The auto started up at once, and I saw Lingo and the other guards watching me as I drove away, but what thoughts
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they had about me I couldn't read in their expressionless faces.
I was soon away from the city center, the towers behind me, the same slovenly filthy slum all around me as the one I'd first seen outside the spaceport at Ni. I was traveling east, the shadow of my auto preceding us along the dirt street, the towers of the city casting their shadows all about me, pointing long thin black fingers toward the mountains beyond the horizon.
After my night and morning in the normal lighting of the tower I had to get used all over again to the blunt redness of everything out here. The shacks I passed looked rusted and scabrous, like wounds that had dried without healing.
No block was empty of people. They moved around as endlessly and purposelessly as wind-up toys on a sidewalk, a kind of defiant hopelessness to the curve of their shoulders, the set of their heads. Children ran after the auto, or flung stones at it, or shouted words at it. Men watched it pass with silent mouths and greedy eyes. Women for the most part pretended it didn't exist, though here and there one would with visual and verbal obscenity inform me of her commercial availability. I drove at a good pace, ignoring everyone, and keeping the pistol handy on the seat beside me.
Lastus lived in a sagging lean-to near the outer edges of this slum, far from the towers, several blocks south of the main road to the east, the one that led eventually to Yoroch Pass. There were fewer people out here, and they showed less reaction to the presence of the auto, whether from jaded-ness or despair I couldn't tell. I pulled off the road and stopped as close to the side of the lean-to as I could get.
When they saw the auto stop, several men and women in the general area began to take an obvious though furtive interest in me, and even began to sidle somewhat closer. I climbed from the auto and stood beside it while very ostentatiously I checked my pistol and then put it away. Interest in me abruptly ceased, and those who had been studying me now went back with renewed conviction to their own pointless preoccupations.
Lastus' lean-to was broad across the front, but shallow and not very high, the open front barely five feet from ground to roof. Going to the front, I saw that dirt had been piled up
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over most of the width to make a land of wall closing the lean-to in, leaving only a narrow opening in which I could see rough steps cut into the ground, leading down and in. So some, maybe most, of Lastus' home was underground. It was dark down there, too dark to even make a guess of the dimensions of the place, though I doubted it was much more than a shallow hole in the ground with the lean-to roof erected over it.
I had noticed pervasive stenches in the air while driving out here, the stinks of too many people and too little sanitation, but the smell that now attacked my nostrils seemed twice as bad as anything from before. I supposed it was because I'd been in a moving auto until now, with a breeze of my own making to dilute the aromas and vary them. Now, standing still, I felt the almost physical impact of an odor that seemed to flow up from the dark hole of the lean-to like the exhalations of the minotaur.
But the impression, of course, was wrong. The stink was in the air, all around me, the smell of the neighborhood and not of this one hovel, though surely Lastus' home was contributing its share to the overall effect.
The other sensation I felt was the chill in the air. Why should it seem so much colder, so much damper, when I was standing still than when I'd in motion in the auto? It was as though Hell, unlike any other sun, gave off cold instead of heat, so that standing in its red light I shivered and felt the air clammy against my skin.
I was impatient to be done here, and back in the comfort of the Ice tower. "Lastus!" I called into the black hole. "Lastus! Come up here!"
There were faint rustlings from within, sounds you might hear from some rathole, but I still could see no movement in the blackness. After a minute a reedy voice called, "What is it? Who are you?"
"Come up here, I want to talk to you."
Now I saw him. He'd moved forward, was very nearly close enough for me to lean forward and touch him, and he blinked up at me like a mole. He was wearing only shorts, and dirt streaked his torso and arms and legs and face. He was short and thin but looked hard-sinewed, strong ropes of muscle defining his arms and legs, his chest strong looking, his stomach
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flat. His face looked wary, and belligerent, and afraid, as though too frequently in his life he'd tested his obvious strength against men who'd proved to be stronger.
He squinted and blinked at me and said, in his reedy voice, "I don't know you. What do you want of me? Who are you?"
"I want to hire you," I said.
He was interested. He wiped his lips with the back of a filthy hand, wiped the back of his hand on his leg. "To do what?"
"Guide me."
"Guide you where?"
"To Yoroch Pass."
He'd kept moving closer, was now barely three steps from the entrance. I backed away to permit him to feel safe about coming out the rest of the way, and he said, "Why do you want to go there?"
"I want to see my brother's grave," I said.
"Your brother's grave?" He came up the last three steps, and stood in the entrance. "What brother?''
"Gar Malone. I'm his brother, Rolf."
His eyes widened. At first I thought it was surprise at what I'd said, but then I saw he was staring beyond me, at something behind me, possibly out in the street. Before I could move, the shooting started.
I heard the first two shots. Number one caught Lastus in the right shoulder, spun him half around like a weathervane when the wind shifts. Number two plunged like an invisible spike into the back of his head, plummeting his corpse down the stairs he'd just come up.
I didn't hear the third shot, I felt it, in the middle of my back; a blunt punch from a hard metal fist. I opened my mouth, but I had no air. I tried to stand erect, but I had no will. The punch drove me forward and I saw myself hurtle down after Lastus into the darkness below. Then a greater darkness overtook me, and I ceased to know.
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XIII
violent pain in my right hand shocked me awake. I sat up, yelling, into dusty red semi-darkness, a powerful stink, a dirt floor, and a scrawny youth with the third finger of my right hand in his mouth. He hadn't been able to get Gar's ring off me any other way, so he'd decided to bite my finger off entirely and take it with him.
I hit him, reflexively, and he fell back, more surprised than hurt, but immediately leaped at me again, his hands going for my throat. The two of us scuffled in the dust.
There was sudden surprised movement in the darkness around us, and a man's amused shout: "Hey, Alfie! This one's alive!" And then laughter from the same voice, and, "Hold him, little one! Don't let him get away!"
But he did let me get away. I flung him off, and scrambled across the floor till I hit a dirt wall. I rolled onto my back— my body was an anthology of pains, too numerous to separate into individual aches—and saw the youth leaping for me again, his eyes wide, his face rigid with terror and determination. I kicked him away with both feet and clawed in my pockets for my weapons.