“It’s—it’s a girl,” the female guard said in wonder. Her companion nodded and called out, “Who are you? What are you doing here?” His voice possessed the confidence of authority; he was secure that he had the power to meet challenges.
The tiny figure, several meters away, seemed to …start, then silently slipped behind the large rock near the cave opening, vanishing from view.
“What kind of children’s trick is this?” the man muttered, irritated.
The other was not so easily lulled. “Take it easy. It could be a trap of some kind. Remember, somebody tipped him off to run. Let’s just give her a jolt.”
“Aw, you’re too nervous,” the man griped, but he was still unsure enough not to advance.
’There. That should have fixed her,” the woman said confidently.
“I don’t hear any groaning,” the man responded, becoming a little nervous himself now. “Did you get her?”
“I’m sure I did,” she assured him. “Come on. Somebody that little probably passed out.”
They advanced cautiously, turned behind the rock, and saw the girl, apparently unconscious, stiff and flat against the rock.
“Jeez, Marl, what’d you do to her?” the man asked, concerned. “She looks like she’s dead.”
They both approached the still form against the rock, no longer cautious. When their heads were but inches apart I leaped with a yell from the other side of the rock, and before either could recover from the freeze surprise brings, I brought their two heads together as hard as I could, knocking them down with my spring as I did so.
I hadn’t done that sort of thing that way since practicing with androids in training, but by God, it worked. Tuning was the key, I told myself, feeling satisfied. Timing and a little knowledge of the weaknesses in human psyches.
The man was dead, I saw. The woman seemed to be still alive, but was bleeding from the scalp. Quickly and quietly I snapped her neck and then dragged both of them into the cave and hid them as securely as I could. I wanted no alarms now, and the uncertainty over their disappearance, when it was discovered, would still raise alarms in the wrong places.
Artur, after all, was charged with Castle security and would not be sure whether the two had been surprised by someone coming out or by someone going in. I counted on that, and on the general feeling these people would have that someone with the voluntary powers of a mere pawn could have neutralized and physically killed two trained supervisors.
I wondered idly why the hell I hadn’t done that to Kronlon long ago. This damned world had sapped my self-confidence; I was only now feeling like myself again.
Picking up Ti for speed’s sake, I made my way out of the Castle and down into the valley below.
Now for the first time the map Intelligence had arranged to be imprinted in my head came in handy. Wild areas, not under any knight or other administrative control—jungle and forest and mountains and swamp—lay as buffers between the keeps.
The Keep itself was easy to navigate in the darkness. The villagers were mostly bedding down for the night or relaxing after eating, so no one would be in the fields except for herdsmen, who could easily be bypassed.
Zeis was a bowl-like valley on three sides and ran up against a swampy and somewhat unhealthy lake on the fourth. The lake was definitely out—I had no desire to navigate through unknown water in daylight, let alone in darkness. Who knew what quagmires and hostile creatures were about? That meant going over or through the mountains, which was almost as bad. Naked, without tools, and carrying Ti along, I would be restricted to well-worn trails that were probably staked out by Artur’s boys.
The map in my head told me I had at least a six-hundred-meter climb ahead Of me, at which point I’d have to descend almost that far to make a forest on the other side. Unfortunately, though the map included both physical and political information, it was no road map. I would have to ferret out the trails myself, and I couldn’t be too choosy about the ones I found, either.
It was easy to find the trails, although none looked particularly well-worn. The network of pathways in the Keep all led to them in the end, of course. A number of tunes I’d had to flatten when great flying besils with mounted riders flew past. Their buzzing sounded like a great series of motors in operation, but they were too large and cumbersome to be more than a deterrent patrol. To spot anybody while atop those creatures would take a lot of luck indeed. But if someone on the ground sounded an alarm, they’d be on me in a moment, and then I’d be totally defenseless.
If the trail I finally made was typical, at least I knew I wouldn’t have problems mountain climbing. Obviously designed for cart traffic, it was wide, with a great many broad switchbacks. Those switchbacks, though, would make anyone on the path plainly obvious to guards further up, and I worried a little about this. After all, this wasn’t like escaping from some armed force; these adversaries merely had to see you to knock you off the path with a strong glance.
All I could do was start up the trail as rapidly and cautiously as possible and then trust to a little luck and the fact that the hunt would still be a day stale at this point. By this point I had Ti clinging to me piggyback and was certain that her grip would never falter.
I was about a quarter of the way up and feeling pretty confident when I heard voices below. I froze, listening, but they were still far below me and, from what I could determine, on foot. The sounds of voices carried along here but with little definition, so I really couldn’t tell who they were—as if I needed to know who’d be walking a trail like this in the dark so late in the evening.
After deciding that my best course was simply to keep ahead of them, I resumed my climb. A few minutes later I realized I was also hearing other voices from the trail. These sounded like the voices of two women, whereas those below me had both definitely been male—of that I was certain. I now realized that Artur had done the most obvious thing under the conditions Lilith and the geography of the Keep imposed on him. At intervals, probably somewhat at random, one team would start down the trail. A little later, another would start up, and they would cross somewhere in between. On a trail like this anybody else would be caught in between.
I tried to judge how far away from me the pair coming down were. It was almost impossible. So I had to take the chance that perhaps they were far enough up to allow me to make the edge of the accumulating fog that always shrouded the sky of Zeis Keep because of the inversion caused by the mountain ring. The fog had been thickening and lowering as the night wore on. I hurried to reach the almost tangible blanket of gray I could see perhaps two turns of the trail ahead of me, the blanket that currently masked me from the descenders’ view as they were masked from mine.
Without Ti I would have been more agile, but she had become something of a crusade, an obligation to me now. I was determined that she would at least awaken and be whole once again. She no longer weighed nothing. I was becoming tired, and forty-two kilos was beginning to have a real effect on my back and neck muscles.
I had only one more switchback to go until I reached the edge of the cloud cover, but I was to be denied it, I now realized. The sound of the women’s voices was coming in quite clear and I could see an eerie, disembodied glow from a yellow lantern one of them was obviously carrying. I looked around for a place to hide, but the trail had been cut into sheer bedrock, the only thing at its outer edge except air and a long, long hard fall was a small sculpted rim that obviously served to keep wheeled carts from slipping over.
I had no time and no choice: the rim would have to do. I was about to see just how strong and able this Cal Tremon body was, I thought sourly.