Hunter Of Worlds

Chapter 13

“THEY ARE DOWN,” said Aiela. His mind wrenched from his asuthi and became again aware of Ashakh’s face looking into his in the dim light of Kleph’s wrist-glove, a witchfire flicker of color in the eyes of the iduve. Insanely he thought of being pent in a close space with a great carnivore, felt his heart laboring at the mere touch of the iduve’s sinewy hand on his shoulder. Iduve weighed more than they looked. They were hard muscle, explosive power with little long-distance endurance. Even the touch of them felt different. Aiela tried not to flinch and concentrated anew on what his asuthi were sending now—awareness of engine shutdown, their own frustration and helplessness, locked as they were within their own quarters.

I was not secured until we lifted, Daniel sent him, bitter with self-accusation. I waited, I waited, hoped for a better chance. But now that door is sealed and locked.

And that communication flowed to the tunnels of Weiss-mouth through Aiela’s lips, a hoarse whisper.

“Is Khasif possibly conscious?” Ashakh asked.

“’No,’” Daniel responded. “’At least I doubt it.’”

“It agrees with my own perception. But free him, if you should find the chance. Bend all your efforts to free him.”

“’I understand,’” sent Isande. “’Where are you?’”

“Do not ask,” Ashakh sent sharply and used Aiela’s idoikkhe enough to sting. Aiela pulled back from the contact, for he was weary enough to betray things he would not have sent knowingly. His asuthi sent him a final appeal, private: Get off this world; if you have the option, take it to get out of here. And Isande sent him something very warm and very sad at once, which he treasured.

“What are they saying?” Ashakh asked, pressing his shoulder again; but the iduve might have broken the arm at that moment and Aiela would still have returned the same blank refusal to say. His mind was filled with two others and his eyes were blinded with diffused light.

Get out, Daniel sent him, pushing through his faltering screens, and Isande did the same, willing him to go, warning him of Ashakh and of trusting the amaut. They left a great emptiness behind them.

“M’metane.” Ashakh’s grip hurt, but he did not use the idoikkhe this time. “What is wrong?”

“They—cannot help. They don’t know what to do.”

The iduve’s brows were drawn into a frown, his thin face set in an anger foreign to his harsh but disciplined person. “I sense his presence, whether he senses mine or not—and Chaikhe—Chaikhe—“

Something troubled Ashakh. His eyes were almost wild, so that Kleph shrank from him and Aiela stayed very still, fearing the iduve might strike at any sudden move. But the iduve rested kneeling, as if he were listening for a voice that no other could hear, like a man hearing the inner voice of an asuthe. His eyes stared into space, his lips parted as if he would cry out, but with an apparent effort he shook off the thing that touched, him.

“There is a wrongness,” he exclaimed, “a fear—one of my nasithi is afraid, and I do not know which. Perhaps it is Tejef. We were once of the same nasul and we were takkhe. Perhaps it is his dying I feel.”

And it was indicative of his confusion that he spoke such things aloud, within the hearing of a m’metane and an outsider. In another moment he looked aware, and his face took on its accustomed hardness.

“You are empaths,” Aiela realized, and said it without thinking.

“No—not—quite that, m’metane. But I feel the takkhenes of two minds from the port—Chaikhe—Tejef—I cannot sort them out. If she and he are diverting a great portion of their attention to managing ships’ systems, it could account for the oddness—but it is wrong, m’metane, it is wrong. And from Khasif, I receive nothing—at least I surmise that his mind is the silent one.” He had spoken in his native tongue, conceding this to Aiela, but not to Kleph, who huddled in terror against the wall, and now he turned a burning look on the amaut.

“We are still going to the port,” he said to Kleph, “and you are involved in our affairs to an extent no outsider may be. From now on you are okkitan-as to Ashanome, the nasul of which we two are part.”

“Ai, sir, great lord,” wailed Kleph, making that gulping deep in his throat which was amautish weeping. “I am nothing, I am no one, I am utterly insignificant. Please let this poor person go. I will show you the port, oh, most gladly, sir, most gladly, serving you. But I am a clerk, no fighter, and I am not accustomed to weapons and I do not wish to be okkitan-as and travel forever.”

Ashakh said nothing, nor glowered nor threatened; there was only a quiet thoughtfulness in his eyes, a wondering doubtless when would be the most rationally proper time to dispose of Kleph. Aiela moved quickly to interpose his calming harachia and to warn Kleph with a painful grip of his fingers that he was going too far.

“Kleph is indeed a clerk,” Aiela confirmed, “and wished to become a farmer, quite likely; his mind is unprepared for the idea of service to a nasul. But he is also sensible and resourceful, and he would be an asset.”

“He has a choice. I have a homing sense adequate to return us to the port even in these tunnels, but it would be a convenience if this person showed us the quickest way.”

“Yes, sir.” Kleph seemed to catch the implication of the alternative, for his pale saucer eyes grew very wide. “I shall do that.”

And the little fellow turned upon hands and feet and scrambled up to go, they following; and ever and again Aiela could detect small thudding sounds which were sobs from the amaut’s resonant throat. It was well for Kleph that the iduve allowed his species liberties in accordance with their (from the kalliran view) amoral nature. But quite probably Ashakh no more understood the workings of Kleph’s mind than he did that of a serpent. The drives and needs that animated this little fellow could scarcely be translated into iduve language, and it would probably be Ashakh’s choice to destroy him if the perplexity grew great enough to overpower advantage. The iduve were essentially a cautious people.

As for Kleph, Aiela thought, Ashakh might have bought him body and soul if he had offered him ten lioi of land; but it was too late for that now.

Suddenly Kleph thrust his light within the belly-pocket of his coveralls and Ashakh made a move for him that threw Aiela against the earthen wall, bruised; the little fellow hissed like a steam leak in the grip of the iduve, the wrong sound to make with an angry starlord; but he tried to gabble out words amid his hissing sounds of pain, and Aiela groped in the dark to try to stop the iduve from killing the creature.

“Stop, ai, stop,” wailed Kleph, when Ashakh let up enough that he could speak. He restored a bit of light from his pocket: his face was contorted with anguish. “No trick, sir, no trick—please, we are coming to an inhabited section. O be still, sirs, please.”

“Are there no other paths?” asked Ashakh.

“No, lord, not if my lord wishes to go to the port. Only a short distance through. All are sleeping. We post no guards. No humans dare come down. They hate the deeps.”

Ashakh looked at Aiela for an answer, putting the burden of judging Kleph on his shoulders, treating him as nas; and he would be treated as nas if he erred, Aiela realized with a sinking feeling; but refusing would lower him forever in this iduve’s sight. Suddenly he comprehended arastiethe, the compulsion to take, and not to yield: giyre in truth did not apply with Ashakh: one did not abdicate responsibility to the next highest—one assumed, and assumed to the limit of one’s ability, and paid for errors dearly. Arastiethe was in one’s self, and had great cost.

“I’ll deal with Kleph, sir,” said Aiela, “either for good or for ill, I’ll deal with him, and he had better know it.”

“I do not mean to lead you astray,” Kleph protested again in a whisper, and he pointed and doused the wan light. There appeared in the distance a faint, almost illusory glow.

Aiela kept a firm hold on Kleph’s arm while they went, and now they trod on stone, and a masonry ceiling arched overhead high enough that Ashakh might straighten without fear for his head. They came to a place where light came from dim globes mounted along the ceiling—a path that broadened into a hall, and rimmed a descending trail that wound down and down past amaut residences, side-by-side dwellings cut into the stone of the city’s foundations. A chill damp breathed out from that pit, a musty scent of water. Aiela imagined that did he find a pebble to dislodge on the rim of that place, it would fall a great way and then—as it reached the level of the river and the water table—it would splash. They were still on the heights of Weissmouth, where the tunnels could reach to great depth. In amaut reckoning, it was a fine residential area, a pleasant place of cool dark and damp. And a sound from Kleph now would bring thousands of startled sleepers awake. It occurred to Aiela that Kleph’s strength would easily suffice to hurl him to his death in the pit, were it not fear of an armed starlord behind him.

They passed on to a closer tunnel, still one where they had headroom, and where lights glowed at the intersection of all the lesser tunnels, so that they had no need of Kleph’s little globe.

And around a corner came a startled party of amaut, who carried picks upon their shoulders and light-globes on their wrists, and who scattered shrieking and hissing in terror when they saw what was among them. In a moment all the tunnels were resounding with alarm, mad echoes pealing up and down the depths, and Aiela looked back at Ashakh, who was grimly returning his weapon to his belt.

“They would not understand nor would it stop the alarm,” said Ashakh. He turned on Kleph a look that withered. “Redeem your error. Get us to safety.”

Kleph was willing. He seized Aiela’s arm to make him hurry, but shrank from contact with Ashakh, whom he urged with gestures, and took them off into one of the side corridors. The light-globe glowed into new life, their only source of illumination now, Kleph leading them where they knew not, further and further, until Aiela refused to follow more and backed the little fellow into a wall. Kleph gave a shrieking hiss and tried to vanish into another passage, but Ashakh brought his struggling to an end by his fingers laid on Kleph’s broad chest and a look that would freeze water.

“Where do you intend to take us?” Aiela demanded, seeing that Ashakh waited his intent with the creature. “I feel us going down and down.”

“Necessary, necessary, o lord nas kame. We are near the river, descending—listen! Hear the pumps working?”

It was true. In an interval of deep silence there was a faint pulsing, like a giant’s heartbeat within the maze. When they did not move, nowhere was there another sound but that. The alarm and the shouting had long since died away. Wherever they were, it seemed unlikely that this was a main corridor.

“Is there no quicker way?” Aiela asked.

“But the great lord said to take you to safety, and I have been doing that. See, there is no alarm.”

“Be silent,” said Aiela, “and stop pretending you have forgotten what we want. Whatever your personal preference, we had better come out near the port, and quickly.”

Kleph’s ugly face contorted in the swaying light, making his grimace worse than usual. He bubbled in his throat and edged past them without looking either of them in the eyes, retracing his steps to a tunnel they had bypassed. It angled faintly upward.

“O great lords,” Kleph mourned in audible undertone, “your enemies are so great and so many, and I am not a fighter, my lords, I could not hurt anyone. Please remember that.”

Ashakh hit him—no cuff, but a blow that hurled the little fellow stunned into the turning wall of the corridor; and Kleph cowered there on his knees and covered his head, shrilling a warble of alarm, a thin, sickly note. Aiela seized the amaut’s shoulder, frightened by the violence, no less frightening when he looked back at Ashakh. The iduve leaned against the stone wall, clinging by his fingers to the surface. His rose-reflecting eyes were half-lidded and pale, showing no pupil at all.

A scramble of gravel beside him warned Aiela. He spun about and whipped out his gun. Kleph froze in the act of rising.

“If you douse that light,” Aiela warned him, “I can still stop you before you get to the exit. I’ve stood between you and Ashakh until now. Don’t press my generosity any further.”

“Keep him away,” Kleph bubbled in his own language. “Keep him away.”

Aiela glanced at Ashakh, feeling his own skin crawl as he looked on that cold, mindless face: Ashakh, most brilliant of the nasithi, cerebral master of Ashanome’s computers and director of her course—bereft of reason. Kallia though he was, he felt takkhenes, the awareness of the internal force of that man, a life-force let loose with them into that narrow darkness, at enmity with all that was not nas.

A slow pulse began from the idoikkhe, panic multiplying in Aiela’s brain as the pulse matched the pounding of his own heart; his asuthi knew, tried to hold to him. He thrust them away, his knees in contact with the ground, the gravel burning his hands, his paralyzed right hand losing its grip on the gun. Kleph was beside him, gray-green eyes wide, his hand reaching for the abandoned gun.

The pain ceased. Aiela struck left-handed at the amaut and Kleph cowered back against the wall, protesting he had only meant to help.

Aiela, Aiela, his asuthi sent, wondering whether he was all right But he ignored them and lurched to his feet, for Ashakh still hung against the wall, his face stricken; and Aiela sensed somehow that he was not the origin of the pain, rather that Ashakh had saved him from it. He seized the iduve, felt that lean, heavy body shudder and almost collapse. Ashakh gripped his arms in return, holding until it shut the blood from his hands, and all the while the whiteless eyes were inward and blank.

“Chaikhe,” he murmured, “Chaikhe, nasith-tak, prha-Ashanome-ta-e-takkhe, au, Chaikhe—Aiela, Aiela-kameth—“

“Here. I am here.”

“A being—whose feel is Ashanome, but a stranger, a stranger to me—he, he, reaching—hypothesis: Tejef, Tejef one-and-not-one, Khasif—Chaikhe—Chaikhe, operating machinery, extended, mindless life-force—e-takkhe, e-takkhe, e-tak-khe!”

Stop him! Isande cried in agony. Stop him! He is deranged, he can die—

He—needing something? Daniel wondered. He hated Ashakh to the depth of all that was human. Tejef had a little compassion. Ashakh was as remorseless as Ashanome’s machines. In a perverse way it pleased Daniel to see him suffer something.

Daniel, what is the matter with you? Isande exclaimed in horror.

Aiela broke them asunder, for their quarreling was like to drive him mad. Isande’s presence remained on the one side, stunned, fearing Daniel; and Daniel’s on the other, hating the iduve of Ashanome, hating dying. That was at the center of it—hating dying, hating being sent to it by beings like Ashakh and Chimele, who loved nothing and feared nothing and needed no one.

“Ashakh.” Aiela thrust that yielding body hard against the wall and the impact seemed to reach the iduve; but moments passed before the glazed look left his eyes and he seemed to know himself again. Then he looked embarrassed and brushed off Aiela’s hands and straightened his clothing.

“Niseth,” he said, avoiding Aiela’s eyes. “I am disadvantaged before you.”

“No, sir,” said Aiela. “You saved my life, I think.”

Ashakh inclined his head in appreciation of that courtesy and felt of the weapon at his belt, looking thoughtfully at the amaut. It could not comfort Ashakh in the least that an outsider had witnessed his collapse, and if Kleph could have known it, he was very close to dying in that moment. But Kleph instinctively did the right thing in crouching down very small and appearing not at all to joy in the situation.

“You are correct,” said Ashakh to Aiela. “You were in danger, but it was side effect, a scattering of impulses. I feel—even yet—a disconnection, a disharmony without resolution. Tejef turned his mind to us and he is stronger than ever I felt him. He is—almost an outsider, not—outsider in the sense of e-nasuli but e-iduve. I cannot sort the minds out; they—he—Chaikhe—are involved with the machines—their impulses—hard to untangle. The strangeness burns—it confuses—“

“Perhaps,” said Aiela, ignoring Daniel’s silent indignation, “perhaps he has been too long among humans.”

Ashakh frowned. “You are m’metane, and you are not expected to go further in this. Tejef is a formidable man, and whatever Chimele’s orders, you are free of bond to me. It is not reasonable to waste you where there is no cause, and I doubt I shall have to face Chimele’s anger for disobeying her. Could you really aid me in some way, it would be different, but Tejef’s arrival in the city has altered the situation. She did not anticipate this when she instructed you.”

“My asuthi are aboard that ship.”

“Au, kameth, what do you expect to do? I shall be hard put to defend myself, and I can hardly hold him from you forever. Should I fall in the attempt, as I doubtless will, there you will stand with that upon your wrist and that ridiculous weapon of yours, quite helpless. In the first place you will hinder me, and in the second event, you will die for nothing.”

Aiela rested his hand on the offending pistol and looked up at the iduve with a hard set to his jaw. “My people are not killers,” he said, “but it doesn’t mean we can’t fend for ourselves.”

Ashakh hissed in contempt. “Au. Kallia have had the luxury to be so sparing of life ever since we came and brought order to your worlds. But Tejef will bend every effort to destroy me. If he succeeds, you are disarmed. I would cheerfully give you this weapon of mine instead, but see, there is no external control, and you can neither calibrate nor fire it. No, Chimele gave her orders, and I assume she is casting me away as she did Khasif. She forbade me to seek out Chaikhe, but you are under no such bond. I do not require you for serach, though it would do me honor; and I should prefer to have you providing Chaikhe contact with your asuthi aboard Tejef’s ship.”

Listen to him, Isande urged, joy and relief flooding over her. But her happiness died when she met his determined resistance.

“No, sir,” said Aiela. “I’m going with you.”

He half expected a touch of the idoikkhe for his impudence, but Ashakh merely frowned.

“Tekasuphre,” the iduve judged. “Chimele said you were prone to unpredictable action.”

“But I am going,” Aiela said, “unless you stop me.”

Ashakh broke into a sudden grin, a thing more terrible than his frown. “A vaikka-dhis, then, kameth. We will do what we can do, and he will notice us before Chimele burns this wretched world to cinders.”

“Ai, sir!” wailed Kleph, and applied his hands to his mouth in dismay at his own outburst.

In the next moment he had doused the light and attempted flight. Aiela snatched at him and seized only cloth, but Ashakh’s arm stopped the amaut short, restoring light that flashed wildly about the tunnel with the flailing of Kleph’s arms, and he had the being by the throat, close to crushing it, had Aiela not intervened. Ashakh simply dropped the little wretch, and Kleph tucked himself up in a ball and moaned and rocked in misery.

“Up,” Aiela ordered him, hauling on his collar, and the amaut obediently rose, but would not look him in the face, making little hisses and thuds in his throat.

“This person is untouchable,” said Ashakh; and in his language the word was e-takkhe, out of takkhenes. No closer word to enemy existed in the iduve vocabulary, and the killing impulse burned in Ashakh’s normally placid eyes,

“I have a bond on him,” Aiela said.

“Be sure,” Ashakh replied, no more than that: iduve manners frowned on idle dispute as well as on interference with another’s considered decisions.

What do you think you are? Isande cried, slipping through his screening. Aiela, what do you think you’re doing?

He shut her out with a mental wince. Not fair, not fair, her retreating consciousness insisted. Aiela, listen!

He seized poor Kleph by the arm and shook at the heavy little fellow. “Kleph: now do you believe I meant what I said? Does it offend your precious sensibilities, all this fine world gone to cinders? If you have any other plans for it, then get us to the port. Maybe we can stop it. Do you understand me this time?”

“Yes,” said Kleph, and for the first time since Ashakh’s arrival the saucer eyes met his squarely. “Yes, sir.”

Kleph edged past him to take the lead. His low brow furrowed into a multiplication of wrinkles so that his eyes were fringed by his colorless hair. His thin lips rolled in and out rapidly. How much he honestly could understand, Aiela was not sure. Almost he wished the little amaut would contrive to escape as soon as they made the port.

Aiela, Isande sent, what are you doing? Why are you screening?

Aiela shut her out entirely. Pity was dangerous. Let it begin and screens tumbled one after the other. He had to become for a little time as cold as the iduve, able to kill.

His mind fled back to the safe and orderly civilization of Aus Qao, where crime was usually a matter of personal disorder, where theft was a thing done by offworlders and the clever rich, and where murder was an act of aberration that destined one for restructuring. No kalliran officer had fired a lethal weapon on Aus Qao in five thousand years.

He was not sure that he could. Ashakh could do so without even perceiving the problem: he only reacted to the urgings of takkhenes, of the two of them the more innocent. A kallia must somehow, Aiela thought, summon up the violence of hate before he could act.

He could not kill. The growing realization panicked him. Conscience insisted that he tell his iduve companion of this weakness in himself before it cost Ashakh his life. Something—arastiethe or fear, he knew not which—kept him silent. Giyre was impossible with this being: did he try to explain, Ashakh would send him away. All that he could do •was to expend everything, conscience and kastien as well, and stay beside the iduve as far as his efforts could carry him.