At last I came to the squat octagonal building occupied by the Procurator of Perris.
It was indifferently guarded. The invaders appeared confident that we were incapable of mounting a counter-assault against them, and quite likely they were right; a planet which can be conquered between darkness and dawn is not going to launch a plausible resistance afterwards. Around the building rose the pale glow of a protective scanner. There was a tingle of ozone in the air. In the wide plaza across the way, Merchants were setting up their market for the morning; I saw barrels of spices being unloaded by brawny Servitors, and dark sausages carried by files of neuters. I stepped through the scanner beam and an invader emerged to challenge me.
I explained that I carried urgent news for Manrule Seven, and in short order, with amazingly little consultation of intermediaries, I was ushered into the Procurator’s presence.
The invader had furnished his office simply but in good style. It was decked entirely with Earthmade objects: a drapery of Afreek weave, two alabaster pots from ancient Agupt, a marble statuette that might have been early Roumish, and a dark Talyan vase in which a few wilting deathflowers languished. When I entered, he seemed preoccupied with several message-cubes; as I had heard, the invaders did most of their work in the dark hours, and it did not surprise me to find him so busy now. After a moment he looked up and said, “What is it, old man? What’s this about a fugitive Dominator?”
“The Prince of Roum,” I said. “I know of his location.”
At once his cold eyes sparkled with interest. He ran his many-fingered hands across his desk, on which were mounted the emblems of several of our guilds, Transporters and Rememberers and Defenders and Clowns, among others. “Go on,” he said.
“The Prince is in this city. He is in a specific place and has no way of escaping from it.”
“And you are here to inform me of his location?*
“No,” I said. “I’m here to buy his liberty.”
Manrule Seven seemed perplexed. “There are times when you humans baffle me. You say you’ve captured this runaway Dominator, and I assume that you want to sell him to us, but you say you want to buy him. Why bother coming to us? Is this a joke?”
“Will you permit an explanation?”
He brooded into the mirrored top of his desk while I told him in a compressed way of my journey from Roum with the blinded Prince, of our arrival at the Hall of Rememberers, of Prince Enric’s seduction of Olmayne, and of Elegro’s petty, fuming desire for vengeance. I made it clear that I had come to the invaders only under duress and that it was not my intention to betray the Prince into their hands. Then I said, “I realize that all Dominators are forfeit to you. Yet this one has already paid a high price for his freedom. I ask you to notify the Rememberers that the Prince of Roum is under amnesty, and to permit him to continue on as a Pilgrim to Jorslem. In that way Elegro will lose power over him.”
“What is it that you offer us,” asked Manrule Seven, “in return for this amnesty for your Prince?”
“I have done research in the memory tanks of the Rememberers.”
“And?”
“I have found that for which you people have been seeking.”
Manrule Seven studied me with care. “How would you have any idea of what we seek?”
“There is in the deepest part of the Hall of Rememberers,” I said quietly, “an image recording of the compound in which your kidnaped ancestors lived while they were prisoners on Earth. It shows their sufferings in poignant detail. It is a superb justification for the conquest of Earth by H362.”
“Impossiblel There’s no such document!”
From the intensity of the invader’s reaction, I knew that I had stung him in the vulnerable place.
He went on, “We’ve searched your files thoroughly. There’s only one recording of compound life, and it doesn’t show our people. It shows a nonhumanoid pyramid-shaped race, probably from one of the Anchor worlds.”
“I have seen that one,” I told him. “There are others. I spent many hours searching for them, out of hunger to know of our past injustices.”
“The indexes—”
“—are sometimes incomplete. I found this recording only by accident. The Rememberers themselves have no idea it’s there. I’ll lead you to it—if you agree to leave the Prince of Roum unmolested.”
The Procurator was silent a moment. At length he said, “You puzzle me. I am unable to make out if you are a scoundrel or a man of the highest virtue.”
“I know where true loyalty lies.”
“To betray the secrets of your guild, though—”
“I am no Rememberer, only an apprentice, formerly a Watcher. I would not have you harm the Prince at the wish of a cuckolded fool. The Prince is in his hands; only you can obtain his release now. And so I must offer you this document.”
“Which the Rememberers have carefully deleted from their indexes, so it will not fall into our hands.”
“Which the Rememberers have carelessly misplaced and forgotten.”
“I doubt it,” said Manrule Seven. “They are not careless folk. They hid that recording; and by giving it to us, are you not betraying all your world? Making yourself a collaborator with the hated enemy?”
I shrugged. “I am interested in having the Prince of Roum made free. Other means and ends are of no concern to me. The location of the document is yours in exchange for the grant of amnesty.”
The invader displayed what might have been his equivalent of a smile. “It is not in our best interests to allow members of the former guild of Dominators to remain at large. Your position is precarious, do you see? I could extract the document’s location from you by force—and still have the Prince as well.”
“So you could,” I agreed. “I take that risk. I assume a certain basic honor among people who came to avenge an ancient crime. I am in your power, and the whereabouts of the document is in my mind, yours for the picking.”
Now he laughed in an unmistakable show of good humor.
“Wait one moment,” he said. He spoke a few words of his own language into an amber communication device, and shortly a second member of his species entered the office. I recognized him instantly, although he was shorn of some of the flamboyant disguise he had worn when he traveled with me as Gormon, the supposed Changeling. He offered the ambivalent smile of his kind and said, “I greet you, Watcher.”
“And I greet you, Gormon.”
“My name now is Victorious Thirteen.”
“I now am called Tomis of the Rememberers,” I said.
Manrule Seven remarked, “When did you two become such fast friends?”
“In the time of the conquest,” said Victorious Thirteen. “While performing my duties as an advance scout, I encountered this man in Talya and journeyed with him to Roum. But we were companions, in truth, and not friends.”
I trembled. “Where is the Flier Avluela?”
“In Pars, I believe,” he said offhandedly. “She spoke of returning to Hind, to the place of her people.”
“You loved her only a short while, then?”
“We were more companions than lovers,” said the invader. “It was a passing thing for us.”
“For you, maybe,” I said.