Well, I will not weary you with a recital of my disappointment. And yet — what else was there, truly, to find? Here lay the piles of boxes, some filled, some waiting to be filled. Piles of minerals, earth, and sand lay neatly ranked, the scoops and shovels — and every one with a stamped number! — regimented in their racks. I sifted the earth through my fingers, barely able to see. I had brought a globe of fireglass containing fire, with a wood-and-metal carrying box with shutters. I chanced opening one of the shutters and the firelight within flashed upon the piles of earth, on the ranked rows of silver boxes. I felt anger, and crushed it down.
With two silver boxes in a voller, you could fly.
By bringing the boxes closer together or moving them farther apart, and by changing their attitude, you could control a flier, make it rise or fall, move faster or slower.
I knew what the silver boxes contained.
Earth and air.
Air and earth.
I looked around. Dirt and air! How could they be the secret I sought?
This shed contained silver boxes for the mineral half of the controls. The next shed contained silver boxes that were empty of all but air. The faint smell of tainted malsidges, a fruit of which I am fond, made me wrinkle up my nostrils. Well, I did not think they crushed up malsidges and somehow conveyed the smell into the boxes. But they might. Then I forced myself to realize this was in reality a reconnaissance mission. I was establishing parameters of action here in Ruathytu. Soon, by listening to my rich acquaintances during the day, and following up the clues by night, I would work nearer to a solution of the mystery.
Besides being a world of great beauty, Kregen is also a world of great and sudden violence, and there was no anticlimax to this night’s work. Or, rather, the true anticlimax of my failed mission was masked by a flurry of action as four Rapa guards, carrying flaring torches, burst into the shed as I bent over an opened silver box.
The sight of them in the torchlight with their ferocious beaked faces, the war-feathers flaunting from their helmets, and the swords and shields, snapped some link in my brain. I flung myself upon them, ripping the rapier free, my left hand still cumbered by the small cube of the fireglass box. They shrieked in their high obscene Rapa way as our blades crossed glittering in the torchlight. My cloak flared out, swirling, as I spun away, slicing a Rapa beak down, avoiding the vicious thraxter slash, stuffing the box back into my breechclout.
“Apim rast! Die!” They were shrilling at me, incensed by the death of the first of them, absolutely confident they would overpower me. They were making an infernal racket, and as the blades crossed and rang and screeched, the noise grew and I knew guards would come running to reinforce these three. I dropped the next, my main-gauche slapped into my hand, and deflected the next one’s thrust. My blade gonged against a shield and I had to skip and duck away. A sword-and-shield-man against a rapier-and-main-gauche-man provide endless room for argument; but it always all boils down in the end to who is the better practitioner with the weapons he uses.
Luckily for me I was able to prove superior. The torchlight splintered from the blades as they chopped and crossed. The two remaining Rapas’ blades were shining and silver; my blade gleamed starkly dark with blood.
“Yetch!” one Rapa shrieked at me, foam flecking from that beaked face. “When we take you it will be the Heavenly Mines for you!”
“Aye!” panted the other, as he thrust up his shield and so managed to deflect my blade. “The Heavenly Mines, cramph, where you will slave until you die!”
These guards would know the Heavenly Mines by hearsay only, by their fearful reputation. There was no information to be gleaned from them. I had slaved in the Heavenly Mines already, and nothing would drag me back there, so I thought, as I twisted a slash and feinted left, then dropped and was able to thrust the rapier through the guts of number three.
Number four shrieked again, in fear this time, and turned to rush from the shed to the safety of his friends. I could hear them coming running, now, shouting the alarm.
He had seen my face. It was bearded, true, and many Rapas cannot tell one apim from another; although with experience I was growing more and more capable of differentiating between Rapa faces. He was a guard and would also be experienced. He would be questioned.
As the fool turned to cast back a frightened glance, the terchick stood out quiveringly from his eye. He collapsed against the door as those outside sought to thrust it open, and the slight delay gave me time to leap for the far end, bash a plank out, force more away from the beams, and so dart out into the darkness. Still the Twins were not up, but over the eastern horizon, She of the Veils rose, ominously lifting pale level streaks of gold and pink.
Time was running out.
The way back to the inn — an inn I had already made up my mind to leave for a more convenient billet
— lay across either one of two bridges across the Black River to the sacred quarter. I chose to return over the built-up and arcaded bridge the Ruathytuans called the Bridge of Sicce, for its massive pillars and piers supported a pressing multitude of houses and shops, with promenades running as many as three or four stories above the main street level. From this high perch many and many a poor devil cast himself or herself into the dark waters in suicide to be swept away to the Ice Floes of Sicce. These galleries and arcades and narrow roofs gave me a fine time as I fled back. My cloak flared in the wind of my passage. She of the Veils rose clear of the jumbled horizon and shone benignly down as I scampered across the rooftops and jumped down from the ledges, level to level, passing across the river and so plunging back into the sacred quarter. Here I could leap from balcony to balcony, hang from ledges, crawl along a razor-backed gable, cling to a chimney, and hurl myself across the gulf of an alley far below. I do not think any eyes spied me as I cavorted across the tiles of sleeping Ruathytu. What kind of devilish figure, half beast, half gargoyle, I created, hurdling the rooftops, I did not know. I slid down the roof of my inn, plunged to the balcony of my room, and crept stealthily in by the window. I employed a couple of harmless Hamalian servants, and they were not disturbed in the next room. As I turned for a last look at this alien sky I saw She of the Veils floating clear. And against that luminous golden-pink orb floated a long bank of jagged black cloud like a reflection of the city below.
Chapter Ten
The only result of the night’s work that affected me could as well be summed up in the words of young Chido ham Thafey. “He must have been a man,” said Chido. “For the fellow left a knife behind him. He isn’t the devil the guards would have us believe, by Krun, he isn’t!”