The Urth of the New Sun

Chapter VI — A Death and the Dark

IT WAS the steward. He lay face down in the gangway the worn soles of his carefully polished boots not three cubits from my door. His neck had been nearly severed. A clasp knife, still closed, lay beside his right hand.

For ten years I had worn the black claw I had pulled from my arm beside Ocean. When first I ascended to the autarchy I had often tried to use it, always without result: for the past eight years, I had scarcely given it a thought. Now I took it from the little leathern sack Dorcas had sewn for me in Thrax, touched the steward’s forehead with it, and sought to do again whatever it had been that I had done for the girl in the jacal, the man-ape beside the falls, and the dead uhlan.

Although I have no wish to do so. I will try to describe what happened then: Once when I was a prisoner of Vodalus, I was bitten by a blood bat. There was very little pain, but a sensation of lassitude that grew more seductive every moment. When I moved my foot and startled the bat from its feast, the wind of its dark wings had seemed the very exhalation of Death. That was but the shadow, the foretaste, of what I felt then in the gangway. I was the core of the universe, as we always are to ourselves; and the universe tore like a client’s rotten rags and fell in soft gray dust to nothing.

For a long time I lay trembling in the dark. Perhaps I was conscious. Surely I was not aware of it, nor of anything except red pain everywhere and such weakness as the dead must feel. At last I saw a spark of light; it came to me that I must be blind, and yet if I saw that spark there was some hope, however slight. I sat up, though I was so shaken and weak that it was agony.

The spark appeared again, an infinitesimal flash, less than the gleam that sunlight summons from the point of a needle. It lay in my hand, but was extinct before I realized it, long gone before I could move my stiff fingers and discover them slippery with my blood.

It had come from the claw, that hard, sharp, black thorn that had pricked my arm so long ago. I must have clenched my fist; I had driven the claw into the second joint of the first finger until its point had pierced the skin a second time from within, impaling it like a fishhook. I jerked it out, hardly conscious of the pain, and pushed it back into its sack still wet with my blood.

By then I was sure again that I was blind. The smooth surface on which I lay seemed no more than the floor of the gangway; the paneled wall that my groping fingers discovered once I clambered to my feet might easily have been its wall. Yet the gangway had been well lit. Who would have carried me elsewhere, to this dark place, and made my whole body an agony to me? I heard the moaning of a human voice. It was my own, and I clamped my jaw to silence it.

In my youth, when I had traveled from Nessus to Thrax with Dorcas, and from Thrax to Orithyia largely alone, I had carried flint and steel to kindle fires. Now I had none. I searched my mind and my pockets for something that would give light, but I could hit on nothing better than my pistol. Drawing it, I drew breath too, to shout a warning; and only then thought to cry out for help.

There was no reply. I listened, but could hear no footfall. After making certain the pistol was still at its lowest setting, I resolved to use it.

I would fire a single shot. If I could not see its violet flame, I would know that I had lost my sight. I would consider then whether I wished to lose my life as well while I retained the necessary desperation, or whether I would seek out whatever treatment the ship might offer. (And yet I knew even then that although I — although we — might choose to perish, we could not. What other hope had Urth?)

With my left hand, I touched the wall so that I might align the barrel with the gangway. With the other, I raised my pistol to shoulder height, as a marksman does who shoots at a distance.

A pinprick of light shone before me, like red Verthandi seen through clouds. The sight startled me so much that though it was my injured finger that jerked back the trigger, I was hardly aware of it.

Energy split the dark. In the violet glare, I saw the steward’s body, the half-open door of my stateroom beyond it, a writhing shape, and the flash of steel.

Darkness returned instantly, but I was not blind. Sick, yes; aching in every limb — I felt I had been spun about by a whirlwind and dashed against some pillar — but not blind. Not blind!

Rather, the ship was plunged in darkness as if in night. Again I heard the groan of a human voice, but this voice was not my own. Someone had been in the corridor after all; someone who had meant to take my life, since what I had glimpsed had surely been the blade of some weapon. The diminished beam had seared him as the diminished beams of the Hierodules’ pistols had once seared Baldanders. This had been no giant, I thought, but he still lived as Baldanders had lived; and it might be that he was not alone. Stooping, I groped with my free hand until I found the body of the steward, climbed over it like a crippled spider, and at last managed to creep through the door of my stateroom and bolt it behind me.

The lamp by whose light I had recopied my manuscript was as dark as the gangway lights, but as I fumbled the escritoire to find it, I touched a stick of wax and remembered there was a golden candle too for melting the wax, a candle that lit itself at the pressing of a stud. This ingenious device had been stored with the wax in a pigeonhole, so that to think of it should have been to lay my hand upon it. It was not there, but I soon found it among the litter on the writing board.

Its clear yellow flame shot up at once. By its light I saw the ruin of my stateroom. My clothes had been strewn across the floor, and every seam of every garment ripped out. A sharp blade had opened my mattress from end to end. The drawers of the escritoire had been turned out, my books strewn over the room, the very bags in which my belongings had been carried on board had been slashed.

My first thought was that all this had been mere vandalism; that someone who hated me (and on Urth there had been many such) had vented his fury at not finding me asleep. A little reflection convinced me the destruction had been too thorough for that. Almost at the instant I had left it, someone had entered the stateroom. Doubtless the Hierodules, whose time ran counter to the time we know, had foreseen his arrival and sent the steward for me largely to snatch me from him. Finding me gone, he had searched my belongings for something so small it might have been concealed in the collar of a shirt.

Whatever he had sought, I had possessed only one treasure: the letter Master Malrubius had given me, identifying me as the legitimate Autarch of Urth. Because I had not expected my stateroom to be robbed, I had not concealed it at all, merely putting it in a drawer with some other papers I had brought from Urth; of course it was gone now.

On leaving my stateroom, the searcher had met the steward, who must have stopped him and attempted to question him. That could not be tolerated, since the steward would have been able to describe him to me later. The searcher had drawn his weapon; the steward had tried to defend himself with a clasp knife, but had been too slow. I had heard his scream as I talked with the Hierodules, and Ossipago had prevented me from leaving so that I would not encounter the searcher. So much seemed clear.

But now came the strangest part of the whole affair. When I found the steward’s body, I had tried to reanimate it, using the thorn in place of the true Claw of the Conciliator. I had failed; but then I had failed also on every previous occasion when I had sought to call upon whatever power I had commanded with the true Claw. (First, I believe, when I had touched the woman in our oubliette who had constructed the furnishings of her room from stolen children.)

Those failures, however, had been no more violent than the failure of a word that is not the word of power: one pronounces the word, but the door does not open. So had I touched with the thorn, but no cure or resuscitation had taken place.

This time had been quite different; I had been stunned in a fashion that had left me sick and weak still, and I had not the least notion what it was. Absurd though it may sound, that gave me hope. Something had happened, at least, though it had nearly cost me my life.

Whatever it had been, it had left me unconscious, and the darkness had come. Emboldened by it, the searcher had returned. Hearing my cry for help (which a well-intentioned person would have answered) he had advanced to kill me.

All these thoughts took much less time than I have taken to write about them. The wind is rising now, blowing our new land, grain by grain, to the sunken Commonwealth; but I will write for a little while more before I go to my bower to sleep: write that the only useful conclusion to which they carried me was that the searcher might be lying wounded in the gangway still. If so, I might induce him to reveal his motive and confederates, assuming that he had either. Snuffing the candle, I opened the door as silently as I could and slipped out, listened for a moment, then risked relighting it.

My enemy had gone, but nothing else had changed. The dead steward remained dead, his clasp knife by his hand. The gangway was empty as far as the wavering yellow light could probe it.

Fearing that I would exhaust the candle or it would betray my location, I extinguished it again. At close quarters, the hunting knife Gunnie had found for me seemed likely to be more useful than a pistol. With the knife in one hand and the other brushing the wall, I went slowly down the gangway in search of the Hierodules’ stateroom.

When Famulimus, Barbatus, Ossipago, and I had gone there, I had paid no heed to either the route or the distance; but I could recall each door we had passed, and almost every step I had taken. Though it took me so much longer to return than it had to go the first time, still I knew (or at least believed I knew) precisely when I had arrived.

I tapped on the door, but there was no response. Pressed to it, my ear detected no sounds from within. I knocked again, more loudly, but with no more result; and at last I pounded on it with the pommel of my knife.

When that too was without result, I crept through the dark to the doors on either side (though each was some distance off, and I was sure both were incorrect) and knocked at them as well. No one answered either.

To return to my stateroom would be to invite assassination, and I congratulated myself heartily on having already secured a second lodging. Unfortunately, to reach it by the only route I knew, I would have to pass the door to my stateroom. When I had studied the history of my predecessors and scanned the memories of those whose persons are merged in mine, I had been struck by the number who had lost their lives in a last repetition of some hazardous action — in leading the last charge of a victory, or by risking incognito a farewell visit to some mistress in the city. Recalling the route as I did, I felt I could guess in which part of the ship my new cabin lay; I decided to proceed down the gangway, turn from it when I could, and double back, and so come eventually to my goal.

I shall pass over my wanderings, which were wearying enough to me and need not weary you, my hypothetical reader. It should be enough to say that I found a stairway to a lower level and a gangway that seemed to run beneath the one I had left, but soon ended in another descending stair leading to a maze of walkways, ladders, and narrow passages as dark as the pit, where the floor moved beneath my feet and the air grew ever warmer and more humid.

At length this sweltering air carried to me an odor pungent and oddly familiar. I followed it as well as I could, I who have so often boasted of my memory now sniffing along for what seemed a league at least like a brachet and ready almost to yelp for joy at the thought of a place I knew, after so much emptiness, silence, and blackness.

Then I yelped indeed, because I saw far off the gleam of some faint light. My eyes had grown so used to the dark in those watches of wandering through the entrails of the ship that, faint though the gleam shone, I could see the renitent surface under my feet and the mossy walls about me; I sheathed my knife then, and ran.

A moment later circular habitats surrounded me, and a hundred strange beasts. I had returned to the menagerie where the apports were imprisoned — the gleam proceeded from one of their enclosures. I made my way to it and saw that the creature within was none other than the shaggy thing I had helped to capture. He stood upon his hind legs, with his forelegs braced against the invisible wall that contained him, and a phosphorescent glow rippled along his belly and shone strongly from his handlike forepaws. I spoke to him as I might have to some favorite cat upon returning from a journey, and he seemed to welcome me as a cat might, pressing his furry body to the unseen wall and mewing, regarding me with beseeching eyes.

An instant later his little mouth split in a snarl and his eyes glared like a demon’s. I would have started back from him, but an arm circled my neck and a blade flashed toward my chest.

I caught the assassin’s wrist and stopped the knife without a thumb’s width to spare, then struggled to crouch and throw him over my head.

I have been called a strong man, but he was too strong for me. I could lift him readily enough — on that ship I could have lifted a dozen men — but his legs clamped my waist like the jaws of a trap; I bent to throw him, but I succeeded only in throwing us both to the ground. Frantically I twisted to get away from his knife.

Nearly in my ear, he screamed with pain.

Our fall had brought us inside the habitat, and the shaggy animal’s teeth had fastened on his hand.