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COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 1977 by Lloyd Biggle, Jr.
All Rights Reserved
Published by Wildside Press, LLC
www.wildsidebooks.com
Edited by
Kenneth Lloyd Biggle
with thanks to David Datta
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