Haven of Darkness

Chapter Eleven

Chagney had taken too long to die. Sitting in a sheltered corner on a high, battlemented promenade, Dumarest recalled how the body, though wasted with disease, had continued stubbornly to function. His own, innate determination to survive had worked against his own interest, adding strength, the power of will. And it had not only been his own.

Warmed by the suns he stared bleakly at a lichened wall remembering how, with the Sleethan on its way scant hours after landing on Zakym, he had made an end.

Drugs and alcohol were taking too long and, should it be examined, the wound on his thigh could arouse question. Space was big and empty and clean. A port, cycled, would hurl his body into the void leaving another mystery to add to the rest. Another strange disappearance.

But it had not been easy to do and, as he'd reached for the final lever, there had been a crying deep within his brain.

A crying.

Dumarest felt the constriction of his stomach as he thought about it. It had been real, an intelligence fighting for life, somehow knowing and therefore, somehow aware. Chagney, trapped, helpless, his body usurped, crying at the approach of death.

It had come with air gusting from ruptured lungs, eyes freezing into gelid liquids, the blood fuming,in the veins at the sudden release of pressure. For a long, aching moment he had hung naked in the void, shrinking at the vast immensity of the universe, overwhelmed by its tremendous majesty and then had come dissolution.

"Earl!" Lavinia came towards him, striding with a mobile grace along the promenade. She was smiling and the delicate contours of her face held a glowing radiance. "You are awake. Good. I thought you might be asleep."

"I've slept enough."

"Good." She sat beside him and he caught the scent of her perfume. "How do you feel?" She laughed before he could answer. "A stupid question. Why do we ask such things? You almost died-how else would you feel but weak and ill?"

"Grateful."

"For life?"

"For that and for the good luck which gave it to me." Dumarest rose and stretched then took his place again on the bench. "And I am not ill."

"But a little weak?" Concern darkened her eyes. "Too weak to talk?"

"No."

"I am not distressing you?"

"No."

"I am glad of that. Roland thought you would die. I thought you had died. You were so still, so chill, you didn't even seem to be breathing. I couldn't even feel a pulse when you were taken from the crate."

"I was under quick-time," said Dumarest.

"Yes, so Roland explained. He knows about these things. He has traveled while I have not. Yet, even when he'd injected the neutralizer, you still didn't recover. You seemed to be in a coma. It lasted for-well, a long time. And then, when you finally woke, you called my name. At least I thought you did. But it wasn't mine, was it? How could it have been?"

A face which swam from shadows to form shape and substance before his newly opened eyes. One set against a background which accentuated the ebon sheen of the hair, the hauntingly familiar contours of the face. One he had last seen lying in the empty stillness of death.

Lallia!

Long gone now, long dead, as so many other were dead. Ghosts which came to him at times in dreams. Loves which had promised so much.

"Earl!" He felt the touch of her hand against his own, the warm comfort of her fingers. Her eyes met his own, deep, wide with concern. "Is something wrong. Your face-"

"It's nothing."

"So hard," she whispered. "So hurt. So dreadfully bleak."

A face the like of which she had never seen before; one belonging to a man from whom the softness had been burned by the fires of necessity. A man who walked alone. One who knew, as she had never known, the ache of loss, the pain of loneliness.

One who was searching-for what?

"Earth?" she frowned as he answered the question. "An odd name for a world. I've never heard of it. But if you left it surely you can find it again?"

"It was a long time ago," he explained. "I was a boy, ignorant, desperate to escape. I stowed away on a ship. The captain was kind; instead of evicting me as was his right he allowed me to work my passage. I stayed with him until he died."

Moving, always moving towards the center of the galaxy where worlds were close and ships plentiful. Into regions where the very name of Earth was nothing but legend.

"But the coordinates? If you had them a ship could take you back."

"If I had them," he admitted. "But the planet isn't listed in any almanac. No captain admits to ever having heard of the place." He sat, thinking of the long, tiresome search, the determination to discover what he knew must exist. "But I'll find it."

"You seem confident."

"I am." He told her why then ended, dryly, "All I need now is money."

A lot of money. A fortune, but that could come later. For now it was enough to sit and feel the warmth of the sunlight, to breath the gentle air and to feel the pulse and surge of life in blood and body. A rustling came from above and a raft glided from the east to hover before settling down into the courtyard.

Idly Dumarest watched it, recognizing the man behind the driver. Lord Roland Acrae who, within minutes, came hurrying along the promenade.

"Lavinia! I must talk with you. Suchong has fresh news and Alcorus-your pardon, Earl. You must excuse me. Are you well?"

An empty question from most; from him a genuine expression of concern.

"Thank you, my lord, yes."

He waved aside the formality.

"That is well. Now, if you will excuse us? Thank you. Lavinia, this cannot wait. Navolok must be consulted at once and we should think seriously…"

His voice faded as he guided the woman along the promenade. To Dumarest she was of normal height, the top of her head coming level with his eyes, but she was at least half a head taller than her companion. Like all the other people of Zakym Dumarest had seen Roland was small, finely built, with a delicate bone structure and a gentle face. The result of centuries of inbreeding, perhaps, or some mutation becoming a dominant genetic trait. Among the scattered worlds of the galaxy such things were common; odd developments produced by the floods of wild radiation which bathed vast areas of space.

In which case Lavinia was an atavar, a throwback to the time when those who had settled this world were taller than now with a more aggressive disposition. That too, he had noticed; a gentleness of behavior which was unusual. Here, on Zakym, it was as if gentle children had come to play, building themselves castles and houses, dividing lands and forming themselves into protective groups, content to let life slip quietly past as they dreamed of endless delights.

A wrong picture, of course, he had seen too little of the place to form a true judgment, but he doubted if it would be too far from fact. A backward world with little commerce and so few contacts with other, more aggressive cultures. A society founded on farms and animals and a little mining. One producing selectively bred beasts and herbs, plants and insects. There would be few gems and little precious metal. There would be hardly any industry.

A near-static world on which it would be hard for a traveler to gather a stake. Harder still for a stranger to gain a fortune.

Well, that worry would have to wait. He was alive and that was enough.

Dumarest leaned back, feeling the warmth of the lichened stone against his shoulders. The suns were sinking, their orbs close and he closed his eyes against their glare. From the courtyard came little, muted sounds and even the calls of one to another seemed to come from a vast distance or be muffled by layers of cloth.

Odd how the air seemed so enervating.

Odd how he had woken to imagine Lallia facing him, stooping a little forward, the mane of her hair a shimmering waterfall over rounded shoulders.

A woman.

The womb of creation.

The natural opposite to the harsh reality of death.

Against the closed lids of his eyes Dumarest saw again the distant burn of scattered stars, the sheets and curtains of luminescence, the somber patches of darkness, the fuzz of remote nebulae-and felt, too, the aching emptiness of the space into which he had flung himself.

To drift in the embracing shimmer of the Erhaft field, to break from it, to hang utterly alone. To die.

To hear the thin, so thin, crying. The crying… the crying…

"No!" He jerked awake with a gasp, aware that he had dozed, feeling the wetness of sweat on his face, the tremble of his hands. He had killed before and had seen men die and had heard them plead before they died but never had it been like this.

The crying. The thin, plaintive, hopeless crying.

"It doesn't matter, Earl." The voice was a familiar wheeze. "It doesn't matter at all."

Chagney!

He stood with his back against the stone wall of the battlement, dressed as Dumarest had remembered, his face the same, the eyes clear, the mouth free of the frill of blood which it must have worn at the last. Now, standing, he smiled and extended a hand.

"We all have to go, Earl. Sooner or later it comes to us all. And what did I lose? A few days? A week? Zakym would have been my last planetfall."

A dead man standing, talking, smiling, his eyes clear- but how?

"Does it matter?" Thin shoulders lifted in a shrug as Chagney turned to look over the crenelated wall. "You have died, Earl. You know more than most. You died-and I died with you!"

"Chagney!" Dumarest stepped forward, reaching, feeling stone. He leaned against it for a moment, feeling tension at the base of his skull. The dominant half of the affinity twin had nestled there-could it still, in some incredible manner, be connected with the part Chagney had carried?

Would death never end?

Dumarest drew in his breath and straightened. The promenade was empty, the navigator had vanished, but some of the tension remained. Theoretically the affinity twin should dissolve when the bond was broken, the basic elements being absorbed into the metabolism, but what if theory was wrong?

"Earl!" Kalin smiled, her hair a rippling flame. "Think of it as a transceiver. You are never really in the host-body at all. It is just that all sensory data is transmitted and received on the ultimate level of efficiency. The rest is illusion."

Kalin? Here?

She vanished as he took a step towards her and he stumbled and fell to a knee, hands outstretched, feeling the rasp of stone on his palms, a growing madness.

The promenade, once empty, was now thronged with figures. Men, women, some strange, others vaguely familiar, a few seeming to gain solidity as he watched. The man he had fought on Harald, falling with blood on his lips, eyes glazed in hatred as he died. The gentle face of Armand Ramhed, the ruined one of his assassin, the sly eyes of an old woman from… from… and then, shockingly, he was looking at himself.

A man lying pale and limp and apparently dead. A man who dissolved and rose and stood tall and menacing in a scarlet robe.

Cyber Broge, his face like a skull, bone which smiled.

"There's no escape, Dumarest. We are too powerful. You can never hope to elude us for long. We shall find you and, when we do, you will pay." The even tones echoed as if rolling down a corridor. "Pay… pay… pay…"

His arm lifted and Dumarest sprang to one side, hand dropping to his boot, the hilt of the knife carried there, rising with it gleaming naked in his hand, lunging forward to send the steel whining through the air in a vicious cut which drew sparks from stone, ripped at fabric-and sent Roland Acrae falling back with a rip on the sleeve of his blouse.

"Earl! No!" Lavinia came running towards him as again the blade rose. It halted in its driving lunge to fall inches from the ruined blouse, light turning the steel into a purple shimmer, luminescent blurs riding the honed edge and point.

"A mistake." Dumarest lowered the knife. "I thought-it was a mistake. I apologize, my lord."

"So fast." Roland lifted fingers to the ripped sleeve. "You moved like the wind."

"A mistake."

"The mistake was mine." Incredibly he was calm. "I should have known, have warned you, at least. Look at the suns."

They were very close, edges almost touching, flares of magenta and violet filling the air with a purple haze.

"I could have killed you," said Dumarest. And would have done if something, instinct perhaps, had not stayed his hand. Lavinia added to the strangeness of the moment with her smile.

"You could have done, I suppose, and if you had I would have regretted it. But it would not have been the tragedy you seem to think."

"My lady?"

"He would have moved on but he wouldn't have wholly gone. At times of delusia he would have returned. We could have spoken to him and he to us."

"Delusia?" Dumarest looked again at the suns beginning to understand. "Is that when the dead come back to life?"

"We can see them and talk to them and they to us. Is that what disturbed you? The presence of an old enemy who threatened you? One who wanted to hurt?"

"One who wanted to kill."

"And so you tried to kill him." Slowly she nodded, her eyes wide, the lift of her breasts prominent beneath her gown as she drew in her breath. "Do you find it easy to kill, Earl?"

He thought of Chagney. "No."

"But, if you are threatened, you will?"

"It is the way of life." Dumarest looked at the knife and thrust it back into his boot. "You breed animals and must know that. The strongest are those who perpetuate their line. To do that they will fight and win. They have to win."

"Animals are not men."

"Perhaps not, my lady, but the same rule applies. A man is nothing if he is not alive-dead he can only feed the ground."

"On Zakym men do not truly die," said Lavinia swiftly. "No human dies. They are changed. Delusia is proof of that."

"Proof?"

"You have seen it, Earl. You know."

He said, dryly, "You believe the dead return to confer with you. That, at certain times, you break some barrier or that some barrier is broken. But always those you see are those you remember. Always, am I right?"

"Yes, but-what has that to do with it? They are real. They talk and smile and listen. You have seen them for yourself. That man you tried to kill-proof, Earl! Proof!"

He heard the conviction in her voice, saw it in her eyes, the stance of her body. To argue against faith was to try and blow out a sun. The evidence was there, to her beyond question, a comfort she could not reject.

"Earl?"

"My lady, I am a stranger to this world, alive only because of your hospitality. Who am I to question your ways?"

"But-"

"Lavinia!" Roland rested his hand on her arm. "You upset yourself without cause. Not all worlds know what we know. Delusia is unique to Zakym. It takes time to understand."

The man had traveled and would know more than he said. Dumarest glanced at the sky, at the twin suns with their tremendous energy-potential, solar furnaces blasting radiation into space. A flood which was subtly altered when the suns merged to become a pattern of forces which distorted the micro-currents of the brain and so create hallucinations. Fragments of memory, revived, projected, given attributes which existed only in the minds of the beholder.

Delusions which would form the basis of a religion, a faith, a way of life.

"Earl?" Lavinia took a step towards him, her eyes searching his face. "You understand?"

A person who communed with the dead. A tall and lovely woman whose hair glowed with the lambent sheen of purple light from the setting suns. One who flushed a little as she felt her body respond to his masculinity.

Roland, watching, said abruptly, "It's getting late. We had best go below."