“What d’you mean? It’s the palace. Isn’t it?”
Shaking his head with exaggerated weariness, Lessup said, “You father’s palace wasn’t in the city.” He waved a vague hand. “It’s way out in the forest, somewhere. Other side of the city. All ’bandoned and everything.”
“Is that right?”
Lessup refilled his glass and took a swallow. “You see,” he continued, “this palace here is just the old government building, that the Regent moved into after the coup. The old palace was never used again.”
A sharp current of thought cut through the alcoholic haze in Daenek’s mind. My father’s palace . . . everything that’s still hidden . . . maybe there—
“Kind of a shame, too,” broke in Lessup’s beery voice. “Supposed to be a whole mountain of gold out there.” He pulled on his glass.
“Gold?” said Daenek, puzzled.
“Yeah. Something to do with some kind of machinery. Technologiker reasons. Plating or insulation or something. Anyway, a bunch of it.”
“How come nobody goes and gets it?”
Lessup looked at him in exasperation. “Because it’s lost?”
“The gold?”
“The palace.”
Daenek slammed his glass on the table. “How can you lose a palace?” he shouted.
“It was kind of hidden to begin with. There was never any road to it—everything came and went by helicopter. You know, up in the sky? Nobody knows what happened to that, either. Or at least I couldn’t find anything about it when I used to snoop around the Academy data banks. Anyway, the forest was always pretty dense, and its gotten worse since then.”
“Yeah, but still—a whole palace. You could look for it.”
“Sure.” Lessup rolled his eyes. “If you wanted to take the time to cross-hatch the area. That’s the only way. But you’d get killed by the bad priests doing it.”
“Bad priests? What’ve they got to do with it?”
“Damn forest’s got several of ’em. Congregate there. You go wandering around in there and you wind up with your throat ripped out.”
Daenek leaned onto the table and kneaded his brow with one hand. Lost, he thought. Bad priests . . . but if you knew right where the palace was . . . maybe you could get in and back out before— “Gold,” he said, sitting upright.
“Wha?”
“Gold,” he repeated. He got to his feet and found them a little unsteady. “Come on. We’ve got to find Rennie.”
It was evening before they did. Rennie was seated at a table in another tavern, trying to explain in sign language the rules of a card game to one of the city-dwellers. Lessup stayed outside as Daenek pushed his way through the crowd to her. As he approached, the citydweller smiled in bafflement, shrugged and got up to rejoin his companions at another table. Rennie shuffled her cards moodily, then looked up at Daenek standing before her. “What do you want?” she asked coldly.
Daenek explained as briefly as he could. Everything, including the bad priests of which Lessup had spoken. She listened without stopping the cards moving through her hands. The slight noise made the headache Daenek had gotten from the ale worse.
When he finished talking, she laid the cards on the table and reached down to her pack beside the chair. She straightened back up with the seeklight in her hand. For a moment she sat rubbing its smooth ovoid shape with her thumb and staring into the space in front of her.
“How long?” she said at last.
“Lessup said it’d probably take two days walking to get to it. Depends upon where it is exactly.”
She fell silent again for a few seconds, then looked straight into his eyes. “All right,” she said evenly. “I’ll go with you. But all the gold’s mine.”
“Fine,” said Daenek. “I don’t want it.”
While Daenek and Lessup waited inside the deserted building, Rennie went back to the occupied part of the city to buy the necessary supplies. No moonlight penetrated the dark interior.
Daenek heard an odd, liquid noise from the other side of the room. He lifted his head from his pack and flicked on the flashlight Rennie had left behind. In its beam was Lessup, casually emptying one of several flasks that he had brought from the last tavern without Daenek or Rennie knowing. The ex-sociologist’s throat worked as he drained the bottle.
A wave of anger made Daenek’s face burn. “Hey,” he snapped. “How about knocking that off? We’re going to be moving out in a few hours.”
Lessup took the bottle from his mouth. “No reason not to— enjoy the trip, is there?”
“This is just a big lark to you, isn’t it?” Daenek’s voice was heavy with sarcasm.
“Maybe it is.” Lessup sat the bottle down on the floor. His face was altered by some new emotion. “Maybe it is. But then, I’m not quite so lucky as you, am I?”
“Lucky?” The word surprised Daenek. “Hey, I’ve been through a lot—”
“Yeah, that’s right.” Lessup’s voice swelled with bitterness. “You’ve got a great big quest you’ve been on, don’t you? Always had it, born with it. I mean, you’ve got a reason for taking another step, for picking things up, putting them down, eating, sleeping—whatever it takes to find out what happened with the last thane. Your father.” He swiped clumsily at the strands of hair plastered with sweat to his forehead. “Well, you’d better hope you find all the answers you’ll ever want at the end of your quest, or you’ll wind up just like real people—dead, or dead on the inside but still aching. With no quest to make your life seem like it’s worth living.” He fell silent, then picked up the bottle again. “Well, enough talking of what you wouldn’t know anything about.”
Daenek switched off the light and remained sitting upright in the dark. The sound of Lessup’s drinking continued for a while, then ended with a smash of glass as the bottle hit the wall.
Chapter XX
“Did you hear something?”
“No.” Rennie pushed another stick into the fire. Its light glinted off the narrow stream they were camped beside. “Get some sleep. I’ll wake you when it’s your turn to watch.”
Daenek pulled the blanket up to his neck and rolled on his side. The tops of the trees blotted out a ragged section of stars.
He yawned, feeling a pleasant ache relaxing in his legs. The first day’s trek had gone well, reminding him of the time—ages past, it seemed—when he had wandered over the hills near the stone-cutters’ village. Rennie had led the way, consulting the seeklight, its tiny jewel-like light glowing in the shade of the moss-tangled trees. Lessup had kept up with them all the way, his lean face set with determination and sweating a great deal.
Towards noon, though, he had caught Daenek’s eye, signalled OK with his thumb and forefinger, and grinned.
Tomorrow, thought Daenek drowsily. Maybe by this time tomorrow. My father’s palace, and I’ll know.
The next morning they set out early, following the stream for a little distance. It shortly meandered off to the north, away from the direction indicated by the seeklight. Just as they were about to plunge back into the forest’s thick underbrush, Rennie turned, scowled and said something under her breath.
“What’s the matter?” said Daenek.
“I left something back where we slept. My flashlight.” She pushed past Daenek and Lessup, heading back upstream. “I’ll be right back,” she called over her shoulder. “Just wait for me.”
The two men sat down at the edge of the forest’s shade.
Daenek watched some type of bird he had never seen before perch on a flat rock in the middle of the stream. The bird poked into the water with a forked twig held in its beak. It didn’t catch anything, and flew away in a flurry of scarlet feathers, leaving only the sound of the water gurgling against the stone.
Then that small noise was gone, too, swallowed up and extinguished by a scream that tore open the still air. Daenek and Lessup scrambled to their feet as the echoes from upstream died like sobs.
Daenek readier her first, with Lessup ru
nning just behind him. Rennie seemed to be sleeping on her side, with the stream only a few feet away from her outstretched hand.
He touched her shoulder and, as if awakening, she rolled onto her back. A wave of blood pumped over his hand, welling from a diagonal slash that ran from her throat into her stomach.
Daenek froze, then, without thinking, knelt and pressed his hands to the wound, but the blood kept coming, streaming between his fingers.
“No,” he heard Lessup say in a high, strangled voice behind him. Daenek jerked his head around and saw the other’s face, drained white with shock, the eyes staring past him at the figure on the ground.
“Not—” He backed away, whipping his head from side to side.
As he turned to run, Daenek reached for him with one of his stained-red hands, but Lessup eluded his grasp and darted into the forest.
Slowly, his mind frozen into a red eternity, Daenek turned back to Rennie, Her eyes opened and a moan broke through her pale lips. “It hurts,” she said in a voice like a small child’s. “It hurts so much.”
He touched her cheek. “Don’t move.”
Something wet traced through the red smear Daenek’s hand had left on her face. “I can’t even see you,” she said. The voice was very weak, a thread. “It hurts, don’t go away—”
Her mouth fell open and the side of her face rolled against the ground. Daenek stood up. His clothes were heavy with blood and clung to his skin. Something was in his hand. He opened his fingers and saw that somehow he had picked up the seeklight.
Looking up from it, he saw the edge of the stream becoming threaded with scarlet.
At last he turned away and walked slowly into the forest. Only a few meters away he found Lessup’s body, twisted in a growing pool that seemed black in the darkness of the trees. On the face was the same expression of shock and horrified disbelief.
A noise somewhere behind him. He turned around. There was a brief glimpse of a metal face with glowing eyes, something sharp that struck and slashed his face, and a scream of triumph and rage.
Chapter XXI
When he came to, a leather cord around his neck jerked him to his feet. His wrists were bound so tightly behind his back that he could no longer feel his hands. He wiped his face on his shoulder, trying to clear the blood from his eyes.
There were ten or more of the bad priests in a circle around him. A few still had scraps of their brown robes hanging in tatters from their shining metal limbs, but the others were bare or daubed with paint. The one that held the end of the leather cord had a grinning caricature of a mouth drawn across the bottom of its face. Daenek saw that there were also slivers of glass tied with dirty string to the tips of its fingers. A knife dangled from a rope around its middle.
It tugged on the cord, pulling Daenek along after it. The others followed, brandishing their weapons, long pointed sticks or pieces of metal bent and sharpened to a cutting edge. Daenek stumbled, and the leader snapped him forward with the cord.
From behind him came a shrill chorus, like screaming laughter.
They walked for several kilometers along a trail cut through the underbrush. A sick exhaustion seemed to grow inside Daenek like a hollow space under his ribs. He kept his head down, seeing only the small splotches of light that penetrated through the trees overhead.
As they mounted the top of a small rise, Daenek had his first glimpse of the old palace. Most of it was hidden by trees, and what was visible seemed to be decaying rapidly. The remains of what had been a tower at one corner lay strewn about in piles of rubble. The rows of windows set into the front facade were smashed, lying in multi-colored shards around the wide doors ripped off their hinges.
And the bad priests—scores of them, crouching together in little groups near the walls of the palace, or stalking about in their loping, wolfish gait—a milling tableau of blank, inhuman faces and metal limbs. No wonder we ran right into them, a part of Daenek thought dispassionately. There must be a couple hundred of them. And we were headed right into their lair.
As the bad priest led Daenek through the figures, the same howling cry spread among them until it rang and throbbed in Daenek’s ears. A metal hand reached for his thigh with a sharpened triangle of metal. The leader slapped it away and cried “No!” in its high, wailing voice. “This is the one! The one!”
Daenek wondered dully what it meant, why he had not been killed at the stream in the forest instead of being marched here and saved. For what reason? he thought.
The bad priest stopped in front of the palace and removed the leather cord from Daenek’s neck. Then it roughly pushed him through one of the gaping doorways. None of them followed him into the dark interior.
Daenek rubbed the chafe mark on his neck and looked around, letting his eyes grow used to the dark. The doorways were either blocked by rubble or groups of bad priests, their blank faces peering in at him with an avid greed. He turned away, the happenings of the last few hours having driven him beyond simple fear.
He seemed to be in some kind of large anteroom. Underneath years of accumulated dirt the floor was made of the precious veined rock from the distant quarry of Daenek’s childhood.
Heavy drapes and tapestries, like fluted columns of dust, reached up into the unseen heights of the room.
The small clouds of dust raised by his feet eddied in the still air as he walked farther inside. A fallen chandelier lay like a small mountain of age-dulled gems. Beyond that, the outlines of a great curved staircase rose up from the floor.
Mounting the first step, Daenek turned and looked back at the blank, yet savage faces of the bad priests peering in at him, waiting. Even if this is the end of it all, he thought, maybe I can still die knowing. Or trying to.
The stairs led to the hub of a network of branching corridors.
He hesitated, then headed down one he could see sunlight pouring in from a point on one side. When he reached it, the opening proved to be a balcony overlooking an open courtyard.
Several of of the bad priests were in the open space. Some of them were clustered around a pile of women’s clothes, rich embroidered gowns made velvet-like with dust and age. One of the machines wrapped a gown against its body, then threw its head back and emitted its shrill manic scream. The others—including the one that had led Daenek in—turned and scrabbled at it, shredding the gown with their talon-like fingers.
Daenek drew back from the balcony before he could be spotted by them. Standing in the corridor he became aware of a faint electronic whine coming from somewhere very close. The seeklight, he thought suddenly. He reached into his pocket and brought it out. The smooth metal was sticky with drying blood.
The little faceted light was blazing, and the shrill note became louder as he pointed the device towards the unexplored end of the corridor. The only direction I’ve got left, he thought. I might as well follow it.
Tracing whatever path kept the tiny light brightest, Daenek moved through the old palace. Corridors without light and cramped with musty air, high-ceilinged rooms that filled with the echoes of his steps as he crossed them. In one, he saw the sun set through a stained-glass window as he passed.
The seeklight’s whine seemed to become as loud as the bad priests’ cries had been when Daenek stood at last before a pair of metal-studded doors. The last stairway he had followed had descended deep into the bowels of the palace, into this silent chamber lit only by the last flickering radiance of a near-dead fluorescent panel in the ceiling. Daenek set his palm against the edge of one of the doors and pushed it open.
Inside, it was like the nest of some large, burrowing animal. A heap of matted cloth and straw lay in one corner, a few yards from the glowing embers of a small fire. Small bones and vegetable rinds littered the floor.
Daenek picked up a half-burnt stick from the fire and blew on it’s end, re-igniting it into flame. Something rustled in the mound in the corner as he approached it, holding the flame overhead to see.
An old man’s face, wizened and with a
beard that was matted with dirt and grease, looked up at him. His body was curled up like a child’s on the rags where he had been sleeping. As Daenek bent down, the old man’s eyes widened, his ancient face becoming suffused with an expression of wonder and delight. In a scratchy falsetto, he spoke. “You’ve come back,” he said. “You’ve come back.”
The old man lapsed into a clouded senility from time to time, and Daenek, nearly an hour later, was still not sure whether the old man understood that he was not the old thane, his father.
Daenek gathered from the old man’s rambling that he had been some type of official or courtier for the old thane. “I crept back here,” mumbled the old man. “Oh—a long time ago. There was nowhere else to go. It was all over. But you’re here now.” He broke into a racking spasm of coughing that brought flecks of blood to his cracked lips.
“Take it easy,” said Daenek, holding the old man’s shoulder steady against the mound of rags and straw. He’s not going to last long, he thought.
“The—the bad priests never bother me.” The old man’s yellowed eyes rolled from side to side. “I think that I’m a pet to them. They bring me some food now and then, little things that they catch—they’re very fast—and water. But they never bother me.”
“That’s good. Don’t get excited.” I don’t have much time, thought Daenek listening to the old man’s ragged breathing. Not if I’m to learn anything from him.
Almost desperately, he pulled the little square of white metal by its chain from beneath his shirt, stiff with dried blood. “Do you know what this is?” he said, holding it out.
Something behind the old man’s eyes seemed to grow clearer as he looked from the metal to Daenek’s face. “That’s right,” he whispered. “You wouldn’t know, would you? You were only a baby.”
Before Daenek could stop him, the old man had risen from the mound and started tottering across the room. “This way,” he piped, waving his gnarled hand.
Daenek picked up another stick from the fire he had re-kindled, then followed the old man. He found him in front of another pair of doors. They were featureless, with no visible way of opening them.
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