Trent’s manner had undergone a rapid change. He looked uneasy. But he managed a crooked grin. “Tragg, that was right over the plate. Not your usual breaking ball. Why don’t you come right out and say I had him murdered?”
“Again, His Highness’s choice of metaphor eludes me.” Tragg sniffed.
Baldon intervened, “I’m sure Lord Tragg means no such imputation.”
“I know he does. But no matter. My lords, I must leave. Uh, one thing more. The funeral.”
“A grand state funeral, of course, Highness.”
Trent nodded. “Yeah, with all the trimmings, I expect. When?”
“According to canon law, the body must lie in state for ten days —”
“Ten days? Preposterous. And I’ll bet no embalming is allowed either.”
“Correct, Highness. But a spell of preservation will be cast.”
“Right,” Trent answered dubiously. “Still, ten days …”
Baldon raised his hands in helpless appeal. “There is no relief from canon law. Am I not right, Renalto?”
The small man next to Baldon nodded. “As Minister Plenipotentiary for Religious Affairs, it is my duty to see that canon law is obeyed to the letter. I shall do so.”
“Very well,” Trent said. “I’ll not object to any of the mummery if I get a quick reply to my proposal.”
Hivelt said, “I think we have a deal on that, at least. We … Your Royal Highness, is anything wrong?”
A rivulet of sweat was making its way down the line of Trent’s jaw. He gave his head a brisk shake. “Not a thing. I have to go. Messenger your decision to me as soon as possible.”
“You will be where, sir?”
“Club Sheila. I must leave the castle for a while, but I’ll be back.”
Trent got up and strode out of the room. The door slammed shut behind him.
Baldon said, “The curse. He can’t stay in the castle for long.”
“And he wants to be king!” Tragg looked around. “Will no one back me?”
“Back you in what?” Hivelt said.
“In thwarting the bastard, of course!”
Lord Renalto put his fingers to his lips. “Tragg, curb your tongue!”
“I care not whose spies are eavesdropping. The man must be stopped.”
“How?” Hivelt asked.
“By whatever means at our disposal!”
Hivelt groaned, shaking his head. “I share Trent’s aversion to squabbling and intrigue. I’m inclined to cave in to him just to avoid all that.”
“Then you are a coward, sir!”
Hivelt smiled weakly. “A seasoned one. I have spent three hundred years perfecting my talents.”
Baldon said dolefully, “The legal fees will be ruinous.”
“A pox on the legal fees!” Tragg shouted.
“If we challenge Trent’s claim, the fees will be extracted from our personal salaries,” Baldon said grimly. “And if we don’t challenge, Trent will be king, not just regent.”
Hivelt said, “It seems, my lords, that we are between the rocks and the whirlpool. I vote for the rocks. I say we go for Trent’s deal. Last time: Are there any other objections?”
“I am in debt to my ears already,” Baldon muttered. He had commiseration around the table.
Tragg looked left, then right. He banged the table, rose, and stalked out of the room. The door slammed again.
Everyone leaned back and exhaled. There was a sense of relief, however dour the upshot.
“Somebody yank the bell pull, please?” Hivelt said.
“Let’s wait till after lunch,” Morrel suggested. “We have that much face to save, at least. Make him sweat a little longer.”
“Very well,” Hivelt said, rising. “I eat a lot when I get depressed. When I eat a lot, I eat Oriental. How about you guys?”
“That suits me,” Morrel said brightly.
The sundry ministers of the King’s Privy Council began to file out of the room.
When the door closed again, only Lord Yorvil was left.
He was still cackling to himself, smiling craftily, drumming the table with one wrinkled, skeletal hand.
Eight
Spot Quiz No
Fill in the blanks:
• The setting of the story is Castle ___________.
• The master of this strange, enchanted castle is Lord _______.
• The magical doorways in the castle, leading to other worlds, are called ________.
• The opening scene in this story takes place in the _______ Hall.
• In the opening chapter, four characters are playing bridge. They are ________, ________, ________, and ________.
• In the game of contract bridge, partners sometimes signal the strength or weakness of their hands by means of bidding conventions. One of these is known as the ________ convention.
• In contract bridge, a contract in which no suit is specified is known as a ________ contract.
• Lord Peter Thaxton, a minor character in this story, was elevated to the peerage (got his title) because he was instrumental in solving the ________ Castle murders.
• Jousting tournaments are usually fought with a long, spearlike medieval weapon known as a ________.
• Adults who read fantasy novels are thought by some psychologists to be in a phase of arrested adolescent ________.
True or False?
• The characters in this book are lifelike and convincing. ___
• Gene likes action and adventure. ___
• Snowclaw is a very good bridge player for a nonhuman. ___
• Flinging-toads are specially bred for competition. ___
• Castle Perilous has exactly 143,999 magical doorways. ___
• The average commercial tuna boat is 40 feet from stem to stem. ___
• The chief export of Tierra del Fuego[7] is hemp. ___
• Linda is an adept sorceress. ___
• Osmirik is a bit on the anal-retentive side. ___
• The price of this book is outrageous for a cheesy paperback. ___
Essay Questions (Keep your answer under 500 words.)
• Discuss some of the methods the author employs to make a totally fantastic tale believable. Does he succeed? If not, where does he go wrong? Relate all of this to what Aristotle says about verisimilitude in his Poetics.
• The chapters featuring the person walking across the featureless plane — what is all that about? Is it fair for an author to be so vague and sketchy and keep the reader in suspense? Discuss ways of dealing with this problem.
• Discuss the possible meaning of the epigraph of this book. (The epigraph is the poem-fragment quoted just before the text of the book begins.) Relate it to the story, then comment on how well-read and erudite the author must be.
For Group Discussion
• Explore the possible animal-rights issues involved in the concept of a “toad-fling.”
• Is bridge an elitist game?
• Have significant contributions to Western culture been made by non-Italians?
Nine
Mine
The door hissed shut behind them.
When he saw it begin to close, Gene began a desperate lunge to catch it, then stopped short. Before he took two strides the darkness had closed in.
“Great,” he said. “Right out of a B movie.”
“A what?”
Before he could get his penlight out of its pouch in his utility belt, a pale halo of luminescence relieved the gloom. The source, he was interested to learn, turned out to be two luminous strips on the front of his companion’s blue-and-silver pressure suit. They emitted a strange greenish glow, cold and faint, but provided enough light to illuminate the surroundings: a large wedge-shaped chamber with lots of empty racks and shelves. A second door was set into the inside wall.
“Handy gadgets, those,” he commented.
“Standard,” she said. “Are you going to keep claiming that it was magic that got us in here?”
> “Not if it annoys you.”
“Not at all. It’s just not a very convincing cover story for the obviously advanced circuit-scanning implant you have. It is a bionic chip, isn’t it?”
“If you insist. Now where can we find that security system?”
“Use your implant to trace it to the master computer.”
“Yeah.”
She looked around. “No alarms are going off, and I find that rather strange.”
“Well, the facilitation spell is still working. Actually, I supplied the lock with the correct security code, so the system probably thinks that we have a right to be here.”
“Then we’d better stop talking about it. The system is intelligent enough to learn from our conversation that it was fooled.”
“As I said, the spell’s still working, and will continue to do so for a bit longer. It’ll smooth our way, make things happen in our favor. But it’ll wear off eventually. So, let’s get busy.”
“When it wears off, can’t you simply cast another spell?”
“Yeah, but it won’t be as effective. Magic loses potency with overuse, you know.”
“Well, no, I didn’t know that. Interesting.”
He chuckled. “You’re more than a little skeptical.”
“Not as much as you think. Is “magic’ your word for psychic ability?”
“Hmm. Well, there is some mental discipline involved, but “psychic’ is the wrong word for me. It’s a supermarket tabloid buzzword.… Uh, never mind. Call it whatever you want. What it is, is magic, pure and simple. The real stuff. Let’s see what’s behind this other door.”
The inner door was not locked but had a complicated levered latch. Gene worked the mechanism and pulled the door open. It led into an oblong room with rack after empty rack that might once have held electronic instruments. He walked between the rows and came out, then stood looking at the bare counters that ran along the walls.
He said, “Scavengers?”
“Possibly, but it looks too clean. The stuff was probably stripped when the installation was closed.”
“Was this communications, do you think?”
“No,” she said. “Maybe a laboratory for mineral analysis. There is an outside chance they left the communications gear. The place hasn’t been left open to the elements. There might be plans to restart operations or convert the place into something else.”
“They were pretty thorough in stripping the place.”
“A multiphone is a huge piece of equipment. Sometimes it’s more trouble than it’s worth to tear one out. Let’s look for the communications shack.”
There were other rooms on the first floor, all offering little but empty packing crates and other debris. They found an elevator but passed it up in favor of spiral stairs, which they mounted warily, Gene leading the way with his flashlight. The second floor was apportioned between more laboratory space and a number of cubicles: offices or sleeping quarters; it was hard to tell which until they arrived on the third floor, where, in rooms even more cozy, some metal cots sans mattresses remained. There were more rooms off to the right, and they walked on into the darkness. It was a big building.
“Here it is,” she said, stepping through a doorway.
Most of this room was like the rest — denuded racks and shelves — the only difference being a large array of cylinders and spheres running along the left wall.
“That’s a multiphone?” Gene asked.
“The resonating chamber and radiation sources, at least,” she said. “And the control circuits” — she knelt before a metal cabinet and ran a finger along a vertical opening that once might have housed an electronics module —”are gone.”
She sighed and settled cross-legged into a sitting position. She hung her head and closed her eyes.
Gene played the flashlight’s beam around the room. A few stray nuts and bolts, one or two funny-looking vacuum tubes, if that’s what they were (he doubted it), an empty plastic box, a length of plastic tape, dust, grit …
He looked at her. She sat unmoving.
He listened. Nothing. No enemies approaching. This seemed a safe place. He wondered about the security system. The spell hadn’t worn off yet. He wondered what would happen when it did.
“What do you want to do?” he asked her.
She was silent, motionless.
“I don’t even know your name,” he said.
She had no comment.
“Uh, then again, maybe you don’t want me to know your name.”
She opened her eyes and looked up at him. “Who and what are you?”
“I’m Gene Ferraro. What am I? Just a … wanderer. A drifter. And you?”
“Sativa.”
“Nice name. That the only name?”
She looked down again. Her voice sounded tired as she said, “Scions of aristocratic houses don’t have surnames, properly speaking, but I’m of the House of Hemlin. It’s a big, important family, with many members prominent in Dominion politics.” Her tone seemed to imply that this wasn’t very remarkable or at all important.
“Is it all right if I think of you as Sativa Hemlin?”
“Feel free.”
“Almost sounds like an Earth name.”
“Earth?”
“Where I’m from.”
“Oh. Never heard of it. Sorry.”
“No reason you should have. Mind telling me why you’re so important to the Irregulars? — Oh, God, wait a minute.”
She looked up again. “What?”
“Uh, you’re not going to tell me you have the secret plans to the Death Star, are you?”
“The what?”
He shook his head vigorously, dismissing the whole notion. “Nothing, nothing.”
“I don’t have any secrets of any sort.”
“For a second there, I was a little worried. Thought I’d walked into some weird aspect.”
“You’re making no sense whatsoever.”
“Forget it. Private joke, just kidding.”
Gene paced once in a circle, idly sweeping the beam around the room.
“You’re a very strange person,” Sativa said, “but I suppose I owe you my life. For what that’s worth.”
“Don’t sweat it. You still haven’t told me why they’re after you.”
“I’d make a perfect hostage. I hold a hereditary seat in the Upper Chamber of the Dominion legislature. I also hold the permanent rank of Wing Leader in the Dominion Near-Space Guards. Last but not least, I’m the daughter of the Outworld Proconsul. My mother is the highest Dominion official governing the hundreds of worlds not directly connected to the Thread.”
“So you’re one choice VIP. Very Important Package. What’s the Thread?”
Sativa lifted unbelieving eyes. “You must be joking.”
“I think I told you that I’m from a world that is very far away.”
“How far? Could your world be off the Thread completely? If so, how did you get here? This is not an inhabited planet.”
“I got here … basically through a spacetime anomaly which was brought about by the same powers that fooled the security lock.”
“Magic again?”
“Yes, magic. It’s the truth, even though you don’t buy it, not for the briefest moment.”
“I did, for the briefest moment,” she said, “when you mumbled that nonsense. I suppose that was an incantation.”
“Yeah, sort of. Well, yes, that’s exactly what it was. It serves only to focus the mind. Come to think of it, magic is a mostly mental discipline. It very well could be psychic, much as I loathe that word.”
“Whatever.” She sighed. “Very well. Even though, frankly, I think you’re lying, I’ll tell you what the Thread is. It is a fracture in the fabric of spacetime … I know you know what that is, so don’t feign ignorance, please. A crack, a fault, if you will. Better to say, a seam in the continuum. It is one of an unknown number of such. These seams were formed — so the astrophysicists tell us — in the early stages o
f the formation of the universe itself. They were produced when the primordial flux of matter — or energy, I should say — went through rapid changes from one state to another. Since the efforts could not propagate instantaneously, sections of the flux changed independently of others. Seams, or faults, appeared between the sections. Like the surface of a pond freezing. It doesn’t all freeze at the same time. It forms plates. Think of a multidimensional equivalent to that process. The plates of spacetime are bounded by threads.”
“Cosmic strings.”
“Yes? That’s what you call them?”
“Just a theory where I come from. Now I understand. Okay. And the Thread is used for interstellar travel, faster than light?”
“You grasp things quickly for one who prides himself on ignorance. Yes, the regions of space near the Thread are anomalous, and, with the proper technology, can be exploited for space travel.”
“How?”
“Basically you pilot your ship near enough to the inner singularity of the Thread so that the extreme gravitational force pulls the ship along. The intense distortions of spacetime in those regions produce strange effects, most of which are not completely understood. One of the effects is superluminal travel. But if you get too close to the singularity, you die. Understand?”
“I think so. Nifty.”
Sativa frowned at this word, then shrugged. “The Dominion of Worlds is sometimes called the Beads Along the Thread. The Thread runs through several galaxies —”
“Travel between galaxies? Now there’s a radical concept. You’re talking about huge distances, aren’t you?”
She nodded. “But they are nothing to the Thread. The Thread obliterates space — and time.”
“I like it, I like it. Now, obviously there’s a war going on.”
“Good observation,” she said.
“A rebellion.”
“Of a sort.”
“And the Irregulars are the rebels.”
“They’re criminals.”
“Well, you’re part of the establishment under siege. You would tend to feel that way about them.”
“It isn’t a feeling. They are a pack of cutthroats posing as noble freedom fighters. They have duped everyone who has lent them support.”
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