Читать книгу Silence is Deadly - Lloyd Biggle jr. - Страница 3

CHAPTER I

The pursuit was almost upon them before Jan Darzek became aware of it.

Above the rhythmic clumping of the hurrying draft nabrula and the screaming racket pronounced continuously by their cart’s ungreased axles, Darzek’s impaired hearing caught a faintly muddled overlay of hoofbeats. He turned and looked back.

The three knights were a mere thirty meters behind them and riding hard: black capes whipping in the wind, mustaches streaming, whip arms ascending and falling rhythmically, leather armor flapping. The ponderous riding nabrula were thundering along as fast as they could gallop.

For a long moment Darzek stared at them, his surprise mingled with fascination and disbelief. A knight of Kamm in full charge was a spectacle, and these three specimens were priests, notorious black knights of the Winged Beast.

He touched Riklo on the shoulder and pointed at the knights. She glanced backward, shrugged, and returned her attention to their own three rushing nabrula. Their only possible action now was to drive straight ahead in a splendid presumption of innocence.

The surlane was narrow here—scarcely wide enough for two carts to pass abreast. Tall, bulbous-topped stalks of the sponge forest crowded it on either side. Sporadic eddies of sponge scent enveloped them as their steadily laboring tandem set a brisk pace over the deeply rutted lane—one moment pleasant and faintly aromatic; the next, chokingly pungent. The cart bounced and swayed, and its pegged boards added an irregular polyphony of creaks and groans to the incessant squawking of the axles. From behind them, under the gaily colored tent that sheltered the cart box, came the continuous tinkle and clatter of rattling glass and pottery.

Darzek looked again at the knights. Their aura of bristling menace made him think nostalgically of Keystone Cops. Each rider clung desperately with one hand to the massive folds of skin that curled about his nabrulk’s neck. His absurdly elongated boot toes were locked under the ugly beast’s flabby stomach. These nabrula were a blotched yellow in color, a variety much favored for their riding qualities, and though the beasts were hairless, their mottled skin made Darzek think of the mange. With saliva pouring copiously from gaping, toothless mouths, with bulging noses aquiver, with double-hinged legs laboring furiously, with each beast’s club-like horn lowered farcically as though for the kill—the horn projected backward, over the creature’s rump, and served a procreational function Darzek hadn’t believed even after he’d seen it—the nabrula seemed specifically designed for populating nightmares, though they were awkward, stupid beasts, disgustingly gentle and affectionate.

But the menace was real enough. The knights’ free hands held their whips ready for action, the deadly lashes coiled and poised to strike. Darzek had seen a victim cut to the bone at eight paces, sliced open as though with a meat cleaver, and he hoped that these knights were merely intent on overtaking them.

He turned to Riklo and spoke with his fingers. The caterwauling of the cart wheels made vocal conversation difficult; also, Darzek needed the practice.

Why would black knights be waylaying innocent travelers in the Duke Merzkion’s province? he asked, trying not to lisp with his awkward sixth finger.

Her hands were busy with the reins. She dropped a shoulder negatively—she was as mystified as he.

Before Darzek could grapple further with this unexpected wrinkle in Kammian intrigue, the first knight drew close enough to strike. His whip curled around the horn of the trailing nabrulk, which came to a rearing halt, buckling the harnesses, dragging the other two nabrula to a stop, and almost overturning the cart. Darzek and Riklo scrambled to the ground and sank to their knees.

But they kept their eyes on the knight who confronted them. For this was Kamm, the Silent Planet, the world of the deaf, and no one humbly averted his gaze when he was about to be spoken to.

The knight’s fingers flashed. Who are you?

I am Lazk, Darzek’s hands explained. A skilled purveyor of scents. A guarantor of delicious dreams and memorable love nights, of sharpened senses and prolonged appetites. From Northpor I come, traveling these eleven days and dispensing happiness at wayside forums. OO-Fair is my destination, may the Winged Beast prosper it and me.

He plucked a vial of perfume from an inner pocket of his cape, un-stoppered it, and offered it to the knight for sampling.

Simultaneously, Riklo was shaping her own carefully prepared identity. I am Riklo, a keeper of secrets. I read the future in reflected starlight and fashion amulets to change it as the Winged Beast may assent. I reconcile lovers and restore friendships. I accompany my mate.

They finished, and the knight sat looking down at them stonily. Watching him, Darzek pondered this strange Kammian ability to absorb multiple conversations. The notion that some Kammians could “listen” to as many as four pairs of hands speaking at once confounded him, but he had seen it done.

One of the knights had ridden up to the cart and opened a tent flap, and he was poking about among the flasks and vials and crocks and the stocks of herbs and essences. The third knight dismounted and slowly began to circle the cart. He held something cupped in his hands, and Darzek wished he dared turn his head to see what it was.

The first knight continued to scrutinize them. Suddenly he bent forward, snatched the unstoppered vial from Darzek’s fingers, and sniffed deeply. Then he emptied the contents onto Darzek’s head.

Scornfully he flung the vial aside. A quality product, his fingers announced, but some of your dabblings are less well formulated, perfumer. Your most recent concoction stinks. If you don’t mend your fumbling ways, you’ll lose custom.

Blinded in one eye, dazed by the overpowering scent, Darzek nearly toppled over. As he regained his balance, the peripheral vision of his untouched eye caught a flash of light.

At the same instant, Riklo cried out. “Pazul!”

Darzek leaped to his feet. On a neck thong he wore a carved amulet, an image of the grotesque symbol of Kamm’s death religion, the Winged Beast. He pointed the gaping, toothed snout at the knight on foot, who now held a gleaming light cupped in his hands and was regarding it with astonishment. Darzek pressed the Beast’s breast, and the knight collapsed abruptly. He whirled to see Riklo calmly shoot the first knight from his saddle with her own amulet. The third knight’s whip already was in motion when Darzek sent him and his nabrulk to the ground in a paralyzed tangle.

Darzek hurried to the knight who had held the light. It lay in the lane beside him, a milky, egg-shaped crystal with a blunted black end. He picked it up cautiously, examined it, and finally repeated the knight’s maneuver in walking around the cart with it.

Only when he thought to point the black end at the cart’s concealed compartments did it suddenly blaze with light.

“It’s not a pazul,” he called to Riklo. “It’s only a metal detector.”

He sat down on the cart step and contemplated it. Almost from the moment he first heard of Kamm there had been panicky references to a pazul on this world, and he was becoming tired of them. The ultimate death ray was a theoretical possibility, but it wouldn’t be invented on a world with Kamm’s level of primitive technology.

But neither would a metal detector, and Darzek found this one almost as disturbing as a pazul would have been. Its milky white, translucent case looked like synthetic crystal, and the inner workings had to reflect a considerable skill in microelectronics. The instrument was sensitive enough to respond palely to the infinitesimally fine wiring of Darzek’s amulet.

“The question,” Riklo announced, “is whether they’re really knights of the Winged Beast.”

She bent over one of them, opened his tunic, and slid it down his arm. On his shoulder was an ugly red tattoo.

Darzek abandoned the metal detector for this new perplexity. “Why would the Duke Merzkion be disguising his knights in his own province?” he demanded.

Riklo smiled enigmatically and did not answer.

Darzek lifted a tent flap, folded back the exquisitely woven carpet that covered the bottom of the cart, and opened a concealed panel. He placed the detector in a padded compartment, wondering as he did so what kind of shielding would be required to protect them from further harassment.

When he emerged, Riklo had grabbed the legs of one of the knights and was dragging him into the forest. “Where are you taking him?” Darzek called.

She answered over her shoulder. “Do you have a better idea?”

Darzek fretfully rubbed his head where an ear should have been. It was at times like this, when he was faced with a limited number of highly undesirable alternatives, that he missed his ears the most. “I suppose not,” he said reluctantly.

She vanished into the forest with the knight. When she came out again, she said, “I’ll bury their clothing and armor separately and disguise the bodies. You go on with the cart. Pull it into the first crosslane you come to, and take their nabrula into the forest and find them a grazing place. After I clean things up here, I’ll wait for you at the cart.”

“All right,” Darzek said.

She hauled the second knight away and returned for the third; and Darzek straightened the cart’s twisted harnesses, helped the paralyzed nabrulk to its feet—the charge that knocked out a knight for an hour or more only stunned this mammoth beast for a few minutes—tied the three riderless nabrula in tandem, and set off along the surlane.

* * * *

At nightfall, Darzek and Riklo were striding boldly through the forest, and every footstep sent clouds of winking lights soaring into the air, or leaping aside, or scurrying away.

For this was Kamm, the world where no life form possessed a sense of hearing, and darkness transformed it. It became a fairyland to the eye and hell to the nose. The world’s night creatures existed in a multiplicity of forms and sizes, and without sound to claim their territories, or attract their mates, or just exuberantly announce their presences, all of them did so with light or with pheromones. The lights were spectacular pulsations of sparkling, multicolored luminosity. The odors were equally dramatic but unfortunately were as likely to be spectacularly nauseous as exquisite. Darzek never took a night walk without longing for a gas mask.

The peculiarities of Kamm’s night creatures posed a serious problem for the alien agent. No one, and no thing, walked about secretly during a Kammian night. The creatures dodging his footsteps often supplied sufficient light to read by, and his path was a streak of illumination that could be seen for kilometers. In compensation, the natives of Kamm rarely were around to see it, because they shunned the night. They actually seemed to fear darkness; but even if they hadn’t, there was nothing for a nocturnal native to do in a sponge forest, so Darzek and Riklo strode along boldly.

Suddenly Riklo burst into laughter. “Some of your dabblings are less well formulated, perfumer,” she sputtered. “Some of your dabblings—”

“What the devil did he mean?” Darzek demanded.

“It’s the most cutting insult one could direct at a perfumer—to tell him he stinks.”

“Thank you. Now tell me a few cutting insults that can be directed at knights.”

She turned quickly. “Are you still brooding about those knights?”

Darzek said nothing.

“They would have done the same for you, cheerfully, and with far less provocation.”

“I know.”

“I find it appropriate that the last blood on their hands should be their own. They’ve washed often enough in the blood of innocents.”

“I know.”

“If we’d turned them loose, they would have set off a search such as Kamm has never known, and every perfumer on Storoz would have been subject to arrest, torture, and probably death.”

“I know.”

“Then why are you brooding? You Earth people are strangely tenderhearted.”

“I don’t like the idea of cutting a creature’s throat when it’s helpless.”

She turned and scrutinized him. “Did you speak truly when you said that your features are your own, and that you had hearing flaps which the surgeons removed to make you look like a Kammian?”

“Of course,” Darzek said irritably. “They removed the flaps and covered the openings.”

She tittered. “I don’t believe it. Where would the hearing flaps go? No natural process would produce a life form looking that absurd.”

“I wore the hearing flaps on my posterior,” Darzek told her. “When I didn’t want to listen, I sat down.”

They walked on. Some minutes later she announced, “I don’t believe it. I don’t believe any of it.”

Darzek thought she was rather unbelievable herself. On Earth she would have been an extremely attractive young female with an outlandish hairdo. On this world of Kamm, where all the females seemed extremely attractive and all of the hairdos were outlandish, she was an ordinary commoner wearing the cloak of a dubious occupation.

What perplexed Darzek was the fact that her appearance was synthetic. She wore an ingeniously contrived artificial body that perfectly represented the appearance of a Kammian native, and within it was concealed the utterly alien life form that was an agent of the Galactic Synthesis.

What that utterly alien life form actually looked like, Darzek had no idea. He knew that she was a native of the world of Hnolon, but he had never been there and couldn’t recall meeting one of its inhabitants before. Perhaps the Hnolonians were giant slugs. Or spiders. Or octopuses. Darzek had spent no small amount of time in watching Riklo and speculating as to what manner of creature was concealed under her synthetic Kammian exterior. Thus far, he had been too polite to ask her.

At the moment he had something more important to worry about. The previous night their young colleague, Wenz, had invaded the castle of the Duke Merzkion. Wenz had a peculiar talent that Darzek found incredible even after seeing it demonstrated. He could walk up a sheer wall. He had entered the castle at its weakest point, the highest window in the tallest turret, and his plan was to explore the building by night and hide by day. If he got into any kind of difficulty, all he had to do was step out the nearest window and walk around on the outside of the castle or perch on the roof until the uproar diminished. For the ultimate emergency, he wore a Winged Beast amulet like those of Darzek and Riklo.

Ten Synthesis agents had vanished on Kamm, several from the province of the Duke Merzkion. These inexplicable disappearances had further fueled the rumors of a pazul. Wenz was to search the castle for traces of the missing agents, while Darzek and Riklo combed the surrounding countryside on the same mission. On the previous night, they had seen Wenz signal his safe arrival at the upper level of the castle. Tonight, he was to signal how much longer his search would take.

It was the metal detector that worried Darzek. He wondered what other instruments of detection guarded the duke’s stronghold.

When finally they reached the edge of the forest, they stood for a long time looking upward at the looming castle. It perched on the cliff high above them, silhouetted against the richly starred sky and looking like a bulgy, many-pronged finger pointed at the infinite.

It was a finger rising from a sewer. The foul odor that clung noisomely to the foot of the cliff left both of them gasping, and above them the cliffside was a smear of lights. The nobility of Kamm was no more fastidious about its environment than the nobility of Earth had been in earlier times. It built its castles on the edge of hills or chasms or cliffs and disposed of waste and refuse by pitching it out of the appropriate windows. What they were seeing and smelling—luminously delineated by the night creatures that came to gorge on it—was the Duke Merzkion’s garbage heap.

They waited, watching Kamm’s swift-moving small moons, and each time an inner moon come into conjunction with an outer moon, they stared intently at the castle. But no light flashed in any window.

After the third conjunction, Darzek stirred uneasily. “Is it possible that he’s finished and left already?”

“Maybe he’s signaling from a window we can’t see from here,” Riklo said.

“Then let’s move.”

They walked along the edge of the forest on a path that took them directly under the garbage heap, and the overpowering stench enveloped them like a corrosive cloud. It became a tangible thing, and Darzek wanted to seize it with his two six-fingered hands and shove it aside so he could breathe. They stumbled forward, keeping their eyes on the castle.

Suddenly Riklo halted. “What’s that?”

There was a scraggly sponge growth at the foot of the cliff, and something had crashed into it and was caught there. A limp arm dangled perpendicularly; a twisted leg was entangled in the sponge fronds. They hurried toward it, ignoring the foul squish of garbage underfoot. Carefully, tenderly, they lifted the body down and carried it to the concealment of the forest.

The soft bark had cushioned its fall, and most night creatures had found it not yet ripe enough for their liking. Darzek and Riklo stretched out the body and examined it with a hand light, flicking the beam from time to time to make it look like one of the night creatures scurrying among the sponge stalks.

Wenz, agent of the Galactic Synthesis. Young, good-looking, intelligent, well trained, skilled, highly capable. The Duke Merzkion had inflicted upon him the final indignity that the Dukes of Storoz reserved for enemies and victims alike: his body had been thrown out with the garbage.

At least that final indignity had been painless. The evidence of what came before it sickened Darzek. The teeth were set; the face was twisted gruesomely; the hands and even the feet were clenched; every body muscle was tensed—not from rigor mortis, but from torture.

And yet the body was unmarked except for the trickle of blood that had caked in the nose and eyes and mouth.

Darzek and Riklo exchanged glances.

Wenz had remarked jokingly that if the Duke Merzkion actually possessed a death ray, he would find it. The duke did, and Wenz had found it; and it had killed him.

At the same instant, it had doomed a world.