffened as a tall slender form appeared from the depths of the cave. For a moment Blaise stared at the speaker, dazzled by such magnificence. He was covered from shoulder to foot in a bronze cloak that shimmered from a thousand metallic threads woven into the cloth. Every glimmer of sunlight that penetrated the shadows enough to touch it woke it to molten life. It glistened and rippled with each movement of its owner. At the neck it flared into a tall, stiff collar behind the speaker’s head, which was covered by a mask of bronze mesh so fine that Blaise could almost see the outline of his features behind it. To one side appeared another figure, the voice called Aabrm, no doubt, cloaked in lesser brown and wearing a dull mask marked with a pattern of gold tracings. This one held a rod of opaque blue crystal aimed at Blaise.
“No,” continued the figure in bronze. “No prisoner now of the Bban’jen or of any jen. Our guard is not with us…” He spread out his gloved hand in an eloquent gesture. “…save for Aabrm, who is ever faithful to our service.” Aabrm bowed, and the rich voice went on. “I brought you here, n’ka, to show Picyt that his secrets are not as close-kept as he believes.”
“Who are you?” demanded Blaise, impatient with the man’s self-importance. He wanted answers, not speeches.
But it was Aabrm who answered sharply, “Mind your tongue, n’ka! It is the Tlar leiil before you.”
Blaise chose his next words with care. “Picyt has told me nothing of what he wants…Leiil,” he said, adopting the stilted formality of the others. “How can I matter so much to Ruantl?”
Ignoring his question, the Tlar leiil said in a voice of silken menace, “A pity this creature did not crash in the south, eh, Aabrm? Then we should have had his knowledge of the ways of Beyond before that cursed Picyt.”
Aabrm flicked his palm over. “It is still possible to interrogate him, noble Leiil. He—”
“I have told Picyt nothing,” broke in Blaise, quick as always to spot an opening. “But I’m willing to talk if it’s to my advantage.”
“No!” A bronze gauntlet was swept out, palm down. “We shall not come after Kkanthor, to take its leavings!” The Tlar leiil turned away with an angry swirl of his cloak. “Our way is best. There shall be no change, no birth. Picyt’s vision is insane.” The Tlar leiil shook his fist, his other hand clamped hard on the jeweled knife hilt at his wide belt of woven leather. “By this jen-knife I swear that blood shall spread deep across the sand if Picyt dares raise the Outerlands against our glory.”
“The Bban tribes are not tame, good Leiil,” soothed Aabrm. “If he raises them, they will turn on him before Altian is ever reached.”
“Not if he has this n’ka!” screamed the Tlar leiil, drawing his jen-knife to point the wicked green blade Blaise’s way.
Blaise edged back by slow, imperceptible degrees toward the lip of the cave, trying to judge the drop, his peripheral vision hampered by his mask. His fingers flexed longingly at his sides. If only he could get that rod from Aabrm! But a highly developed regard for his own skin held him back from trying to jump the man as the argument raged on.
“My Leiil, consider!” Aabrm was saying, his voice thickened with urgency. “Even Picyt would not dare raise the Jewels of M’thra. If he intended this blasphemy against all that is sacred, then surely he would have placed his own life into the attempt. Thee need not fear this thing, Leiil.”
“Fear?” The Tlar leiil rounded on his companion so fiercely that Aabrm cringed, and Blaise dared a full step backward. “Lea’dl, do you think I fear? I am Tlar! I am leiil! The city holds firm in my hand, no matter how much Picyt shakes the Bban’n to his bidding. He does not rule the Tlar’jen. I rule! And I shall continue to rule as long as the Jewels remain untouched.”
Abruptly he strode toward Blaise, who froze in alarm. “You…n’ka,” he said, breathless after his
outburst. “Before you die, answer this. What meant your people by sending you to Ruantl? Do others follow? Is invasion planned? Did Picyt, Lli curse his blood, summon your kind?”
Blaise shook his head. “No. I came here because I am an outlaw among my own—”
The Tlar leiil shot out his long arm with unexpected quickness and ripped off Blaise’s mask.
“So,” said the Tlar leiil, tossing the mask out over the ledge and backing away so that he was clear of the aim of Aabrm’s rod. “This is not much for Picyt to send against us.” He laughed, a mocking, hollow sound through the bronze mask, which glittered brightly in the sunlight. “Hear me, you of the striped eyes. I have taken your mask and exposed you to the bite of the Outerlands. Thus you stand dishonored and thus I send you to the shadow land of Merdarai, where your soul may rot unclaimed for all time. Pray to Anthi, or to whatever god you serve, n’ka, for this minute is your last.” He lowered his knife and turned away. “Kill the n’ka, Aabrm,” he said coldly, “and let us go. I weary of this game.”
Aabrm aimed the rod, and Blaise tensed, gathering himself to dodge. He had only a split second; he’d better make it count. Then from the corner of his eye he saw the Tlar leiil’s arm blur, hurling the jeweled knife straight at him. With an oath Blaise dived to the ground. The knife missed him, ripping through his cloak, but it forced him to throw himself into Aabrm’s fire. The blue bolt crackled across the cave, frying the air, and slammed into his thigh like a hammer blow, knocking him out over the ledge.
He fell in terror, flailing his arms uselessly. Blinded by the white haze of agony and certain that his leg had been blasted off, he landed on the rocky slope below the cave with a jolt that knocked the breath from him and tumbled him down faster and faster in a whirl of dust, tangled limbs, and pain until he came up hard against the base of a boulder. Nearly suffocated with dust, he lay there facedown, half dead, his cloak tangled about his head, while dislodged pebbles continued to rain down on him in a shower of pelting blows. Exposed, helpless, he waited for Aabrm to finish him off, certain that this time was indeed the end of him. But no further attack came. He heard nothing but the rasping sigh of desert wind.
The Children of Anthi: Anthi - Book One Page 6