A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows

II

Immediately after the two Navy yeomen who brought Kossara to the slave depot had signed her over to its manager and departed, he told her: “Hold out your left arm.” Dazed—for she had been whisked from the ship within an hour of landing on Terra, and the speed of the aircar had blurred the enormousness of Archopolis—she obeyed. He glanced expertly at her wrist and, from a drawer, selected a bracelet of white metal, some three centimeters broad and a few millimeters thick. Hinged, it locked together with a click. She stared at the thing. A couple of sensor spots and a niello of letters and numbers were its only distinctions. It circled her arm snugly though not uncomfortably.

“The law requires slaves to wear this,” the manager explained in a bored tone. He was a pudgy, faintly greasy-looking middle-aged person in whose face dwelt shrewdness.

That must be on Terra, trickled through Kossara’s mind. Other places seem to have other ways. And on Dennitza we keep no slaves …

“It’s powered by body heat and maintains an audiovisual link to a global monitor net,” the voice went on. “If the computers notice anything suspicious—including, of course, any tampering with the bracelet—they call a human operator. He can stop you in your tracks by a signal.” The man pointed to a switch on his desk. “This gives the same signal.”

He pressed. Pain burned like lightning, through flesh, bone, marrow, until nothing was except pain. Kossara fell to her knees. She never knew if she screamed or if her throat had jammed shut.

He lifted his hand and the anguish was gone. Kossara crouched shaking and weeping. Dimly she heard: “That was five seconds’ worth. Direct nerve stim from the bracelet, triggers a center in the brain. Harmless for periods of less than a minute, if you haven’t got a weak heart or something. Do you understand you’d better be a good girl? All right, on your feet.”

As she swayed erect, the shudders slowly leaving her, he smirked and muttered, “You know, you’re a looker. Exotic; none of this standardized biosculp format. I’d be tempted to bid on you myself, except the price is sure to go out of my reach. Well … hold still.”

He did no more than feel and nuzzle. She endured, thinking that probably soon she could take a long, long, long hot shower. But when a guard had conducted her to the women’s section, she found the water was cold and rationed. The dormitory gaped huge, echoing, little inside it other than bunks and inmates. The mess was equally barren, the food adequate but tasteless. Some twenty prisoners were present. They received her kindly enough, with a curiosity that sharpened when they discovered she was from a distant planet and this was her first time on Terra. Exhausted, she begged off saying much and tumbled into a haunted sleep.

The next morning she got a humiliatingly thorough medical examination. A psychotech studied the dossier on her which Naval Intelligence had supplied, asked a few questions, and signed a form. She got the impression he would have liked to inquire further—why had she rebelled?—but a Secret classification on her record scared him off. Or else (because whoever bought her would doubtless talk to her about it) he knew from his study how chaotic and broken her memories of the episode were, since the hypnoprobing on Diomedes.

That evening she couldn’t escape conversation in the dormitory. The women clustered around and chattered. They were from Terra, Luna, and Venus. With a single exception, they had been sentenced to limited terms of enslavement for crimes such as repeated theft or dangerous negligence, and were not very bright or especially comely.

“I don’t suppose anybody’ll bid on me,” lamented one. “Hard labor for the government, then.”

“I don’t understand,” said Kossara. Her soft Dennitzan accent intrigued them. “Why? I mean, when you have a worldful of machines, every kind of robot—why slaves? How can it … how can it pay?”

The exceptional woman, who was handsome in a haggard fashion, answered. “What else would you do with the wicked? Kill them, even for tiny things? Give them costly psychocorrection? Lock them away at public expense, useless to themselves and everybody else? No, let them work. Let the Imperium get some money from selling them the first time, if it can.”

Does she talk like that because she’s afraid of her bracelet? Kossara wondered. Surely, oh, surely we can complain a little among ourselves! “What can we do that a machine can’t do better?” she asked.

“Personal services,” the woman said. “Many kinds. Or … well, economics. Often a slave is less efficient than a machine, but needs less capital investment.”

“You sound educated,” Kossara remarked.

The woman sighed. “I was, once. Till I killed my husband. That meant a life term like yours, dear. To be quite safe, my buyer did pay to have my mind corrected.” A sort of energy blossomed in look and tone. “How grateful I am! I was a murderess, do you hear, a murderess. I took it on myself to decide another human being wasn’t fit to live. Now I know—” She seized Kossara’s hands. “Ask them to correct you too. You committed treason, didn’t you say? Beg them to wash you clean!”

The rest edged away. Brain-channeled, Kossara knew. A crawling went under her skin. “Wh-why are you here?” she stammered. “If you were bought—”

“He grew tired of me and sold me back. I’ll always long for him … but he had the perfect right, of course.” The woman drew nearer. “I like you, Kossara,” she whispered. “I do hope we’ll go to the same place.”

“Place?”

“Oh, somebody rich may take you for a while. Likelier, though, a brothel—”

Kossara yanked free and ran. She didn’t quite reach a toilet before she vomited. They made her clean the floor. Afterward, when they insisted on circling close and talking and talking, she screamed at them to leave her alone, then enforced it with a couple of skilled blows. No punishment followed. It was dreadful to know that a half-aware electronic brain watched every pulsebeat of her existence, and no doubt occasionally a bored human supervisor examined her screen at random. But seemingly the guardians didn’t mind a fight, if no property was damaged. She sought her bunk and curled up into herself.

Next morning a matron came for her, took a critical look, and nodded. “You’ll do,” she said. “Swallow this.” She held forth a pill.

“What’s that?” Kossara crouched back.

“A euphoriac. You want to be pretty for the camera, don’t you? Go on, swallow.” Remembering the alternative, Kossara obeyed.

As she accompanied the matron down the hall, waves of comfort passed through her, higher at each tide. It was like being drunk, no, not drunk, for she had her full senses and command of her body … like having savored a few glasses with Mihail, after they had danced, and the violins playing yet … like having Mihail here, alive again.

Almost cheerfully, in the recording room she doffed her gray issue gown, went through the paces and said the phrases designed to show her off, as instructed. She barely heard the running commentary:

“Kossara Vymezal [mispronounced, but a phonetic spell-out followed], human female, age twenty-five, virgin, athletic, health and intelligence excellent, education good though provincial. Spirited, but ought to learn subordination in short order without radical measures. Life sentence for treason, conspiracy to promote and aid rebellion. Suffers from hostility to the Imperium and some disorientation due to hypnoprobing. Neither handicap affects her wits or basic emotional stability. Her behavior on the voyage here was cold but acceptable.

“She was born on the planet Dennitza, Zoria III in the Taurian Sector. [A string of numbers] Her family is well placed, father being a district administrator. [Why no mention of the fact Mother was a sister of Bodin Miyatovich, Gospodar and sector governor? O Uncle, Uncle … ] As is the rule there, she received military training and served a hitch in the armed forces. She has a degree in xenology. Having done field work on planets near home, several months ago she went to Diomedes [a string of numbers]—quite remote, her research merely a disguise. Most of the report on her has not been made available to us; and as said, she herself is confused and largely amnesiac about this period. Her main purpose was to help instigate a revolt. Before much harm was done, she was detected, arrested, interrogated, and sentenced by court-martial. There being little demand for slaves in that region, and a courier ship returning directly to Terra, she was brought along.

“We rate her unlikely to be dangerous, given the usual precautions, and attractive both physically and personally—”

The camera projected back the holograms it had taken, for its operator’s inspection, and Kossara looked upon her image. She saw a big young woman, 177 centimeters tall, a bit small in the bosom but robust in shoulders, hips, and long free-striding legs, skin ivory-clear save for a few freckles and the remnant of a tan. The face was wide, high in the cheekbones, snub in the nose, full in the mouth, strong in chin and jawline. Large blue-green eyes stood well apart beneath dark brows and reddish-brown bangs; that hair was cropped below the ears in the manner of both sexes on Dennitza. When she spoke, her voice was husky.

“—will be sullen unless drugged, but given the right training and conditions, ought to develop a high sexual capacity. A private owner may find that kindness will in due course make her loyal and responsive—”

Kossara slipped dreamily away from the words, the room, Terra … the whole way home. To Mihail? No, she couldn’t quite raise him from the dust between the stars—even now, she dared not. But, oh, just a few years ago, she and Trohdwyr …

{She had a vacation from her studies at the Shkola plus a furlough from her ground defense unit in the Narodna Voyska. Ordinarily she would have spent as much of this time as he could spare with her betrothed. But a space force had been detected within a few light-years of the Zorian System which might intend action on behalf of some other claimant to the Imperium than Hans Molitor whom the Gospodar supported, or might use such partisanship as an excuse for brigandage. Therefore Bodin Miyatovich led some of the Dennitzan fleet out to warn off the strangers, and if necessary fight them off. Mihail Svetich, engineer on a Meteor-class torpedo craft, had kissed Kossara farewell.

Rather than fret idle in Zorkagrad, she flitted to her parents’ home. Danilo Vymezal, voivode of the Dubina Dolyina, was head of council, chief magistrate, and military commander throughout a majestic country at the northern rim of the Kazan. Soon after she reached the estate, Kossara said she wished for a long hunt. Her father regarded her for a moment before he nodded. “That will do you good,” he said. “Who would you like for a partner? Trohdwyr?”

She had unthinkingly supposed she would go alone. But of course he was right; only fools went by themselves so far into wilderness that no radio relay could pass on a distress call from a pocket transceiver. The old zmay was welcome company, not least because he knew when to be silent.

They took an aircar to a meadow on the unpeopled western slope and set forth afoot. The days and nights, the leagues and heights, wind, rain, sun, struggle, and sleep were elixir. More than once she had a clear shot at a soaring orlik or a bull yelen poised on a crag, and forbore; those wings or those horns were too splendid across the sky. But at last it was sweet fire in the blood to stand before a charging dyavo, feel the rifle surge back against her shoulder, see fangs and claws fall down within a meter of her.

Trohdwyr reproved: “You were reckless, Dama.”

“He came at me from his den,” Kossara retorted.

“After you saw the entrance and took care to make much noise in the bushes. Deny it not. I have known you longer than your own memory runs. You learned to walk by clinging to my tail for safety. If I lose you now, your father will dismiss me from his service, and where then shall a poor lorn dodderer go? Back to his birth village to become a fisher again, after these many years? Have mercy, Dama.”

She chuckled. They set about making camp. This was high in the bowl of the Kazan, where that huge crater bit an arc from the Vysochina. The view could not have been imagined by anyone who had not seen it, save God before He willed it.

Though treeless, the site bore a dense purple sward of mahovina, springy underfoot and spicy to smell, studded by white and gold wildflowers; and a nearby canebrake rustled in the breeze. Eastward the ringwall sloped down to timberline. Beyond, yellow beams of evening fell on a bluish mistiness of forest, as far as sight could reach, cloven by a river which gleamed like a drawn blade. Westward, not far hence, the rim stood shadowy-sharp athwart rough Vysochina hills. Behind them the snowpeaks of the Planina Byelogorski lifted sungold whiteness into an absolute azure. The purity of sky was not marred by a remote northward thread of smoke from Vulkana Zemlya.

The air grew cold soon after the sun went behind the mountains, cold as the brook which bubbled iron-tasting from a cleft in the crater’s lip. Kossara hunched into her jacket, squatted down, held palms forth to the fire. Her breath drifted white through the dusk that rose from the lowlands.

Before he put their meat on a spit above coals and dancing flamelets, Trohdwyr drew a sign and spoke a few words of Eriau. Kossara knew them well: “Aferdhi of the Deeps, Blyn of the Winds, Haawan who lairs on the reefs, by this be held afar and trouble us not in our rest.” Hundreds of kilometers and a long lifetime from the Black Ocean, he remained an old-fashioned pagan ychan. Early in her teens, eager in her faith, Kossara had learned it was no use trying to make an Orthochristian of him.

Surely the Pantocrator didn’t mind much, and would receive his dear battered soul into Heaven at the last.

She had never thought of him as a zmay. Not that the word had any particularly bad overtones. Maybe once it had been a touch contemptuous, four hundred years ago when the first immigrants arrived from Merseia; but later it came to mean simply a Dennitzan of such ancestry. (Did the growth of their original planet into a frightening rival of Terra have anything to do with that?) However, from him and his family she had learned Eriau—rather, the archaic and mutated version they spoke—at the same time as she was learning Serbic from her parents and Anglic from a governess. When finally prevailed upon to stop scrambling these three into a private patois, she kept the habit of referring to Trohdwyr’s people by their own name for themselves, “ychani”: “seekers.”

For he had been close to the center of her child-universe. Father and Mother were at its very heart, naturally, and so for a while were a doll named Lutka, worn into shapelessness, and a cat she called Butterfeet. Uncle Bodin approached them when he and Aunt Draga visited, or the Vymezals went to Zorkagrad and he took her to the zoo and the merrypark. Three younger siblings, two brothers and a sister, orbited like comets, now radiant with love, now off into outer darkness. Trohdwyr never shone quite as brightly as any of these; but the chief gamekeeper to three generations of her house moved in an unchangeable path, always there for her to reach when she needed him.

“Kraich.” Having started dinner cooking, he settled back on the tripod of clawed feet and massive tail. “You’ve earned a double drink this evening, Dama. A regular sundowner, and one for killing the dyavo.” He poured into cups from a flask of shlivovitza. “Though I must skin the beast and carry the hide,” he added.

The hoarse basso seemed to hold a note of genuine complaint. Startled, Kossara peered across the fire at him.

To a dweller in the inner Empire, he might have been any Merseian. No matter how anthropoid a xenosophont was, the basic differences usually drowned individuality unless you knew the species well. Trohdwyr roughly resembled a large man—especially in the face, if you overlooked endless details of its heavy-boned, brow-ridged, wide-nosed, thin-lipped construction. But he had no external earflaps, only elaborately contoured holes in the skull. Totally hairless, his skin was pale green and faintly scaled. A sierra of low triangular spines ran from the top of his forehead, down his back to the tail’s end. When he stood, he leaned forward, reducing his effective height to tall-human; when he walked, it was not on heels and soles but on his toes, in an alien rhythm. He was warm-blooded; females of his race gave live birth; but he was no mammal—no kind of animal which Terra had ever brought forth.

By a million signs Kossara knew him for Trohdwyr and nobody else, as she knew her kinfolk or Mihail. He had grown gaunt, deep furrows lay in his cheeks, he habitually spurned boots and trousers for a knee-length tunic with many pockets, he wore the same kind of curve-bladed sheath knife with knuckleduster handle which he had given her and taught her to use, years before …

“Why, I’ll abandon it if you want,” she said, thinking, Has time begun to wear him down? How hurtful to us both.

“Oh, no, no, Dama. No need.” Trohdwyr grew abashed. “Forgive a gaffer if he’s grumpy. I was—well, today I almost saw you ripped apart. There I stood, you in my line of fire, and that beast—Dama, don’t do such things.”

“I’m sorry,” Kossara said. “Though I really don’t believe I was taking too big a chance. I know my rifle.”

“I too. Didn’t you learn from me?”

“But those were lightweight weapons. Because I was a girl? Today I had a Tashta, the kind they’ve issued me in the Voyska. I was sure it could stop him.” Kossara gazed aside, downslope toward the bottom of the Kazan, which night had already filled. “Besides,” she added softly, “I needed such a moment. You’re right, I did provoke the dyavo to attack.”

“To get away from feeling helpless?” Trohdwyr murmured.

“Yes.” She could never have opened thus to any human except Mihail, maybe not even to him; but over the years the ychan had heard confessions which she did not give her priest. “My man’s yonder.” She flung a hand toward the first stars as they twinkled forth, white upon violet above the lowlands. “I have to stay behind in my guard unit—when Dennitza will never be attacked!”

“Thanks to units like yours, Datna,” Trohdwyr said.

“Nevertheless, he—” Kossara took her drink in a gulp. It burned the whole way down, and the glow spread fast to every part of her. She held the cup out for a refill. “Why does it matter this much who’s Emperor? All right, Josip was foul and his agents did a great deal of harm. But he’s dead now; and the Empire did survive him; and I’ve heard enough from my uncle to know that what really keeps it going is a lot of nameless little officials whose work outlasts whole dynasties. Then why do we fight over who’ll sit crowned in Archopolis for the next few years?”

“You are the human, Dama, not I,” said Trohdwyr. After a minute: “Yet I can think how on Merseia they would be glad to see another Terran Emperor whose spirit is fear or foolishness. And … we here are not overly far from Merseia.”

Kossara shivered beneath the stars and took a strong sip.

“Well, it’ll get settled soon,” she declared. “Uncle Bodin told me he’s sure it will be. This thing in space is a last gasp. Soon”—she lifted her head—“Mihail and I can travel,” exploring together the infinite marvels on worlds that circle new suns.

“I hope so, Dama, despite that I’ll miss you. Have plenty of young, and let them play and grow around me on the manor as you did, will you?”

Exalted by the liquor—how the smell of the roasting meat awakened hunger!—she blurted: “He wanted me to sleep with him before he left. I said no, we’ll wait till we’re married. Should I have said yes? Tell me, should I have?”

“You are the human,” Trohdwyr repeated. “I can simply answer, you are the voivode’s daughter and the Gospodar’s niece. But I remember from my cubhood—when folk still lived in Old Aferoch, though already then the sea brought worse and worse floods—a female ychan of that town. I knew her somewhat, since a grown cousin of mine used to come in from our village, courting her—”

The story, which was of a rivalry as fierce as might have stood between two men of different clans in early days on Dennitza, but which ended after a rescue on the water, was oddly comforting: almost as if she were little again, and Trohdwyr rocked her against his warm dry breast and rumbled a lullaby. That night Kossara slept well. Some days afterward she returned happily to Dubina Dolyina. When her leave was up, she went back to Zorkagrad.

There she got the news that Mihail Svetich had been killed in action.

But standing before the slave shop’s audiovisual recorders, Kossara did not think of this, nor of what had happened to Trohdwyr himself on cold Diomedes. She remained in that one evening out of the many they had had together.}

The chemical joy wore off. She lay on her bunk, bit her pillow and fought not to yell.

A further day passed.

Then she was summoned to the manager’s office. “Congratulations,” he said. “You’ve been bought, luckier than you deserve.”

It roared in her. Darkness crossed her eyes. She swayed before his desk. Distantly she heard:

“A private gentleman, and he must really have liked what he saw in the catalogue, because he outbid two different cepheid houses. You can probably do well for yourself—and me, I’ll admit. Remember, if he sells you later, he may well go through me again instead of making a deal directly. I don’t like my reputation hurt, and I’ve got this switch here—Anyhow, you’ll be wise if you show him your appreciation. His name is Dominic Flandry, he’s a captain of Naval Intelligence, a knight of the Imperium, and, I’ll tell you, a favorite of the Emperor. He doesn’t need a slave for his bed. Gossip is, he’s tumbled half the female nobility on Terra, and commoner girls past counting. Like I said, he must think you’re special. The more grateful you act, the better your life is likely to be … On your way, now. A matron will groom and gown you.”

She also provided a fresh euphoriac. Thus Kossara didn’t even mind that the servant who came to fetch her was hauntingly like and unlike an ychan. He too was bald, green, and tailed; but the green was grass-bright, without scales, the tail thin as a cat’s, the posture erect, the height well below her own, the other differences unreckonable. “Sir Dominic saw fit to dub me Chives,” he introduced himself. “I trust you will find his service pleasant. Indeed, I declined the manumission he offered me, until the law about spy bracelets went into effect on Terra. May I direct you out?”

Kossara went along through rosiness, into an aircar, on across the city and an ocean, eventually to an ornate house on an island which Chives called Catalina. He showed her to a suite and explained that her owner was busy elsewhere but would presently make his wishes known. Meanwhile these facilities were hers to use, within reason.

Kossara fell asleep imagining that Mihail was beside her.