“If! If! If!” Vaskos’ bloodshot eyes blazed his ill-controlled wrath and he slammed his callused palm onto the desktop. “Meanwhile, this rebel bastard of a woman killer goes his merry, bloody way making fools out of me and the entire Confederation garrison. Sun blast the swine! Why can’t we catch him?”
They very nearly had on two occasions, and Captain Danos still became pale and weak-kneed whenever he thought of how narrow had been his two escapes. And what made the terrible chances he was daring so meaningless was the awful fact that he no longer even enjoyed himself. Had not since the devil-spawn vahrohnos had demonstrated that, though he might be Danos’ prisoner, still was he the captain’s master.
Always had it been the cries of his victims—the moans, the whimpering pleas for mercy and, especially, the screams of agony—which had aroused Danos’ sexual lusts. But now, with the streets above his well-concealed cellar aswarm with armed and alert men, he was afraid to allow any avoidable noise from his victims. And victims were becoming harder and harder to come by. Only his thorough knowledge of Vawnpolis and its secret ways had provided him with the last half-dozen women and with a means of getting them onto that bloodstained cellar floor under the ruined mansion. And he knew with utter certainty that it was but a matter of time—possibly a rather short time—until one of the roving parties chanced upon an arm of that warren of ancient tunnels.
Quite by accident, he had stumbled into the subterranean ways during the siege when an overshot catapult stone had demolished some of the charred timbers and fire-blackened bricks of the once splendid mansion above his chamber of horrors. These were quite unlike the great tunnels under Morguhnpolis, being no more than six feet high and five wide, unpaved and shored up by old, rotting timbers. The main passage ran from east to south on a gradual curve, ending at each extremity against the damp stones of the city walls, and it was unblocked from one end to the other. Such was not true of many of the branch passages. Danos had found that many had collapsed and others seemed so close to collapse that he had feared to enter them.
But that had been before the increasing security within the city and the steady pressure from the satanic vahrohnos had so complicated his existence. Now he regularly trod fearfully beneath sagging, wormy timbers and even wriggled through partially blocked passages in search of access to fresh prey. The arm leading to the Citadel, though not paved, was at least walled and shored with granite, probably because of the immense weight of masonry above it. It debouched into a disused subcellar room, only four levels below the prison corridor off which was located the vahrohnos” cell, which fact was the sole reason, aside from inordinate amounts of pure luck, that Danos had not long since been apprehended.
Both of his close escapes had occurred when Danos was returning to the Citadel in the early morning. If, as in the old days, he had come back smeared from head to foot with the blood of his night’s victim, the jig would have been up. But Danos had begun to take precautions to minimize the possibility of discovery and, having come across a small, spring-fed cistern in the main passage, he always thoroughly cleansed himself, his armor and his clothing after each of his forays.
No, what had most frightened him about the encounters with Citadel guards had been that, on each occasion, he had been carrying back the “delicacies” demanded by the vahrohnos. And had the guards ever chosen to examine the two sealed jars, there would have been no possible way that Captain Danos could have explained why one was brimful of fresh blood, while the other contained a whole human liver, still warm.
It had been after that second episode in the lower corridors that he had finally convinced the mad vahrohnos that he could no longer take the risk of carrying the “delicacies” into the Citadel.
After an impossibly long moment of glowering at his warder from eyes deep-sunk in his ruined face, Myros of Deskati had smiled, albeit wolfishly. “It is in moments of extreme danger that breeding becomes apparent, and you have no trace of breeding, you lowborn swine. But I had been expecting this funk of yours, soon or late, and I have devised an alternate plan, one which will give you far less to fear… well, from the guards, anyway.”
Since Vaskos had refused to alter or lessen his long, work-filled hours, Ahlee had done what he felt to be both professional duty and the duty of a friend; he had been helping the harried commander with the paperwork, of nights. Nor was this a difficult undertaking for the Zahrtohguhn, for, combined with a high degree of intelligence and both a written and verbal command of most dialects of Mehrikan, Ahlee had a natural talent for and formal training in mindspeak so that he could resolve any questions by dipping into Vaskos’ deliberately unshielded mind.
So it was, on an evening six days after his last autopsy, that a breathless, red-faced sergeant found them both together in Vaskos’ bright-lit office a couple of hours after midnight.
The sergeant was not an ex-rebel but rather a grizzled Confederation Regular, and he behaved accordingly despite his agitation—this quite obvious to Ahlee’s trained eye. Upon being bidden to enter, he stalked stiffly across the room, his well-oiled armor clanking, his helm cradled in the crook of his shield arm. At the halt, he wheeled precisely to face the desk and, standing rigid as a post, slammed fist against breast in formal military salute.
Glancing up from under his bushy salt-and-pepper brows, Vaskos returned the salute. “Yes, sergeant? You have a report?”
In a firm, emotionless voice, the noncom replied, “My lord strahteegos, I be Company Sergeant Dahbzuhn of Number Three Company, Fourteenth Regiment, seconded to your lordship’s command and now serving under Lieutenant Gahloopohlos. The noble lieutenant bids me request your lordship’s presence in the north quarter of the city. And it please your lordship, immediately.”
The lieutenant was tall but slender, his dark hair and olive complexion attesting to his Ehleen antecedents. His were no rolling, bulging muscles, but he moved with an assurance and grace which Ahlee suspected emanated from considerable wiry strength. The young man was soft-voiced and respectful to his superior but with no trace of fawning.
“My lord strahteegos, knowing how intense be your interest in these murders, I took the liberty of sending for you. This may well be a discovery of importance.”
The one-eyed man, summoned from a small knot of fellow civilians, completed his tale a few minutes later. “So, like I a’ready done told the lieutenant, Lord Vaskos, after I seen the man knock Moynah in the head and put her over his shoulder, I follered him, ‘th out him seeing me, o’course; I ain’t brave, ‘specially as I seen he had a big dirk.
“I seen him carry her into this here empty house, then I run back and got these here other fellers together and while one feller went to look for the p’trol, we got us some torches and clubs and a few knives and went to save her. But, when we got to the house, won’t nary a sign of either one of ‘em, ‘cept just a little bit of blood just inside the door and a little more on the steps going down to the basement, was all. Then, ‘bout that time, the lieutenant and the p’trol got here.”
With a brusque nod of thanks to the old man, Vaskos turned on the junior officer. “It comes to my mind that the killer, if such it was, knew that he was being followed and ducked into the house until he was certain that the observer had gone. Could that be possible, lieutenant?”
With a typically Ehleenic shrug, Gahloopohlos answered, “Highly possible, lord strahteegos. And I considered it, too, especially when my men found no living creature in the house … and we searched it from top to bottom. But that was before we chanced across what I wish to now show your lordship.”