“I do feel like I’m between a rock and a hard place,” Shyla sighed. “I’m afraid that if I dig in my heels about this Koruse business, Gorsh will simply put me next on the list of girls he’ll let Mosse have. And Mosse wants me, there’s no question about it. It doesn’t matter which way I turn, I’m faced with the intolerable. Damn that marker Gorsh has in my shoulder; because of it, it doesn’t do any good to run or hide!”
They were climbing the stairs now.
“Look Shyla,” Jaqui said seriously, “you can live through a lot more shit than you think you can. If you have to go to Koruse, just square your shoulders and tell yourself that you will survive whatever he, or anyone else, throws at you.“
Tere was climbing on ahead of them, and she grabbed hold of the other girl’s arm, slowing her progress for a moment.
“Remember what Murra said about there being healers in the Federation who can fix all kinds of physical and emotional damage. We’ll get you to one of those if necessary.”
Actually Murra had said that Mikal and Xoraya, the Lady Lizard, had talked about such healers. They were friends with one, apparently, one who had led a healing of an abused ex-slave, whom some other friend of theirs had recognized as someone whom Gorsh had snatched from his world. Hearing about all these people, even second or third hand, as it were, had made Jaqui long to leave Wayward and go somewhere where she would be valued and appreciated. Apparently, places like that really did exist.
The girls hurried on behind Tere. Shyla wondered vaguely how Jaqui could possibly expect to keep a promise like the one she had just made, regardless of there being off-worlder astral forms in the cellar back room, and in spite of the help the Wise Woman of the River Valley had offered them. She fought the tears that were stinging at her eyelids. Life had become a frightening slog.
*****
Max offered to lend his flit to Chrysalia and Lank for the trip to Salamanka, but after looking the vehicle over, Kati and her crew thanked him for his generosity, but declined. The Lordz Family vehicles were marked with the Family crest, making them easily identifiable. One of the reasons why Lank was insisting that he be the one accompanying Chrysalia to Salamanka, instead of Kati, was that Gorsh did not know his face at all, whereas he could have identified Kati in a heartbeat. It was not a good idea for the two reconnoiterers to associate themselves with a Councillor who had turned down Gorsh’s offer of a loan of a chattel, when going to tease out information about his stronghold in a city, half of which he owned.
Since President Naez had arranged for the new Government to buy some of the communicator crystals, and had paid a fair price for them, Lank and Chrysalia had some Waywardian cash to spend on a rented flit. Accordingly, they walked over to the vehicle rental parkade near both the Government Buildings, and the City Market, accompanied by the kitchen staff member who was going to the Market with a pull-cart, to buy the day’s greengroceries.
Matt, their guide was thrilled to have companions for part of the way. He was about Lank’s age, and a bright young man, pleased to have received the opportunity to leave his rural home on Max’s Family Estate for even a humble job in the Family Head’s Strone household. He was voluble, and Lank and Chrysalia took full advantage of that, asking him about the city, and, also, life in the hinterlands.
He shared what knowledge he had of the area they walked through, and a lot of gossip about the rest of Strone, clearly gleaned from his fellow employees, and other people whom he had met during his errands into the city.
“Be careful at the Parkade,” he warned them. “Especially if Thom serves you himself. He’ll cheat you if he can, and he’ll think that he can, because you’re pretty clearly off-worlders.”
They clearly were. Lank, in spite of his youth, towered over many of the Waywardians in his Tarangayan height, and Chrysalia was a tiny, delicate creature, compared to the stockier, sturdier locals.
“If Lizzy, his wife, serves you, you’ll be better off; she’s an honest woman, and just rolls her eyes when Thom plays his little games.”
Lank thanked Matt for this tidbit when they parted at the street corner where the Market Halls began, and the Waywardian pointed out the expanse, and the sign of the Rental Parkade, a block in the other direction.
“We’ll keep your advice in mind,” he said, cheerfully. “Thom may be surprised by an off-worlder’s ability to haggle.”
Matt grinned.
“Good luck,” he said, and began to pull his cart in the direction of the nearest Market Hall.
“He’ll be entertaining the vendors, and his fellow customers,” Chrysalia muttered at his back.
“No matter,” opined Lank. “I think we got more out of him than we gave away.”
Chrysalia laughed out loud.
“And you’re thinking that it’s all to the good if everyone in this town thinks that Max’s guests are a bunch of weird Free Traders, from who knows where! Right?”
“You got it. Odder, the better. You’re starting to catch on to how Kati operates. I’ve been taking lessons from her!”
*****
Lank handed Chrysalia one of the two stunners that he had retrieved from The Spacebird Two before they said good-bye to Kati, Llon and Ciela, outside Max’s vehicle garage. Max had wished the two of them well earlier, before he had left to help with the arrangements to bring the chattels Gorsh had loaned to some of the Councillors to Karn’s office for question-and-answer sessions.
As the First of the Families Karn had the authority to scrutinize the local affairs of the Councillors belonging to the Old Families. They could not very well stonewall if he showed some concern for the off-world workers which the Heads of the Families had recently brought into Strone. Not when the rumors about their slave status were passed on by even the lowliest of the local servants! Fortunately, for the Government, most of the Council Members whom Gorsh had bribed in this fashion were from the Families, and therefore under Karn’s jurisdiction. As for the few who were not, President Naez was looking into their acquisitions, and making plans to speak to the chattels.
There would have been a large contingent of the house staff watching Lank and Chrysalia’s leave-taking, except that Sammas had expressly forbidden it. The Lordz guests, no matter who they might be, and no matter how interesting, were to be treated with respect, and that meant that there were to be no gawkers when two of them left for Salamanka in a rented flit. Sammas could not keep the household from being abuzz with all the interesting events taking place—the off-worlders had certainly created a stir—but he could insist that proper decorum was observed by Max’s employees. Max tended to be a little too lenient with some of the younger members of the staff, in his opinion, and he was determined that this would not result in sloppy manners with the guests. He had been a little shocked the other evening when Kasia had spoken up about the rumours swirling about Lovale’s carpets, especially when her story had so disturbed Captain Katerina, and Max had not even chided her for it. He, Sammas, had taken Kasia to task at the end of the evening, and told her to not interfere in the guests’ conversations, but he was not particularly hopeful that he had made an impression on her. The young people, nowadays, seemed to think that democratic practises ought to prevail everywhere, including the households of the Old Families!
“You don’t trust me to manage with my natural weapons?” Chrysalia asked Lank, as she accepted the stunner, and slipped the little weapon into her pocket.
“Oh I do,” Lank replied. “I just think that a stunner is less deadly, and we have strict orders not to leave dead bodies behind. And our resident healer is not coming with us, as you know.”
Chrysalia grinned somewhat ferally.
“Oh, I have orders from my people to not leave dead bodies behind, too,” she said. “That doesn’t mean that I can’t hurt the sons of bitches who treat other sentients as property. There’s crap, and then there’s real crap, and the real crap is not to be tolerated.”
“Watch your attitude, Chrysalia,” Llon said mildl
y. “This is an information-gathering sortie you’re going on, not a battle. You two are to make the Wise Woman’s cottage in the river valley your first stop, by the way. She has information for you, and a request for your aid, I believe.”
Kati was glad that the Guide had taken Chrysalia to task for her attitude, so she did not have to. Her own feelings could be as mixed as those of the Crystolorian obviously were, and sometimes it was hard to keep up the composed, cautious, fair-to-all attitude which her positions as the Team Leader, and the Captain of The Spacebird Two, required. Llon was good, she thought. He never tried to usurp her authority, but when it made sense for him to point out that he did have knowledge and experience greater than any of the other Team members could possibly have, he did not hesitate to do so. And he had been a big help when it came to dealing with the Planetary Spirits. He could do it quickly and confidently, whereas Kati would still have been groping, just as she had on Vultaire.
“Heck, having a Guide as a Team member is a definite plus,” she subvocalized to The Monk. “I’ll miss him when the time comes that I’ll once again have to operate without him.”
“But, woman, you’ll always have me,” The Monk protested. “I can be amazingly useful, too.”
“Thanks for noticing that I’m a woman, and not a girl.”
Kati turned her attention to Lank and Chrysalia, leaving the Granda to stew however he wished.
“You two figure that you know what you’re doing?” she asked. “You’ve got the last known address of the knife-maker?”
Marna Naez had got that for them, from her in-laws’ records. The address they had was at least a decade out of date, but settled Waywardians did not move around much. Except possibly in a place like Salamanka, where the power structure of the city’s affairs was in a flux, with one person gaining more and more influence and property.
Lank grinned at Kati. He understood that she was fretting because she had to send two of her Team members into danger without being able to accompany them. She was like that, and he appreciated it, even though sometimes it could be annoying since it made her sound as if she didn’t trust them to know their business. He did know his business, and he knew that Kati knew it—otherwise she would never have asked him to come on this adventure in the first place. He trusted that Chrysalia knew what she was doing, too; presumably she had been picked for her task by the other Crystolorians, and they must have known her.
“Relax, Boss,” he said. “We’ve got the address, and the coordinates to take us to Salamanka. We’ve a description of the river valley there, and the Wise Woman’s cottage. We’ll pretend to be clueless tourists when we’re not being Free Traders with valuable merchandise, in search of a man who is supposed to know what to do with our expensive goods. And we plan to come back with lots of useful information.
“And Kati, if you need any complicated mechanical stuff, or mathematics to be done, remember, Ciela’s your girl. She’s as good at that stuff as I am—even without a node in her neck.”
“Yeah, but I’ll have to make sure that she doesn’t get too deep into the wine,” Kati laughed. “Chrysalia won’t be here to clear her bloodstream.”
“You’ll have to fix her if she gets a headache, that’s all. Okay Chrysalia, let’s climb in, and get going. Salamanka’s quite a ways off.”
Kati watched the flit lift, and climb into the sky above the Lordz house. Then it shot off towards the north, and she felt almost bereft. Lank and Chrysalia were going to Salamanka where Mikal was, with Xoraya, Xanthus, and Murra. And she had to cool her heels in Strone, because they were not ready to play their biggest card in the game that was to snare them Gorsh.
*****
“So are human cities always on water?” Chrysalia asked Lank that afternoon, when the flit arrived in the airspace above Salamanka.
“I don’t really know,” the youth replied. “On Tarangay they were, but on Tarangay it would have been hard for them not to be, since it’s a world of islands and oceans, and with no continents at all. On Vultaire both the Port City and the Capital City were on rivers, but they were the only cities that I was in. The Second City of Lamania is on a sea coast, so it’s on water too. But I do understand that there are such things as desert cities on some Federation planets, so, come to think of it, I guess I do know the answer to your question, and it is no.”
“Well, thanks for that convoluted but precise answer,” Chrysalia laughed. “In any case, this is a city on a lake shore, bisected by a river that flows into the lake.”
“Just like the maps in the flit’s console said,” Lank added. “So the coordinates took us to the right place, just like they were meant to.”
He had the feeling that Chrysalia was a little iffy about human technology sometimes. She had had no problem with The Spacebird, but, it seemed that the flits and the flyers were a whole other sort of a bird as far as the Crystolorian was concerned. She had fretted when Lank had set the controls on auto.
“Right now the weather is ideal for flying auto,” he had explained to her. “It’s a beautiful, sunny day, and the winds are pretty reasonable, even up here. We’re not in a rush, so I don’t have to try to get all possible speed out of this beast. If the conditions change, the flit will let me know; it’ll buzz insistently, in fact, until I grab the controls again. In the meantime, it’ll fly us steadily towards the coordinates that I set, and those will take us into the middle of Salamanka.”
There had been no buzzing, nor any other indication that all was not well. In fact, the trip between Strone and Salamanka had been about the most boring flight Lank had experienced in his life. He and Chrysalia had spent some time sharing what information each of them had about Wayward, about the city of Salamanka, and about the Slaver Gorsh. The data pool they had thus created was disturbingly shallow, Lank had thought; they really didn’t know all that much. Well, the fact was that they were on this trip to fix that. In the meantime there had been time to kill in the flit, and he had opted to kill some of it by napping while the auto controls took care of the flying.
“We’ll have to go down a lot lower to pick out the Wise Woman’s cottage in the river valley,” Lank now said, feeling refreshed, thanks to the nap. “I hope Gorsh’s minions aren’t in the habit of shooting strange flits out of the air before they ask questions. It would be pretty ignominious to have the machine crippled before we’ve even had a chance to land.”
“Didn’t Llon say that the river and its valley are the territory of the Nature Spirit with which the Wise Woman deals? If that’s so, then Gorsh’s holdings will not extend there. The Nature Spirit would keep Gorsh’s Dark Creature from encroaching, so the most the Slaver could do would be to take or send his men in for a sortie in a flyer or a flit, and I bet those guys would be antsy the whole time to get the heck out of there!”
“Llon did say that at least the river valley would not be Gorsh’s territory, though he did warn me that he had no way of knowing how extensive the Slaver’s holdings are.”
Lank brought the flit down to a tree-top altitude over the large lake. It appeared to be a fishing ground, as well as a transportation route, and a playground. From the flit’s map bank he had earlier determined that there were a handful of smaller settlements on the lake, and now, as the flit descended, he and Chrysalia could see that these centres were connected to Salamanka by freight carriers and passenger boats which plied the lake waters from the large port just outside the city’s river delta. As a resident of an ocean world, Lank had no problem recognizing the fishing boats scattered here and there on the water, even though they were smaller than the ones he had grown up with. And there were small sailboats, just outside Salamanka, tacking and dancing in what wind there was, and looking cheery in the sunshine.
It was hard to believe, gazing upon the peaceful scene, that there were nefarious goings on in Salamanka.
Nobody paid the flit the least attention as it approached from the lake, and, using the thread of the river as a guide, began to make its way into t
he city.
“I guess we’re just some tourists, as far as the inhabitants are concerned,” Lank muttered. His jitters began to abate as he realized how little attention they were attracting.
“Just what we want them to think,” Chrysalia agreed. “With luck, we can keep that impression going for a while.”
Lank chuckled.
“We’ll make like we’re some really odd, or stupid tourists,” he said. “From some obscure place in the Galactic Fringes, or the Wilderness. That way, if we ask questions, even invasive ones, no-one will take us seriously as any kind of a threat.”
“That might work. Except that we’re bringing some pretty pricey merchandise with us, and will be looking for an obscure knife-forger. That’s not really in line with the stupid tourist image.”
“Eccentric Free Traders then.” Lank was not to be discouraged. “Believe me, I’ve run into a few prize examples of that sort, in my short life. Hana and Mose, with whom we traded for Spacebird Two on Tarangay were frigging paragons of the Free Trader middle class, compared to some of the jokers I’ve met. And I suspect that Zeke and Darla, for all their daring trips to Crystoloria in the Wilderness, were pretty much the same, in their day. At least Darla, when we met her, was a nice woman, married to a man who adored her, and had tied her to himself, and a settled life, with a couple of kids.”
Showdown on the Planet of the Slavers Page 35