She scrambled to her feet behind him and flung herself upon Ahnao, pleading incoherently.
Ahnao screamed, and Slant turned to see the beggar clinging to his companion's leg. He reined in his horse and snapped, "Let go of her!" His voice was clear and sharp, and there was no doubt that the creature heard him. She glanced at him but did not loose her hold.
They were at the top of the marketplace, directly in front of the gate, in view of hundreds of people, merchants and customers buying and selling and trading, beggars accosting all within reach, friends conversing with one another. Slant paid no attention to any of them.
"I said let her go." His voice was now cold and threatening, and Ahnao looked from the beggar to her protector, suddenly as frightened of him as of the freak.
Again his command was ignored; the wretched creature reached a hand upward to cling to Ahnao's arm.
Slant was totally unaware of his own movement, and it was far too fast for human eyes to follow, but the snark was in his hand and the freak was falling away, to land screaming in the dirt, her many-fingered hand severed at the wrist.
The fingers slowly loosened, and the hand fell from its grip several seconds later.
Ahnao did not scream again but made a curious smothered squeak and turned her gaze away as blood spattered her mount's flank and the hand tumbled a short way down the slope.
The incident had not gone unnoticed; passersby had been watching the little everyday annoyance befalling the strangers on horseback when it had so abruptly ceased to be little and everyday. The beggar's continuing screams were joined by others, and the crowd surged away from the three horses. None touched the bleeding victim until Slant, in a strange state midway between the warrior who had cut off the hand and his ordinary, calmer self, pointed to a by-stander and ordered, "Tend to her. There's no reason for her to bleed to death."
The man he had chosen nodded, near panic, and rushed forward; he had no desire to offend such a wizard—if wizard he was. Someone handed him a strip of cloth, and he struggled to bandage the stump of the wrist as the beggar thrashed about in the dust.
Slant paid them no further attention; he wanted only to get away. He urged his horse forward.
The crowd parted instantly, allowing him through the gate into the city of Praunce. Ahnao and the riderless horse followed. In moments they were well into the city, out of sight of anyone who had seen the incident and away from the crowds of the marketplace, surrounded instead by the sparser crowds of the city streets.
Slant found an empty side street and turned into it, then stopped his horse and sat silently thinking. Ahnao came up beside him and said, in a quavering voice, "Slant?"
"Don't bother me," he replied. She lapsed into silence.
It was a beautiful day, sunny and warm; the air was fresh and invigorating, albeit a trifle dusty. White, fluffy clouds drifted overhead, and somewhere on the rooftops birds were cooing at one another. Slant had been feeling pleased with life. He had overcome most of his worries about radiation and his relationship with Ahnao, and was glad to have finally reached the city he had set himself as a goal—and then his good mood had been completely ruined by his combat programming. He had just manned and perhaps killed a fellow human; however deformed, the woman was still human. He had not been acting in self-defense, nor had he been forced to his action by the computer. He had done it very nearly of his own free will.
It was no comfort to tell himself that it had been another personality in his body; that personality was a part of him, after all, not some mysterious independent entity.
He wished he had never landed on this troublesome planet.
Although Slant never saw her again, the beggar did not die; she recovered nicely and became a minor celebrity among the city's poor. This attention so inflated her vanity that she took to bathing and keeping herself tidy as best she could with her remaining seven-fingered, double-thumbed, double-jointed hand. The pitifully decrepit appearance that had been her main source of sympathy was ruined by this, but the stump of her wrist and her natural deformities were enough to bring her a satisfactory income, and her improved cleanliness and odor made her acceptable in human society for the first time in her life. She was permitted in taverns and shops, as she had not been previously, and her life improved considerably, so that in the end she became almost grateful to the mysterious mounted stranger who had dressed like a warrior but wielded a weapon that was obviously magical.
Slant knew nothing of that, and after a few moments of guilty anger he pushed the whole matter out of his mind as best he could and considered other, more important matters.
He was in Praunce, the city he hoped would have wizards capable of removing the thermite and override from his skull. The next thing he had to do was to locate a suitable wizard.
He looked around. He and Ahnao and their spare horse were in a narrow byway two blocks east of the gate, running approximately parallel to the wall. It was lined with tall, narrow houses, mostly three stories in height and built of stone or half-timbered plaster. It did not look like a particularly interesting neighborhood, neither poor nor affluent He did not think it likely that there were wizards on such a street. If he were a wizard, he would want to live somewhere out of the ordinary, someplace that would impress people.
The most impressive things he had seen in Praunce were the wall and the great towers. The wall was not exactly a residence, but the towers seemed perfect.
The more he thought about it, the more certain he became that wizards must live in the towers. After all, this culture could scarcely have kept the elevators running in any ordinary fashion; only wizardry could propel anything to the top of a two-hundred-meter building. Nobody, in any culture, would want to walk up sixty flights as a regular thing.
Therefore, he wanted to get to the towers.
That was not necessarily going to be as easy as it might at first appear. He knew the towers were near the center of the city, somewhere to the east of his present position, but visibility was severely limited by the buildings three or four stories high lining the narrow and twisting streets. Although the towers had dominated the view for a full day's ride, dozens of kilometers, now that he was close to them they were invisible.
Still, he knew they were near the center of the city. Accordingly, he headed east, following whichever street seemed to run most nearly in that direction.
Ahnao followed, asking once, "Where are we going?"
"To the towers," he replied. That was enough of an answer to satisfy her, and she rode along silently, not questioning the turns and twists he led her through, even when forced to double back out of a blind alley.
At last, after half an hour of winding through the city, they arrived at a wide intersection from which one of the towers could be seen, looming up to their right, glittering in the sun. Slant was able for the first time to see in detail the side of the structure.
He was now absolutely certain that the towers were prewar skyscrapers, for there were several places where the walls had not been maintained and chunks had sloughed off, leaving gaping holes in the façade. Through these, Slant could see steel girders. The façade itself was curious indeed, a patchwork of stone and brick and glass, not built up neatly in patterned rows but seemingly slapped together at random.
Now that he had the tower in sight, it was a relatively simple matter to steer toward it, and twenty minutes later he and Ahnao were at its foot. It was not the tallest, but it would do.
There was no question about where to enter; a huge arch, two stories high, occupied the center of each side of the base. Slant, however, did not choose to rush on blindly. He still did not know where in the tower he might find wizards, and did not care to go wandering about fifty or sixty floors, each fifty meters square, looking for them. Furthermore, he was fascinated by the building itself. He had, in his fourteen years of travel, seen other pretechnological cuttares, some built on the ruins of bombed-out cities much as this one was. None, however, had ever made use of ruined
skyscrapers; he had never seen anything resembling this rebuilt monstrosity.
Where steel girders showed they were slightly askew, rusted and twisted, but still sturdy. The entire building had a slight lean to the north, away from the crater, presumably a result of the shockwave. When the rebuilding began, Slant guessed that the tower had consisted of little more than bare steel and rubble, and the builders had used their own primitive techniques to fill that in. No particular pattern was visible; it appeared that several different people had each filled in sections according to their own whims.
Much of the bottom few meters was clad in concrete, first a clean, straight level that appeared to be surviving prewar work, then a bizarre, patched-together section where chunks of rubble had been assembled with mortar and gravel. Beyond that, Slant saw sections that were half-timbered, or built of cut and polished stone, or walled with fieldstone. There were several ordinary windows of wood frames and small panes, but also large, irregular areas of rough glass, each a single sheet. These chunks of glass were not all transparent; Slant could see blue, green, and red glass, rippled, bubbled, or smooth, all gleaming in the afternoon sun. Obviously, the builders had used what they found in the rubble as it was; perhaps much of that glass had been part of the original walls of the tower.
Slant hoped that little or none of it came from the radioactive crater to the south.
The overall effect of the tower was that of a village built vertically instead of horizontally, and it occurred to Slant that it might have been just that originally, and that the city might have grown up around the towers, in a reversal of the usual pattern where towers grew out of a city for lack of space.
It was odd, though, that the steel frames had survived well enough to make it possible to build these things this close to the crater, and therefore to the blast.
He turned and saw Ahnao staring upward at the tower.
She noticed his gaze, and said, "It's so tall!"
"Sixty stories, I'd guess, perhaps slightly less."
"Ftha and Hligosh!"
If he were a wizard, Slant thought, he'd want to live at the top, for the view and the privacy. He remarked, "We may have to find a way up all sixty floors."
Ahnao looked at him in surprise. "Why?" she asked.
"I'm looking for a wizard who can take some of the machinery out of my head; I think one may live up there."
"Oh. Do you want me to check?"
"What?" Slant was startled; he had forgotten that Ahnao herself was almost a wizard. "Yes, if you can."
He had thought that she meant to fly up and report back, but instead she closed her eyes, then opened them again in an unfocused stare, much as she had in Awlmei when contacting Furinar.
Slant waited for the prickle of magic at work but felt only a very faint hint of the tingling he remembered.
Ahnao's eyes closed again, then opened, normal once more. "There is somebody up there, but he's on the next floor down, not at the very top."
"A wizard?"
"Of course!"
"Good. Come on, then, and we'll find a way up." He urged his horse forward and led the way through the great arch into the building's interior.
The arch led into a broad corridor that, had it not been inside a building, would have been more properly called a street. It was seven or eight meters high, and ten meters wide, and extended the full length of the building, to emerge from the other side through an arch very much like the one by which Slant and Ahnao entered. At its midpoint another, similar corridor-street crossed it at right angles, so that the first two floors were neatly divided into fourths.
Both sides of the passageway were lined with shops in two tiers; a balcony ran along either side about three meters off the stone-paved floor, easily reached by half a dozen staircases scattered along its length, providing access to the upper tier's businesses. Since the bright sunlight could not penetrate into the heart of so large a building, the innermost shopfronts were lit by torches made of bunched cornstalks dipped in some black, gummy substance. The interiors of the shops that had no windows to the outside—the great majority—were illuminated with what appeared to be oil lamps.
The shops, being sheltered from the elements as they were, were not closed in by glass or solid walls but instead fronted with various sorts of shutters. These varied almost as greatly as the wall segments of the tower's exterior; there were sliding metal panels, folding screens of carved wood, rolled-up bundles of slats that could be lowered like windowshades, and other ingenious devices. Appetizing' smells of fresh fruit and baking pastry filled the passage, reminding Slant that he and Ahnao had not stopped for lunch that day.
Wizards could wait; he was hungry. He reined in his horse and dismounted in front of a bakery shop. The girl followed suit.
The proprietor of the shop became very friendly and attentive the moment silver struck the countertop of polished wood, and as the travelers ate he gladly answered Slant's question regarding the contents of the tower.
"As you can see, there are our various business establishments on these first two levels; my fellow businessmen and myself have our homes on the next four levels—with our families, of course. Above that there are three more floors of residence." The baker stopped, with a pleasant smile.
"What of the rest? That covers less than a fifth of the tower's height,"
"Of course, but that's as far as the stairs go. There's only storage for most of the rest."
"Storage?"
"Yes, of course. The rest is full of grain and other foods, in case of siege. The city has enough stored away to feed the entire population for three years. It is because of that and the great wall that no enemy has ever successfully attacked Praunce, and it has helped us to become the center of the trade in grams."
"Ah, I see. What of the top of the tower, though?"
"As in all the towers, that's where the wizards live."
"Wizards?" -
"Yes, wizards. You must know what wizards are."
"Certainly I do. Are there many in Praunce?"
The baker shrugged. "Enough, I suppose. They do their part in defending the city and safeguarding trade, but I never cared for them much. They make me nervous."
Slant nodded. "I might like to talk to one, though. Is there any way up to the top?"
The shopkeeper shrugged again. "There are no stairs. The wizards fly up."
Disappointed, Slant thanked the man, and he and Ahnao left the shop.
"What now?" Ahnao asked.
"We can at least go up as far as we can." He led the way toward the center of the building and up a convenient staircase to the balcony, leaving the horses tied in front of the bakery shop. When Ahnao pointed them out, Slant replied, "They can take care of themselves for now. Nobody is likely to harm them, and we may not need them any more. I can always steal some more."
The balcony was fairly narrow, floored with wooden planks. At the corner where the two passageways crossed another staircase led upward through the ceiling. Slant noticed that the ceiling, too, was wooden; he had rather expected it to be vaulted stone.
They proceeded up this new staircase and found themselves in a large, dim, windowless chamber, lit by oil lamps in brackets on the walls. A dozen doors, each with a name painted neatly upon it, lined the sides of the room, and another staircase led through another wooden ceiling to the next floor.
They continued upward through floor after floor until, eight flights above street level, there were no more stairs but only a closed trap door in a corner of the ceiling that took them a moment to locate. It was a dozen centimeters out of Slant's reach.
He stared at it resentfully, then remembered who his companion was. He turned to her, standing close behind him and very tired from the long climb. "Would you open that for me?"
"Me? How?"
"Fly up to it."
"Oh! Let me catch my breath first"
"All right." She sank to the plank floor and sat; Slant settled beside her, though he was not particularly in
need of rest.
When she felt herself to be more or less recovered Ahnao rose to her feet, took a deep breath, and then picked her feet up from the floor, curling herself into a ball in midair, a meter above the planks.
Slant watched in fascination; he had never seen a wizard take off before. He had expected her to leap upward, or to drift, but not to pull herself up as she actually did. He felt his skin crawling and itching from the nearness of magic.
Once she was off the ground, Ahnao slowly and carefully stood up, still unsupported in midair; her hair brushed the ceiling. She reached up and pushed aside the trap door.
Sunlight poured through, and the two of them blinked in the unexpected brilliance; they had long since adjusted to the feeble oil lamps. Ahnao's concentration was disrupted by her surprise, and she fell awkwardly backward. Slant caught her and lowered her to the floor. He looked up through the opening but could not see anything useful; the trap door seemed to open into a vast empty space. That did not accord well with the baker's description of a grain storage area.
"Could you lift me up there somehow?"
"I don't think so," she replied.
He needed a ladder, or at least a rope, but saw nothing in the room that might be useful; except for the flickering lamps, the chamber was completely empty. It was also, he reminded himself, a public hallway, and if he stayed where he was long enough somebody was sure to notice him. If several people noticed him, they might begin to wonder what he was doing there, and he had no good explanation ready.
He could at least send Ahnao up through the opening, though, and perhaps she would find her way up to the wizard and send him down. He was about to ask her if she would cooperate in such an endeavor when she spoke first, saying "The wizard wants to know what you're doing here."
"What?"
"He noticed us banging around and contacted me. His name is Arzadel. He wants to know what we're doing here."
Slant had forgotten that wizards had limited telepathic abilities. Or, rather, he had forgotten that Ahnao did. He was almost pleased to have her along. "Tell him that it's important I speak to him as soon as possible."
The Cyborg and the Sorcerers Page 20