“I know Percy Mjipa,” said Fallon. “But look here: Aren’t you afraid your planet will get pretty badly shot up? Or that whoever gets guns first will conquer all the other nations?”
“For the first contingency, a man is no deader when slain by a gun-bullet than when clouted by a club. And for the second, that were no ill to my way of thought. We need one government for the world—first because we must have it ere you will admit us to your hoity-toity Interplanetary Council. Secondly, because it gives us an advantage in dealing with you in any case. Prestige follows power, she does not precede, as says Nehavend.”
“But shouldn’t such a government come about as a result of voluntary agreement among the nations?” Fallon smiled at the realization that he, the cynical adventurer, was arguing for Terran political idealism, while Sainian, the unworldly philosopher, spoke for Machiavellian realism.
“You’ll never get voluntary agreement in our present stage of culture, and well you know it, Earthman. Why, if the ayamen of our nearest heavenly neighbor, the planet Qondyor— what do you Terrans call it?”
“Vishnu,” said Fallon.
“I recall now—after some fribbling Terran deity, is it not? What I say is: if these rude savages invaded us—let’s say brought hither in Terran spaceships for some recondite Terran reason—think you that even that threat would unite our several states? Nay. Gozashtand would seek revenge upon Mikardand for its defeat at Meozid. Suria and Dhaukia would see a chance to throw off the yoke of Qaath, and then each to erase the other—and so on down the list, each angling for the help of the invaders in extirpating its neighbor, indifferent to its own eventual fate.
“Had we another thousand years wherein to advance at our natural gait, ‘twere well—but such time is lacking. And, as I recall my Terran history, you fellows all but blew up your planet before you came to that happy degree of concord; and your general level of culture was far ahead of our own at present. So, say I, we shall receive equal treatment when—and only when—we no longer have this multiplicity of independent sovereignties that you can play off, one against…”
“Excuse me,” said Fallon, “but I’ve got to get back upstairs before my friend guarding the door goes off duty.”
He crushed out his cigar, rose, and opened the door. There was no sign of Fredro.
“Bakh!” Fallon breathed. “Either the fool’s gone off exploring, on his own, or the guards have taken him! Come on, Sainian, show me around this warren, I must find my man.”
Chapter XVI
Sainian led Fallon briskly through the halls and rooms of the crypt. Fallon followed, shooting glances right and left from under his cowl into the many dark corners.
Sainian explained: “Here the guns are stored when finished and inspected… Here is the room where the barrels are bored true after forging… Here is the stock-making chamber. See how they carve and polish stocks of bolkiswood; Chabarian lured woodcarvers from Suruskand, for in this treeless land the art’s but feebly developed…Here the explosive is mixed…”
“Wait,” said Fallon, looking at the mixing process.
In the middle of the room a tailed Koloftu stood before a cauldron under which burned a small oil-flame. The cauldron contained what appeared to be molten asphalt. The Koloftu was measuring out with a dipper and pouring into the asphalt the materials from two barrels full of whitish powder, like fine sand, while with his other hand he gently stirred the mixture.
“Beware!” said Sainian. “Disturb him not, lest we all be blown to shreds!”
But Fallon stepped nearer to the cauldron, thrust a finger into one of the barrels of powder, and tasted. Sugar!
Though no chemist, Fallon’s store of general information— gathered in the course of his ninety-four years—informed him that the other barrel probably contained niter. In back of the Koloftu, Fallon could see a mold into which the mixture would be poured to harden into small blocks. But he could not linger to watch this process.
They searched through more chambers: some used by the workers for living, some for storage of raw materials, and some vacant. In one section of the labyrinth, they came upon a door with a member of the Royal Guard standing before it.
“What’s in there?” said Fallon.
“ ’Tis the tunnel to the chapel across the street. In former times the priests used it for their convenience, especially in rainy weather. But now that the government has rented their crypt, they must needs slop through the wet like common mortals.”
As they searched, Fallon started as a trumpet-call reverberated through the caverns. There was a bustle of guards clanking about, the lamplight gleaming on their armor.
“The guard is changed at midnight,” said Sainian. “Be that a matter of moment to you?”
“Hishkak, yes!” said Fallon. “Now we can’t leave until tomorrow noon. You’ll have to put us up.”
“What? But my dear colleague, it would mean my head were I caught harboring you…”
“It’ll mean your head if we’re caught, in any case, because you’ve been seen walking all over this place with me.”
“Well then, it were not irrational for me to seek a boon from you in turn. Does that conspiratorial wit of yours hold some plan for freeing me from these noisome toils?”
“You mean you want to escape?”
“Certes!”
“But then you’ll forfeit all this pay the government has supposedly been banking for you.”
Sainian grinned and tapped his forehead. “My true fortune is in there. Promise to get me out—and Zarrash too if you can—and I’ll hide you and your comrade. Though Zarrash be but an addlepated animist, yet I would not leave a professional colleague in such a lurch.”
“I’ll do my best. Oh, there’s the fastuk now!”
Having scoured almost the entire cellar, they came upon Dr. Julian Fredro. The archeologist was standing before a section of ancient wall near the exit stairs on which appeared a faint set of inscriptions. In one hand he held a pad and in the other a pencil with which he was copying off the markings.
As Fallon approached with thunder on his face, Fredro looked up with a happy smile. “Look, Mr. F-Fallon! This looks like one of oldest parts of building, and the inscription may tell us when it was built…”
“Come along, you jackass!” snarled Fallon under his breath. On their way back toward Sainian’s quarters, he told Fredro what he thought of him, with embellishments.
Sainian said, “There is room for but one here, so I will put the other in Zarrash’s chamber.” He tapped with his knuckle on Zarrash’s door-gong.
“What is it?” asked another elderly Krishnan, opening the door a crack.
Sainian explained. Zarrash slammed his door shut, saying through the wood, “Begone, benighted materialistic chatterbox! Seek not to lure me into any such scheme temerarious. I have woes enough without harboring spies.”
“But ’tis your chance to escape from the Safq!”
“Ohe? By Dashmok’s paunch, that is an aya of a different gait.” Zarrash reopened his door. “Come in come in, ere you are overheard. What is that?”
Sainian explained in more detail, and Zarrash invited all to sit down to wine and cigars. Learning that Fredro was a Terran savant, both philosophers began to ply him with questions.
Sainian said. “Now, touching this matter of inductive versus deductive reasoning, dear colleague from Earth, perhaps you can with your maturer wisdom shed light upon our difference. What is your rede?”
Thus the conversation took off into the realms of higher reasoning, far into the night.
The following morning, Fallon felt the bristle upon his chin and looked at himself in Sainian’s mirror. No Earthman could pass as a Krishnan with an incipient beard of the full European or white-race type. Krishnan whiskers were usually so sparse that the owners pulled them out, hair by hair, with tweezers.
Sainian slipped in, bringing a plate on which were the elements of a plain Krishnan breakfast.
“Be not palsied w
ith fright,” said the philosopher, “but the Yeshtites search their temple for a brace of infidels said to have attended last night’s Rite, disguised in the habit of priests. The purpose of this intrusion and the identity of the intruders are not known. But since the doorkeepers swear that no such persons went out after the service, they must still be there. And they can’t have descended into the crypt because the only door there to is constantly guarded. I have no notion, of course, who these miscreants might be.”
“How did they find out?”
“Some one counted the capes of the third-class priests and found that two more had been employed than there were priests to wear them. So, ere this mystery leads to wider searchings, methinks you and Master Yulian had best aroint yourselves ere you bring disaster upon us all.”
Fallon shivered at the thought of the bloody altar. “How long before noon?”
“About an hour.”
“We shall have to wait until then.”
“Wait, then, but stir not forth. I’ll do my proper tasks, and tell you when the guards have changed again.”
Fallon spent the next hour in solitary apprehension.
Sainian put his head in the door, saying: “The guards have been changed.”
Fallon pulled his hood well down over his face, glided out with the shuffling walk of the-priests of Yesht, and gathered up Fredro in Zarrash’s room. They headed for the exit stairway. The crypt was still lit by oil-lamps and the glow of furnaces, just as it had been before; there was no way to tell day from night. When Fredro sighted the carving that he’d been copying the night before, when Fallon had found him and dragged him off, he wanted to stop to complete his transcription.
“Do what you like,” snarled Fallon. “I’m getting out.”
He mounted the stairs, hearing Fredro’s disgruntled shuffle behind him. At the top of the flight he came to the big iron door. With a final glance around, Fallon smote the door with his fist.
After a few seconds there was a clank as the outer bolt slid back, and the door creaked open. Fallon found himself facing a trooper of the Civic Guard in uniform—but not Girej. This Krishnan was a stranger.
Chapter XVII
For three seconds they stared at one another. Then the guard started to bring up his halberd, at the same time turning his head to call out, “Ohe! You there! I think these are the men for whom…”
At this instant Fallon kicked him expertly in the crotch, a form of attack to which Krishnans—despite many anatomical differences—are just as vulnerable as Earthmen. As the man yelled and doubled over, Fallon reached around the edge of the door and extracted the big key. Then he slammed the door and shot home the bolt on the stair side, so that those in the temple could not open it unless they either broke it down or found another key.
“What is?” said Fredro behind him.
Without bothering to explain, Fallon pocketed the key and trotted down the stairs. At such desperate moments he was at his best; as they reached the bottom there was a loud bang as something struck the door from the other side.
Fallon, calling upon his recollection of his tour of the crypt the previous night with Sainian, picked his way through the complex toward the tunnel entrance. Twice he went astray, but found his way again after scurrying about the passages like a rat in a psychologist’s maze.
Behind him Fallon heard a scurry of feet on the stair and a clatter of weapons. Evidently the door had been opened.
At last he sighted the guard in front of the tunnel door. The Krishnan hoisted his halberd warily. Fallon kept right on, waving his arms and crying, “Run for your life! There’s a fire in the explosives-room, and we shall all be blown to bits!”
Fallon had to repeat before the guard got the idea. Then the fellow’s eyes goggled with horror; he dropped his halberd with a clatter and turned to unlock the door behind him.
The bolt had snicked back and the door was opening when Fallon, who had picked up the halberd, swung it so that the flat of the ax-head smote the guard on the helmet with a crashing bong. The man went down under the blow, half-stunned, and Fallon and Fredro slipped through the door.
Fallon started to shut the door, then realized that, first, the guard’s body was lying in it; and second that if he did, the tunnel would be in total darkness. He could either leave it ajar, or drag the guard’s body out of the way, take one of the lamps down from its bracket on the wall of the crypt, and close the door behind him.
The clatter of approaching footsteps convinced him that he would not have time to carry out this maneuver. So he took the key, leaving the door open, and turned into the tunnel, saying, “Now run!”
The two Earthmen gathered up the skirts of their robes and ran along the rough rock floor, sometimes stumbling on an irregularity. They ran, the light from the door behind them diminishing with distance.
“Be caref…”
Fallon started to speak, but ran headlong into another door in the darkness. He bumped his nose and cracked a knee-cap.
Cursing in several languages he felt around until he found the handle. When the door did not yield to mere pulling and pushing, he located the keyhole by feel and tried his two keys. One of them worked; the bolt on the far side slid back.
Noises from the other end of the tunnel indicated that their pursuers had found the felled guard.
“Hurry up, please!” whimpered Fredro between pants.
Fallon opened the door. They entered a room that was almost dark, but feebly lit by gleams of daylight that came down a stair-well. The walls were covered with shelves on which were untidily stacked vast numbers of books—Krishnan books with wooden covers and a long strip of paper folded zigzag between them. Fallon thought that he recognized them as the standard prayer-books of the cult of Yesht, but he had no time to investigate. The tunnel was echoing to the tramp of many running feet.
The Earthmen bounded up the stair, finding themselves on the ground floor of the Chapel of Yesht. Fallon, moving silently now, holding his scabbard through his robe lest it clank, neither saw nor heard any sign of life.
They went down a hallway, past rooms with rows of chairs set up in them, and presently found themselves in the vestibule just inside the front doors. The doors were bolted from inside, and Fallon slid back the bolt and opened one door.
A light rain slanted across the wet cobblestones and sprinkled Fallon’s face. Few pedestrians were about. Fallon whispered, “Come on! We’ll slip out and around the corner to leave these robes. Then when the guards get here we shall be walking toward them.”
Fallon slunk out the door and flitted down the stone steps and around the corner of the building into the narrow space between the chapel and the adjoining house. Here an ornamental shrub screened them from the street. They slipped off their robes, rolled them into small bundles, tied them up with their belt-cords, and tossed them into the top of the shrub where they were above eye-level and so might be overlooked. Then they walked quickly out to the street, turned, and were strolling past the front of the chapel when the door flew open again and a gaggle of guards and priests boiled out and clattered down the steps, peering into the rain, pointing, and shouting at one another.
Fallon, one fist on his hip and the other hand on his hilt, surveyed the pursuers with a lordly air as they came down the steps toward him. He gave them a little bow and a speech in his most grandiloquent Krishnan style, “Hail, good my sirs. May I venture to offer assistance in the worthy search upon which you appear to be so assiduously engaged?”
A guard panted at him: “Saw—saw you two men in the dress of priests of Yesht come out of yon portal even now?”
Fallon turned to Fredro with raised eyebrows. “Did we see anything like that?”
Fredro spread his hands and shrugged. Fallon said, “Though it grieves me so to confess, sir, neither my companion nor I noticed anything of the sort. But we’ve only just now arrived “here—the fugitives might have left the building earlier.”
“Well then…” began the Krishnan, but
then another Krishnan who had bustled up during the colloquy said, “Hold, Yugach! Be not so ready to take the word of every passing stranger—especially inhuman alien creatures such as these. How know we they’re not those for whom we seek?”
The other Krishnans, attracted by the argument, began crowding around with bared weapons. Fallon’s heart sank into his soft-leather Krishnan boots. Fredro’s mouth opened and closed in silence, like that of a fish in stale water.
“Who be ye, Earthmen?” said the first Krishnan.
“I’m Antane bad-Fain, of the Juru…”
The second Krishnan interrupted: “Iya! A thousand pardons, my masters—nay, a million, for not having known you. I was in the House of Justice when you testified against the robber Shave and his accomplice, the same which died of the wound ye so courageously dealt in apprehending him. Nay, Yugach, I’m wrong. This Antane’s one of our staunchest trees of law and order. But come, sir, pray help us to search!”
The guard turned to shout directions to his fellows. For a quarter-hour Fallon and Fredro helped to hunt for themselves. At length, when the search appeared hopeless, the two Earth-men strolled off.
When they were out of earshot of the chapel, where the baffled searchers had gathered on the steps in a gesticulating knot, Fredro asked, “Is all over? I can go back to hotel now?”
“Absolutely. But when you write a report for that magazine of yours, don’t mention me. And tell Percy Mjipa your story, saying we saw no trace of his missing Earthmen.”
“I understand. Thank you, thank you, Mr. Fallon, for your help. A friend in need saves nine. Thank you, and good-bye!”
Tower of Zanid Page 14