At that a flash of quick fury came up into his eyes, like a goblin face appearing at a window. Then, just as quickly, he grew calm again. “You will? And why is that, Thalarne?”
“I’d rather speak with you privately about that,” she said. “Nortekku? Would you excuse us for a moment?”
She was in full command, now. Obediently Hamiruld allowed her to march him off toward the ship’s bow, and just as obediently Nortekku swung around and walked to the other side of the ship, where he could look outward into the harbor instead of having to observe their conversation from a distance.
It went on a very long while. It was one of the longest moments of his life. Then she returned, grim-faced, her jaw tightly set. Glancing across, Nortekku saw that Hamiruld was gone from the deck that he had descended once again to the pier.
“Well?” Nortekku asked.
“I told him that we had brought four living Sea-Lords back with us, and that I wanted him to have them released. I told him that I would leave him if he didn’t.”
The conditional nature of that threat left Nortekku feeling chilled. But all he said, when she did not continue, was: “And then?”
“And then he shrugged. He said, ‘You’re going to leave me anyway, aren’t you? So why should I let them go?’ And that was all. He’s going back to the hotel now. I’ll stay with you aboard the ship.”
In the night Thalarne awakened him and said, “Do you hear noises, Nortekku?”
“Noises?” He had been in the deepest of sleeps.
“Thumps. Shouts. A scream, maybe.”
Nortekku pushed himself upward through the fog that shrouded his mind. Yes, there were noises. Muffled thumpings. A panicky outcry. Another. Then deep-voiced grunting sounds that could only be the bellowings of the Sea-Lords.
“Someone’s in there with them in the tank,” she said. “Listen—that sound’s coming from a Sea-Lord. But that one isn’t.”
“Hamiruld?” Nortekku suggested, pulling the idea out of the blue. “Could it be that he’s come on board, and—”
But she was already up and on her way out of the cabin. Nortekku ran madly after her, down the corridor, up the little flight of well-worn stairs, and down the upper corridor that led toward the stern of the ship and the tank of the captive Sea-Lords. The door of their hold was open. The light was on inside.
Hamiruld, yes.
What was he doing on board? Who knew? Here to gloat over his invaluable prisoners, maybe? Or simply making sure that Thalarne and Nortekku weren’t going to release them in the night?
But he seemed to be under attack. He was at the back of the hold, up on the narrow boardwalk that ran along three sides of the room around the edges of the tank, and the four Sea-Lords stood crowding around him, jostling him roughly. They were clustered close, pushing fiercely at him with their shoulders, buffeting him from one to another, and Hamiruld, crying out in terror and pain, was trying to get out from among them. The two big males seemed to be letting the females do most of the shoving, but even they were bigger than Hamiruld, and when they thrust themselves against him he went ricocheting back like a flimsy toy.
“They’ll kill him!” Thalarne cried.
Nortekku nodded. It was hard to believe, these gentle, passive creatures wanting to kill, but surely the rough sport they were having with Hamiruld was doing great injury. And very likely they would kill anyone who tried to intervene, too. He hesitated, uncertain of what to do, looking around for something he could use to push the Sea-Lords back from him.
Then came footsteps in the corridor. Crewmen appearing, five or six of them, the night watch belatedly putting in its appearance.
Nortekku pointed. “Don’t you see what’s happening?”
They could see it, yes, and, seizing electric prods from a case mounted just inside the door, they ran into the room and headed down the boardwalk.
At the sight of them, the Sea-Lords closed in even more tightly.
Hamiruld was completely hidden by them now. Out of the center of the group came a single horrible shriek, high-pitched, cracking at the end. Then the crewmen were in the midst of the melee themselves, jabbing at the Sea-Lords with the prods, trying to push them back into the water of the tank. One of the males swung a broad flipper at the nearest crewman and knocked him on a high curving arc into the tank. The other men danced backward, then approached with their prods again. There came the hissing sound of electrical discharges—the bright flash of light at the tips of the prods—
“No!” Thalarne called. “Not maximum! Don’t use maximum!”
Everything dissolved into confusion, then—Sea-Lords and crewmen lurching back and forth on the narrow platform, prods hissing, lights flashing, Hamiruld nowhere to be seen—and then, abruptly, it was over.
Two of the crewmen were in the tank. The rest stood gasping against the wall. All four of the Sea-Lords lay sprawling on the boardwalk, motionless. The crumpled figure of Hamiruld, broken and bent, was face-down at the edge of the tank, motionless also.
Nortekku and Thalarne, who had remained in the doorway throughout the struggle, moved out along the boardwalk now. Thalarne knelt beside Hamiruld. She touched his shoulder with the tip of a finger, very gently. Then she looked up.
“Dead, I think.”
“I imagine he is,” said Nortekku. He had reached one of the Sea-Lord females. “This one is, too. And this. They all are, all four. These idiots did have their prods turned to maximum!”
“Dangerous animals,” one of the crewmen mumbled. “Gone berserk. Anything could have happened. Look, they killed that man who came from the city—”
“Yes. So they did. And they’re dead too.”
So four of them, at least, had had their wish. The Sea-Lords at rest were awesome, mysterious, calm. There was a rightness, he thought, about their death. They were creatures out of place in time, who should have died when the Great World ended. They had carried on their backs the whole burden of the world’s past ages, and now they had relinquished it at last.
Nortekku looked toward Thalarne. “That was what they wanted most, wasn’t it? To die? It’s why they attacked him. They did it deliberately, to set things in motion. So that someone would come rushing in to defend him, someone who would kill them for the sake of protecting Hamiruld. Don’t you think so?”
“I think you’re right,” Thalarne said, her voice hardly more than a whisper. She was still kneeling by Hamiruld, holding his limp arm at the wrist. Letting go of it, she rose and looked about, surveying the carnage. “What a ghastly scene, though. Dead, all of them. And Hamiruld too.”
“He shouldn’t have been in here,” said Nortekku. “He had no right to be aboard.” But that only made it all the worse, blaming Hamiruld for his own death. Some ungovernable impulse made him ask her, as he had asked her once before, “Did you love him, Thalarne?”
“I suppose I must have, once. In some way, yes, I did. After a fashion. But what difference does that make? I told him this afternoon I could never forgive him. For lying to you, for sponsoring this expedition, for agreeing to the capture of the Sea-Lords. I told him I wanted nothing more to do with him. Maybe that was why he came here tonight.”
“We’ll never know what really went on in this room, will we?”
“No,” she said. “We’ll never know.”
“Come. Let’s get out of here.”
He led her up on deck. The night air was warm, the moon was high and nearly full. The ship rocked gently against the pier. Out here it was as though none of the horror below had really happened.
He felt very strange. He had never been in the presence of violent death before. And yet, shocked and dazed as he was, he felt that what had happened had not entirely been a thing of horror, that some necessary act of liberation had taken place this night. Those four Sea-Lords would not now go onward to a humiliating life as exhibits in a zoo; and whatever forces had driven the tormented Hamiruld were at rest now also. Perhaps all of them, Hamiruld and the Sea-Lords both, had found in that terrible melee in the tank room that which they had been seeking most.