Shadowkill

##

As he had night after night for weeks now, Miji the sakali trotted along an unlit corridor, frill erect, senses alert for insomniac wanderers. It was about an hour before dawn on a night as uneventful as last night and the night before and the night before that, and so on, but he was never at ease inside the prison wing.

For weeks now Rohant had been using the sakali like a blind man’s cane, probing the corridors around his cell and throughout the prison wing.

It was a frustrating process. He could not see through Miji’s eyes, or hear what he heard, he could only read the sakali’s reactions, feel the play of his muscles. Despite this he was acquiring considerable information about his surroundings. Dyslaera had unusually accurate perceptions of distance, direction, and duration. Each pitpat of Miji’s tiny feet told him more about the maze around him.

The Omphalites took him out of his cell nearly every day, sometimes twice. Every five days they took him to the exercise court so he could wash, get some sun and work the kinks out of his body, running round and round inside those slippery walls. The other times he went to the saferoom where the techs made lifeflakes of him. In the first one they made him shave off half his mustache, then read out a message to Miralys. The degree to which his half-mustache grew back was a timing device for subsequent flakes, evidence that an extended period was being recorded.

And they took him to dine with the Grand Chom, who discarded his mask and robes for these encounters.

The serviteurs were androids, not flesh to be shocked by the Chom’s departure from the rules of behavior before outsiders. There were no guards inside the room, but he wasn’t being foolish; there was a stunfence down the center of the table, ceiling to floor, between Omphalite and Dyslaeror.

“Come here,” he said, the first night they dined. Warily Rohant came toward him. He touched the screen and went down.

He was out for twenty minutes.

When he woke, he found that the serviteurs had lifted him away from the screen, settled him in his chair, crossed his arms on the table, laid his head on them.

“A lesson,” the Grand Chom said. “It’s a stunfield. It won’t kill you, you’re much too valuable to waste.”

The third night they dined, the Chom showed Rohant the flake they’d made for Miralys. Rohant shaving half his moustache, then reading the statement. Then six successive views with related physical data, then the final message detailing how the payment was to be made. “We have you,” he said. “If your Toerfeles wants you back she has to sell us a piece of Voallts Korlach, she won’t be able to raise the ransom elsewhere, we’ve seen to that. And once we have the piece, we have the whole.” He held his hands up, closed them into fists. “Before the year’s out, your Toerfeles will be working for us,”

Rohant said nothing. Let the Chom think he was chagrined by this development. He wasn’t. It wasn’t going to happen. He’d learn his mistake when Miralys was standing in front of him tearing his throat out.

They kept flaking Rohant every two or three days after the first demand was sent out. They’ve done this before, he thought, they’re almost as slick as they think they are.

He hadn’t been called to dinner for over two months. The Chom was away somewhere, or so the gossip went. He didn’t know if he missed it or not. The food was better than he got in his cell, but the company took his appetite away.