A Werewolf Among Us

TWO: Rider in the Storm

The Alderban mansion was built on the slopes of the last of the major foothills, in the shadows of the gray mountains. In five distinct steps, each fitted against the contour of the land, perfectly smooth and unseamed as if it had been carved from a single piece of blazing white stone, the house managed to appear more like a natural outcropping of the landscape than like the intruding hand of civilization.

Teddy piloted the ground car into the irising mouth of the garage and parked it in a stall alongside five similar vehicles.

"I'll show you to your room," he said.

Five minutes later, by means of an elevator that moved both vertically and horizontally by turns, they reached the main hall of the topmost level of the house: deep carpet the color of untainted seawater; muted blue walls; indirect lighting, so indirect that he could not locate the source; paintings on both walls, all rather interesting at a glance, all signed by Tina Alderban; music, almost inaudible, gentle and soothing.

Teddy palmed a wall switch, opened the door that appeared behind a sliding panel and showed the detective to his quarters: a comfortably furnished sitting room, a bedroom with a mammoth waterbed and a fireplace large enough to roast an ox, more of Tina Alderban's paintings, a private bath off the bedchamber complete with a Brobdingnagian sunken tub.

"Will this do?" Teddy asked.

"I'll try it for a day or so and see," St. Cyr said dryly. But his sarcasm was lost on the master unit.

"If it doesn't suit, I am sure that something else can be arranged." Teddy floated to the door, turned and said, "Dinner will be served in two hours and twenty minutes, in the main dining room. You will find directions in the house guide in the top drawer of your nightstand."

"Wait." St. Cyr said. "I'd like to talk to Mr. Alderban to get—"

"That will come later," Teddy assured him. "Now, Mr. Alderban wishes that you rest from your journey."

"I'm not tired, actually."

"Then you may watch the thunderstorm, Mr. St. Cyr. Climicon has scheduled one for approximately six o'clock. It should already have begun to form."

This time, when the robot assumed its air of dismissal, it was utterly inarguable. The door closed behind it; beyond the door, the concealing panel slid down the wall.

St. Cyr, unable to imagine what else he should do to pass the time, afraid of growing bored again, went to the glass patio doors and discovered that they opened on vocal command. He stepped onto the slate-floored balcony, which was shielded from the elements by the slanted, spout-flanked, red-shingled roof. Below, a lush valley opened like the center of a flower, cut through by a blue stream of water, spotted with stands of pines and, now and again, a copse of gray-leafed trees.

Above the valley was the storm.

A towering bank of thunderheads had moved stolidly out of the east, black as a carboned anvil. A dozen quick, silvery Eyes of Climicon darted in and out of the dense clouds, drawing them forward with clever atmospheric chemistry.

The thunderheads moved as fast as a freight train, across rails of air on wheels of vapor.

St. Cyr pulled a chair to the railing and sat down, intrigued.

Over the roof of the house, moving in from the mountains behind, a second storm front tagged after and sometimes swept across the spherical Eyes, bearing down on the deep evil of the thunderheads. This massive cloud formation was a softer color, more gray than black, more blue than purple.

At ground level the wind had subsided, though it was clearly still a power at higher altitudes as it jammed the two centers of atmospheric disturbance into the area above the valley.

St. Cyr realized that, in an incredibly small area, the wind appeared to be blowing from two entirely different directions, evidenced by the opposite line of drive behind each front. He supposed this was a relatively minor feat for Climicon on a planet where costs were no object. After all, in recent years they had graduated from weather control to complete terraforming of worlds once unsuitable for human settlements.

Lightning forked between the behemoths overhead.

A moment later, thunder cracked down the valley, a thermal whip that brought an auditory punishment.

Across the valley, in the foothills at the ankles of the next spine of gray mountains, sheets of rain obscured the trees, sliced quick gulleys in the exposed earth, and gushed forward toward the stream below.

And out of those fluttering curtains of rain rode a man on horseback, bent low over his mount's neck, slapping its shoulders with his free hand. He dug his knees into the beast's sides, as if he were riding without benefit of a saddle, but he seemed in no danger of falling off.

St, Cyr stood, now oblivious of the storm except as it was a backdrop to the rider. The approaching figure carried with it an air, a mood, that somehow made him uneasy — something he had noticed with the aid of the bio-computer but which he was as yet unable to pin down and define.

The rain lashed at the rider's back, pushed by the winds, which had once again kissed the earth. Yet he managed to remain ahead of the worst of it, still slapping his mount's neck and shoulders, still bent low so as to be almost a part of the four-legged creature under him.

As the rider drew nearer, taking the slopes of the valley toward the lowest step of the Alderban house, St. Cyr saw that he carried a rifle strapped across his broad back, Slung across the shoulders of the horse were two objects: a saddlebag made of dark leather — and a pair of bloody boar's heads, which dripped crimson and glared out at the passing world with bared fangs and rigor-mortised snarls.

The man took the last hundred yards toward the swiftly irising doors of the stables, and as he drew close to St. Cyr's position, the cyberdetective saw tangled black hair, a broad and Slavic face, fierce dark eyes. The hand that slapped the horse, urging it on, was as large as a dinner plate and looked, consequently, too large to eat with. Beneath the tight-fitting black shirt, muscles bulged and twisted as if they were sentient creatures in their own right.

The hunter was laughing, heedless of the blood that spattered over his trousers from the dangling boars' heads, unconcerned about the lightning that chattered down to the earth all across the valley. The only thing in the world, at that moment for that large dark man, was the race. And he was laughing at the elements because he knew that he had won it.

He disappeared through the stable door.

The door winked shut.

And the storm broke over the house with the force of a small hurricane, almost taking St. Cyr off his feet as he staggered back into the safety of his quarters.

Inside, he listened to the rain and the pea-sized hailstones as the deluge battered the roof and snapped against the patio doors. Curiously, its fury seemed pale now. He had watched the hunter defeat it; the hunter was now more charged, more fiercely powerful than any storm.

Only a man, the bio-computer said, without speaking.

But who had he been? The laughing giant, bringing home two bloody pig heads as trophies, did not fit any of the descriptions of members of the Alderban family that he had obtained from his own reliable sources before setting out for Darma, and certainly not with anything that Teddy had told him. It was evident to St. Cyr that the hunter had never undergone psychiatric hypno-keying to stimulate his creativity. He was elemental. He was blood, the fight, the stalk, rain and fire. He was positively no historical novelist like Dane, no sculptor like Jubal.

St. Cyr walked to the communications board in the wall by his bed and called the house computer.

"May I be of service?" a voice asked overhead.

"I wish to speak to Teddy," he said.

A moment later the master unit was on the line. "Yes, Mr. St. Cyr?"

"I asked you who all was in the family, and you did not tell me everything."

"Whom did I miss?" Teddy asked, concerned. He would be running a check of his own systems even as he spoke, searching for a faulty memory cell.

"The big man with black hair and eyes. He was out hunting just now."

"You mean Hirschel," Teddy said, as relieved as a robot could be.

"Who is he?"

"Hirschel is Jubal Alderban's uncle on his father's side of the family."

"He lives here?"

"Yes, sir."

"Why didn't you mention him before?"

The master unit said, "I suppose because of the way you asked the question. You wanted to know who was in the family. To that, I am programmed to reply as I did. If you had asked who was in the household, I would have told you about Hirschel."

It was possible, St. Cyr thought, that the master unit had been given a narrow definition of the word "family" and that the restricted use he was permitted for that term had made it impossible for him to mention Hirschel. He really did not know enough about Reiss Master Units to be certain. His bio-computer assured him that, while most robotic servants should be equipped for cross-reference and broad spectrum recall, such a likelihood as this was not that improbable. Yet, emotionally, he could not escape the notion that Teddy had been trying to hide Hirschel's presence as long as he could.

To what end?

"Anything else, Mr. St. Cyr?"

"No, Teddy," he said at last He broke the connection.

St. Cyr showered, still wearing the turtle-shell machine, and lay down for a while before getting dressed for supper. He worked at the pieces of hay, cleared away a section of the stack but still could not find any needle. Reminding himself that the nap would have to be short and relying on the bio-computer to wake him, he fell asleep.

The dream was about a man wearing a boar's head mask. The man was leading him along a road where the pavement was broken, jutting up in great slabs much higher than a man. Around them, the tottering buildings, filmed in gray smoke, leaned over the street, skewed out of square and ready to topple. When he woke from it an hour later, he was drenched in perspiration and felt as if the greasy smoke that layered the dead buildings now wrapped him in a dark, buttery sheath. The sheets were twisted around his legs. The pillowcase was sodden.

While he showered and dressed, the bio-computer explained a few things about his dream.

The man in the boar's head mask: THE UNKNOWN.

The damaged road: THE PAST.

The tottering buildings: MEMORIES BEST LEFT BURIED.

The reason you woke without letting it continue further: FEAR OF WHERE THE ROAD WOULD END.

St. Cyr hated these dream analyses, but he could not do anything to dissuade the bio-computer, which contributed what it deemed important whether he wished to hear from it or not. He refused to consider what it said. He was a detective. A detective did not have to investigate himself.

In the top drawer of the nightstand he found the house guide — fifty pages of closely-packed information and ten pages of detailed maps. He located the main dining room, traced a path backwards to his own quarters, which were marked in red. Satisfied that he knew the way, a bit amazed that even the wealthiest families would require a house this size, he went downstairs to meet the suspects.