“Very much so, Hasso, and thank you.”
“I think it will be safe to leave now.”
He did believe that it was safe.
The shadow moved away from the esplanade.
:You handled that very well, Archivist, and it is safe for now,: the Lyhhrt said, as Hasso snicked the bolt on the glass doors. :Now I will go take care of those clerks. If they should ever realize what has happened, they will not mind my help in reversing such embarrassing actions. And eventually I will find that Other … . :
The Lyhhrt’s loneliness burned like Reddow’s tears.
Fthel IV, In the Forest House:
One of Those Days
Tyloe spends his time looking and listening for he doesn’t know what, he eats and drinks and works out on all the machines in a big high vaulted room with arched windows filled with a hushed green light, among all those snaking steel tubes and springs, it’s like a gothic torture chamber; sometimes a couple of the thick bluejawed men or hardknuckled women will spar with gloves or the chebok, nobody asks him, few speak to him other than Brezant and Lorrice, the only ones that trust him. And she wants to keep him onside. So after the errands and the workouts and watching trivvy locked on Brezant’s favorite porn station, it’s eat and drink some more.
Now he’s sleeping it off after another day of all them snarling over wasted supplies, money not come yet and a bunch of shitheads getting lost looking for enemies in the wrong direction. Another night of her thoughts drifting into his dreams, though more often lately, mercifully, she’s been wearing that red lattice helmet and closing her mind down against him, she keeps her sexual feelings for her employer … .
But now the dreams are flowing into that dim room where—
—in jeweled shoes and red silk stockings with gold cord garters she’s crouching beside Brezant on the bed while his hands run over her everywhere, dermcap on his wrist giving off a bead of lamplight while the karynon darts into every branch and rivulet of his bloodstream, his eyes flash with every pulse. The timer ticks faintly.
I love you, she whispers.
Yeh sure, baby—gimme, baby, gimme right now!
She mounts him mouth on his, heartsbeat!—heartsbeat!—it’s the height of the history of the Universe!—he pulls his mouth away to roar his violent joy!—
(Tyloe in sleep feels this)
—and now they’re boiling into the room, doorslam, Istvan, Oxman, Demarest, thick men in shadow-suits pulling her off him, falling on him with beating fists grunting—thought you were the whole Big Man you stupid arsehole hireling—ripping the bracelet with its poison-cure off her wrist, shoving her in the corner, screaming she staggers up to grab at the bracelet, they punch her down, she’s sobbing, breathless, Brezant howls Give me! Give me!—
The timer rings.
Tyloe jumps up every nerve-end firing, no, not a dream, flings off covers and runs, slamdoor through her room, to Brezant’s through that other adjoining, heavy ancient door, Tyloe’s on them—
—grabbing the nearest pair of feet and hauling till the rest of the body drags off the bed and the head hits the floor thudding, does not quite duck number two’s fist shaving his skull, but backs himself on the bedpost and raises a knee to shove a foot in the thick belly twice before Two is flung back and flattens Three, pulls up Lorrice by the arm in rough haste, Brezant thrashing and screaming—“I can’t stand it! I can’t! Give me—give me the fucking—”
Tyloe’s got a grip on his arm, panting, “Help me, help me get’m outa here!”
She’s yelling too, “It’s poison, it’s killing him! Where’s the—”
Istvan is on hands and knees retching but Oxman and Demarest are scrambling up reaching for stunners, and Tyloe, who has depended on speed, can’t match the strength of any of them; through her mind Tyloe senses the dark figure of Hummer outside the door, waving her zap—“Lyhhrt here! Lyhhrt landing!”
“Money!” Oxman drops everything and runs out.
Demarest yells, “What about them!”
“He’s done for an’ we’ll shut’m up later, come on!” Demarest follows, Istvan pulls himself up and limps after them, rubbing his belly. The door frame glimmers for a moment as Hummer welds the lock shut with her zap.
Tyloe thinks: Lyhhrt? What Lyhhrt?
Brezant who’s been gasping and choking suddenly loses consciousness.
“I got it, sweetheart,” Lorrice pulls herself up. “I found it, there’s some left, I found it! Here!” Her hands are trembling so hard she can hardly push the half-broken dermcap against the inside of his wrist. “Now help me, Tyloe—”
“Help you what? We can’t get out anywhere!” One eye half shut, he’s craning desperately for exits, door welded, no others, windows strong as stone walls.
“Here.” Lorrice presses a curlicue in the patterned wall beside the bed, a door slides open, a wood-paneled elevator beyond it. “Lots of different people have lived in this place.” She flings a silk robe around herself and grabs at Brezant’s wrists. “Come on, wake up, Andres! Get going, Tyloe, for God’s sake!”
Tyloe looked elsewhere into blankness. “I—he’s dead.”
“No! No! He can’t be!” She threw herself over Brezant’s body, clasping his face in her hands. “Andres!”
“He’s dead, Lorrice. It was too late and not enough antidote left.”
“But he’s screaming—he’s screaming in my mind, help me, help me!” She hunched over the body as if it was her child, glaring at him.
Tyloe shook his head, and said, “Only in your own mind, it’s not him, he has a subdermal helmet,” and reached over her to close the staring eyes. He closed his own for a moment to ease the headache the glancing blow had given him.
She had warned him, surely she had seen this coming—how could she have let her guard down?—but her absorption in that figurehead of a man had been as strong as any helmet … and I’m not much of a guard, they thought I was a pretty boy too weak to bother with—
He saw himself in her furious eyes, his swollen eyebrow, his terra-cotta skin, that showed him the son of diplomats from half the peoples of Earth, smeared with dead black blood over his cheekbones, ugly to her now. The messenger.
She collapsed into sobs. “He can’t be dead! Money was coming in and we were gonna have everything!”
As if she had really believed that. He grabbed her by both arms. “Lorrice, listen! What does it mean, their saying, the Lyhhrt is here? What Lyhhrt? I haven’t seen or heard of any Lyhhrt beside the ones we met in Montador! Why all of a sudden have we got one now?”
“Lyhhrt?” She stared at him and whispered, “I don’t know.” Her eyes were blank.
“All right then, let’s get the hell out of here! How can that lift get us out?”
“Down the cellar, there’s an exit—that’s why Andres—Andres and I rented this house.”
“Let’s get going.”
“No, wait, I want to take him!” She was hauling at Brezant’s body by one arm.
“Where, Lorrice? He has no clothes and neither have we. Do you think we could bury him?”
“I can’t—” Her eyes overflowed with tears suddenly.
“If you want to live, leave him, just as he is, otherwise if they don’t find him they may think he got away somehow and come looking—and maybe, just maybe if they find him they won’t think we’re worth chasing—”
“What can we do there with no clothes or food!”
“We’ll have to find out, because we can’t stay here!”
The cellar was a vaulted cavern fairly clean and well ventilated; things skittered or flapped occasionally but nothing touched them except falling dust. Air, cooling and electrical systems were just perceptibly humming, and the darkness was broken only by their maintenance and warning lights. They found a bare place against a wall, waiting until their eyes accommodated.
“What’s happening? Can you tell what they’re doing?”
“Oxman’s talking to the Lyhhrt, the others—they’ve bro
ken into his room—” She let him see through Oxman’s eyes: a Lyhhrt in a black steel workshell that looked like wrought iron.
Oxman saying: Shit, there’s nobody here! Just the body!
They were not likely to find the particular curlicue that opened the door.
Where the hell they gone?
Better have a look around—
Lorrice whispered, “They’re coming down here! The Lyhhrt will know where we are!”
“Do the others know?”
“I can’t tell that—but he’ll know we’re here.”
I did not expect there would be two bodies—that’s dangerous. You will get rid of those.
“That’s him, he’s talking to Oxman! Oh …” She leaned her head against his shoulder for a moment, and he felt her tears through the cloth. “Cranshawe’s dead … he was trying to keep them from …”
Tyloe saw the sprawled body through her mind and eyes. The Lyhhrt was nodding toward Brezant:
Absolute incompetent. Hiring him on was a great mistake and it was time for him to go.
Wasn’t easy trying to get on with him either.
Here are cashbooks, and you will receive whatever else I’ve promised when the ship leaves. Now clean this up, dispose of those bodies, and when you’re through here get down to Bonzador and work on that army. As for this house—
The owners will come, the lease was about to run out anyway.
You will not speak of this to anyone. Goodbye now, you’ll see me again.
“I think he’s leaving,” Lorrice whispered. By now Tyloe and Lorrice were sidling along the walls looking for niches and open doors; Tyloe could feel panic rising in the back of his throat.
:Tyloe! There’s an entrance here.:
Locked.
Demarest and Hummer were coming, their footsteps skittered down the ramp. Lorrice, fighting her own rising panic, felt around the doorway, found the i.d. panel and pushed savagely, Tyloe joined her and without warning the heavy door opened in silence. The door closed behind them; light flowed from the ceiling.
Tyloe stared. “Christ, this is the first place they’ll look!”
Three walls were lined with crates, the fourth with racks upon racks of sample weapons: Karnoshky flamers, Gothenburg stunners, Uzi MarkVII/Gimmels, Zepp darts and almost every other kind of gun that could fit into human hands and limbs.
“I never knew of it,” she whispered.
“Do these jokers know?”
“Everything I thought I knew is wrong.”
“Come on! D’you think this arsenal was for the ‘army’—in this house?”
She sharpened. “No! they’d have been in a storage depot. The i.d. for this place must have been caught up in our own security code when we wired it.”
“I’m afraid whoever does own it will sniff us out when they find they forgot to lock up. Why wouldn’t the Lyhhrt give us to his slaveys?”
“That’d be four bodies to dump, and we aren’t going to tell anyone else ever. I’m sure he saw to that.” Trying not to think, he may be saving us for something. Shudderingly trying not to think of Lyhhrt at all.
The thoughts from Demarest and the last stragglers drifted outward from Lorrice’s mind:
Nah, they ain’t down here. Anyway when we shut this place up tight they’ll be locked in and they got no food.
This was a damn good kip … .
Plenty more of those when this job ends.
“I wouldn’t bet on that,” Tyloe said. “I don’t think they know everything either.”
The figures drew farther away, the thoughts faded … .
“They’re not going to find us here,” Lorrice said, braver now.
“Yeh.” Tyloe was trying to keep himself from thinking: Rats in a trap. “Listen, I want to get this straight about the Lyhhrt.”
She seemed to fade. “I never knew anything about that.”
“Brezant was a figurehead, and those jokers seemed to have known the Lyhhrt a long while. Did he hire them all on?”
“They were here when I came … I told you how Andres found me, and I think he hired Cranshawe, that’s all … .”
“But you were the ESP! You were supposed to be esping them!”
Lorrice had become even paler. “I guess I wasn’t, then, was I? Just made to think I was.”
Tyloe said wearily, “All right, then. Tell me how we’re supposed to get out of this trap.”
“Here,” she reached for the door-latch. “Come on.”
“No, no! If we’re safe in here we can stay long enough to make sure they don’t forget something and come back.”
“There’s no goddam place to pee.”
They waited sitting on the floor, backs to the wall. Every so often she turned her head away from him and wept for Andres Brezant, for his death and for his final humiliation; finally she fell asleep in his arms. Her stockings were tattered and her shoes crack-heeled; she was so wan and dark-ringed under the eyes that he did not want to abandon her in spite of everything.
Tyloe did not realize he had fallen asleep until he woke and found Lorrice staring at him.
“You kept saying you couldn’t fight,” she said dully.
“Not as a pug! My father kept driving me, I learned all kind of martial arts, and won prizes, but that’s mostly posing around—and where would I need to fight, on my father’s estate? That was all the trouble with my father, he had me taught everything and trained in everything, everybody telling me how wonderful I was but it wasn’t good for anything and I didn’t give a shit about anything except to get away from his pushing.”
“I bet you do now, if it’s only for your own ass.”
“I risked it free enough trying to save your bullyboy.”
Neither of them had much to say then. But Tyloe knew: It’s the only way I could have gotten out of this place.
“You’re right about that,” she said bitterly. Then, suddenly, “That Lyhhrt has nothing to do with the lot Andres was dealing with, he had a different … smell to him, the way he said, ‘You’ll see me again’ … he’s a loner.”
Tyloe braced his sore head against the wall. “They’re all the same bastard to me.”
She was silent for a long while. “I could have saved him.”
Tyloe said wearily, “Oh yes. And somebody else would’ve done him in.” He pulled himself up on stiff legs. “It must be near morning.” There were no clocks in the fortress of arms. “I wonder what happened to the servants.”
“There were only two or three staying tonight. They all flew off in their buzzer when the fight started.”
“I hope they got somewhere … I hope we get somewhere. We got something to ride in?”
“I have my own aircar.”
“Good. Now which way is out? I’m damned if I’m going through that room again.”
She said nothing but led him down narrow stone passageways through a massive coded door that opened at her handprint to a maze of wine racks and up a spiral stair into an ordinary pantry.
Upstairs the only sound was of ventilators; there was no one in the long wide-paneled rooms, and Tyloe realized how little furniture had actually been in them. A few wrinkles in the carpets where a dragged body might have pulled at them; one snakeskin shoe lying on its side was all that remained of Cranshawe. Tyloe swallowed hard to keep from retching. “Let’s pick up some clothes and get out of here.”
But she had rushed off ahead of him past the exploded door and its glimpse of the vast rumpled bed into her own room, where she rummaged feverishly in wardrobes with sliding doors that slammed and ricocheted.
“What in hell are you doing now? You can’t take all your baggage!”
“You can do what you want and fuck off, Tyloe! I’m not working for you!”
Tyloe shut up. Last thing he wanted now was a fight. He went to his room and dressed, nothing too fancy, packed a few things into the same knapsack he’d been dragging around the fight-rooms before he fell in with Brezant. Fell in. He didn’t expect to find muc
h use for the kind of rich clothing Lorrice had bought for him with Brezant’s money. He did not stop for anything else except a glance into the mirror to see if he was the same man he had been yesterday. He looked the same: the image was not shivering.
When he came out he found her running through the house, picking up bits, jewelry, dopesticks, picking pockets for cashbooks, credisks. He said nothing, but stood waiting for her, a few minutes worth of patience—until he heard her scream.
He ran into the room with the flashing desk where Brezant had held court and found her standing with hands flattened to her mouth, staring at the Lyhhrt sitting draped in that grand leather chair, long and elegant in wrought-iron black with ruby eyes.
“Hello there,” the Lyhhrt said. His lips had been formed into Cupid’s bows.
“What do you want?” she whispered.
“Nothing right now, but I’ll find some use for you. You do have a few more brains than those thugs … . Did you enjoy my little toyshop? I’m the owner of this house, and I let you in there, you know. You can run along now, but don’t go too far from Montador”—he tossed a cashbook and Tyloe caught it without thinking—“because I like that place, you can have a good time there for a while.”
Tyloe and Lorrice could not find words, or perhaps were stifled by the Lyhhrt. Finally Lorrice burst out, “You bastard! You murderer!”
He paid no attention but rose sinuously. “You can run along now, but not too far. I’ll always know where to find you … .” He elongated himself out of the room in the way of Lyhhrt.
When Lorrice could open her mouth to speak, she said, “I don’t know—I just don’t understand what’s going on.”
“I think you were right when you said he was different.” Tyloe shoved the cashbook in his pocket. “I/we has become I/myself/alone. Let’s get out of here, as far as we can run anyway.” He could not keep himself from taking one last look through the multipaned windows and their deep green forest light that once seemed so heavy with wealth.
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