Next he looked in on the star man, who lay curled in a ball, staring as unseeingly as if he’d been blinded too.
The weight from the big wall clock hung down about three decimeters, and he wound it back up. After midnight. A mental glance into the guard quarters found them all asleep, with no dreams worth watching. Briefly he considered waking them for an attack drill, but no, the man who really needed to be alert was the guard at the upper door. Yitzhak walked to the lower door and pulled the lever. When it had raised he walked thoughtfully up the three long flights of stairs. He had never before checked the upper door guard-that was the responsibility of the corridor patrol. But it was his bones if the man was caught off guard and someone else got hold of the speaker tube and tricked his way in.
For a moment he stood at the door, mind screened, hand on the latch lever, then threw it and pulled. The door swung open abruptly and the guard outside leaped back from it, fright in his eyes and ready sword in hand. The two orcs stared at each other, the guard recognizing the captain but uncertain and still ready to run him through. Standard procedure was to signal from below and inform him through the speaking tube.
What am I doing? Yitzhak thought suddenly. “You’re awake I see,” he said. “Good thing. If I ever catch you sleeping here… ”
The guard leaked no thought, but his eyes… Yitzhak screened his embarrassment as best he could. Ahmed was dead, and no one else would engineer a breakout! What had he been thinking of? He’d made a fool of himself to the door guard!
Engaging the lock behind him, Yitzhak clopped back down the stairs. He needed a drink. The escape of a few nights ago, and the murder of the watch, must have thrust him deeper than he’d realized. The door guard thought he was a fool. He’d have to shut the dog’s mouth before he spread the tale around. Maybe Hassan the Shark… Hassan owed him a favor, and he’d enjoy paying it in such a way.
By the time Yitzhak had returned to have his wine and make his plans, Nils was well inside the air duct that opened into the guard room wall. He didn’t know where it led, except out of the dungeon. And there’d been the problem of getting into it. He’d had to jump from the heavy table at an opening he could see only through Ilse’s psychic sight, and he wasn’t coordinated to operate well that way. Then, with only a hand-hold to start with, he’d had to pull his bulky body into the small opening.
Inside he wriggled six meters to where it ended in a cross duct, then paused to rest. The ordeal of pain and shock and the demands of healing had weakened him. There Ilse whispered in his mind. While he’d been crawling, she had scouted the ventilator system to its roof opening. He needed to turn left. In such cramped space, that took effort. Ilse was gone again, back to her body; there had been a sense of urgency in her.
He pulled himself along, feeling without eyes the utter blackness. Before long the duct opened into a vertical shaft about a meter square. He stood up in it, leaned his upper back against one side, placed his bare feet against the other, and began working his way upward.
Ilse was back. “I can only stay for a moment,” she thought to him. “I’m in labor and it’s coming fast. I… ” She was gone, drawn by the pain in her body.
Fifteen grueling meters higher, his shoulders felt the edge of another side duct entering the shaft; he slid into it and rested. After several minutes he continued upward, stopping in yet another duct not far above.
Ilse was with him again. “Rest well here,” she told him. “There won’t be another chance and you have a long way to climb. The top is in a roof garden. When you get out, circle the shaft-it’s like a chimney-keeping one hand on it and reaching out low with the other. You’ll find a low-walled thing of soil there, with thick bushes growing in it. Crawl beneath the bushes and hide. I’ll try to have someone come down and get you.”
He was alone again. Wriggling back into the shaft, he started climbing. Warm air moved softly upward around his sweating body. His shoulders soon were raw from rubbing on rough dry stone; his legs and back were tired again. It was far. The dungeon was deep underground and the roofs high. He could not rest braced within the shaft; it would take strength to stay in place, draining his energy without progress. His sense of time blurred as he labored upward; there was only long concentration, and pain, and growing fatigue. Very largely he could put himself outside the pain, but exhaustion progressively slowed him.
At length he had to stop. There was no way to tell how much farther it was. With an effort of will he gathered himself, then jacked himself higher, half a meter, a meter.
And smelled fresh air! In moments his back-pressed head reached an opening.
The shaft was capped and the side-ports small. He reached an arm out, and then the other, exhaling and pushing powerfully with his legs to force his chest through. After pausing for a moment on the small of his back, he grasped the cap of the shaft, pulled, wriggled, and tumbled to the roof. For scant seconds he lay there, greasy with sweat, then turned over and crouched. There was no watchfulness nearby-no mind of any kind except for insects and sleeping birds. The planter was in front of him, fragrant with blossoms, and after standing for a moment, Nils crawled beneath its cool-leaved shrubs, to lay on the dry-surfaced soil.
A part of him watched while he slept.
The hull was on one-way transparent and Ram reached out to the instrument panel. Although it was against safety regulations, he pressed the key that slid the door open, to feel the air.
The City swung closer beneath, its rows of buildings defined by black shadow and the weak light of a slender, newly-risen moon. This was night on a planet, not the perpetual blackness of space, and it felt rich and beautiful, with an unreal reality that tingled. There were people down there, too, breathing, sleeping, dreaming-people whose existence was not quite real to him.
The whole scene felt unreal; he was acting in a dream fantasy at the request of his own hostage. Perhaps she had hypnotized him; the story she’d told between contractions sounded like sheerest lunacy. Though Celia had urged him, she hadn’t needed to. This was action, something to do about something, something to accomplish after the waiting and frustration.
He maneuvered by thin moonlight rather than radar. The palace was easy to find, its tower and multiple roofs rising well above the buildings around. The cover of night wouldn’t last long; it might be he could see a suggestion of dawn already, a possible lightness on the northeastern horizon. And it wouldn’t do to be seen, to be associated with the escape. They still had hostages down there, unless they were dead.
Their spiral had brought them down until the tower loomed above them as they circled. Ram leveled off, gave the controls to his copilot, and crouched in the door. How in the world do you find a man hiding in the night beneath a bush on one of a multiplicity of roof gardens? A man that can’t see you?
“Nils! Nils Jarnhann!” he called with his mind. Penthouses, planters, small trees and shadowed shrubs swung silently beneath, and the man at the controls took her lower while Ram’s eyes strained to see. “Nils! Nils Jarnhann!”
“Here!” The answering thought was faint but distinct.
Ram commanded the copilot and they stopped, locked on a gravitic vector.
“Where?”
“Here!”
This time Ram was ready for the answer, and his psi-sense gave him a bearing on the silent call. He moved to the controls himself, silently slid Beta into position twenty meters above a roof, then gave them up again. From the door he saw a figure step out of shadow.
“I see him,” he said quietly, and closed the switch that lowered the short flight of landing steps. “There! See? Take her down slowly until I say stop.”
The barbarian stood like a statue, face aimed at the open door as the Beta settled. Ram knew the man was orienting himself through his eyes.