Exile (12 page)

On Earth, Kamath had played once, at the age of three, in a meadow under a bird-blue sky with the warmth of So!, hanging like a ball in the air, on her skin. The toasty feel of that warmth was like nothing else she had felt since, and its loss was the great loss of her life. When her parents fled the consolidation of Sarat Shar's power, they tore their daughter not only from her birth home, which became the

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Al Sarrantonio

eastern governorship of Shar's empire, but from the rest of her life as well.

The warmth of Sun on skin

In dreamy rumination within her hard shell, Ka-math Clan found that her feet had taken her unheedful to her destination. There were no pedestrians to move out of her way here, for this, the most backward and dangerous of the city's streets, was deserted at any time of day or night. And anyone wondering at her visit here would keep such thoughts to themselves.

A day of doors. She stood before another door, opened and closed it behind her. It always felt damp to her touch, so out of harmony with the thing that brought her here. Inside, it was dark as any midnight.

"You have come again, my queen?" his voice, a little frailer than the last time; as it had been frailer last time and the time before that. "You have come to see old Quog again?"

"I have come," Kamath Clan said.

"And is it the same you seek as before?"

"As always," Kamath said.

"Very well."

He emerged from the darker shadows of the room into mere shadow. He was indeed a man, of sorts. He had told Kamath that first time, the one time when he felt obligated to explain himself, that he had once been a handsome specimen.

"But the Puppet Death," he had said, "changed all that. It twisted and turned me and pulled me
every which way. It danced on me, all right! Oh, I was dashing before the disease, my queen. I was straight-backed and black-haired and had good hands and feet; I could dance, and could make things with my delicate fingers. But afterward, my wife left me and my daughter shunned me. But I took a bit of what I was and came here."

It was then that he had shown Kamath Clan what she had come to see. And it was what he again showed her now.

"Soon I will be gone, my queen!" hisfrail voice said. The sideways appearance of his arm-thin face, like a melted substance, plastic or cheese, one layer over the other, never failed to startle even Kamath Clan. In the midst of this visage were his organs of sight and smell, pressed to mere slits, and his mouth, a vertical oval hole.

The rest of his body was sloped sideways, also, though not as severely as his face and head; his walking was of a shuffling kind, baby steps by deformed feet.

"Hard to believe I've been this way since I was eighteen!" Quog said. He moved closer, giving the queen, with her unwavering stare, a good look at him; this was part of a ritual of cruelty and trade they had worked out long ago.

"Think you would have gone for me then, my queen?" Quog whispered breathily through his mouth hole.

"I think not," the queen said.

"Nor I you! Ha!" Quog said.

Trying not to show her need, which was a useless thing with this man, Kamath said, "You will provide me."

"Of course! Have I ever denied you, my queen?" He waited for her response; which was, "No."

"But before long, when these soft bones are in

the dust heap, you will be denied, eh?"

"Perhaps."

"Perhaps?" A trace of irritation entered the old man's panting words. "Do you think there are others like me?"

"Not like you. But what you have—"

"Can be duplicated?" Now he was angry. "Do you think so? Do you think I am so foolish as to think you haven't tried? You who have a chemical, a potion, for everything? Have you
tried?"

His slitted eyes were as wide as they ever grew; within the vertical, flesh-flapped cavities the queen saw tiny fierce eyes, red with rheum.

"I have tried," she said.

"Of course you have! And failed! Ha!"

The queen waited; as did the old man, who stood panting tiny breaths through his mouth.

"You will apologize to me, Queen," Quog said finally.

There was silence.

"You will apologize immediately or get out of my home."

Kamath Clan turned her towering body away from the twisted old man.

"You will not take a step toward the door," Quog
said. "I know your needs too well. What you will do is turn and beg this thing of me; get down on your knees, Queen, and beg me!"

The old man was huffing in agitation—either anger or satisfaction.

Kamath Clan stood still.

"Now!"
Quog spat.
"Or be forever banished from my house!"

A moment ticked by, and then Kamath Clan turned slowly and lowered herself to the filthy floor; laying her hands flat upon the boards, she crawled forward, eyes downcast, and lay her forehead on the old man's deformed, sandaled feet.

"Kiss them!"

Kamath Clan lifted her head slightly to kiss the feet, one and then the other; his toes were like gnarled knuckles.

"Lick them! As a dog licks!"

The queen did as she was told.

"Very well," Quog breathed, satisfied. "You may rise."

Head still bowed, Queen Kamath Clan slowly brought herself up to her full height and stood impassively.

Chuckling, Quog said, turning to shuffle into the deeper shadows of the room to the shelves on which rested pots and metal containers and some ancient glass carafes of dark colors, green and red, "You know well, my queen, that all power resides with those who have what is desperately wanted. This," he said, still chuckling weakly, "is the
only
definition of power."

"Yes."

"Ha!" He lingered over various vials, knowing that such action was drawing out her torture.

"Cruelty," he said, the levity gone from his voice, "is something to be learned, though."

Abruptly he chose the canister he sought all along, a nondescript metal tube, one among a few, with one end sealed tightly.

"Two," Queen Clan said.

"No. One now, and one again tomorrow. I want you to return."

His deformed hand held the single slim container out from the shadows to her. Eagerly she took it. "I will return tomorrow."

"Yes, you will."

As she exited, closing the door, this time, behind her, he said, breathing from the shadows, "I was not . . . always cruel. . . ."

"I'
m sorry to report I have no idea where he is," Finance Minister Besh said in an even tone. In this case distance produced boldness, and Besh was well aware that if High Leader Prime Cornelian were standing beside him at this moment instead of sixty million miles away, his unsightly visage a mere image on a wall Screen, Besh's voice would be anything but level.

"I'm sorry to hear your report, Besh," the High Leader said, though he sounded not nearly as interested or upset as the finance minister had thought he would. "I imagine your people are out scurrying about trying to find him?"

"Of course, High Leader," Besh said.

"Good. Let me know if he turns up."

Before Besh could even bow, the Screen went dark, leaving the finance minister with salutations and such dryly stuck in his throat.

Strange,
Besh thought, mildly irritated; he was the kind of man who liked praise for a job well done and considered dressing down appropriate otherwise.

Minister Acron, seated at the conference table behind him, was not quite so contemplative.

"The pup will be found, and when he is I will strangle him myself!" the florid-faced defense minister, newly released from incarceration, shouted. He raised his fist to pound the table, but held it frozen at Besh's request.

"Please," the finance minister, stroking his chin, said. "I must think this through."

"What is there to think through? The King must be caught and dispatched with! There is no greater danger to us!"

"That is true," Besh said, lowering his lanky frame into the nearest chair, "but there are other factors to consider. For instance, who has facilitated his escape?"

"Faulkner, of course!"

Besh waved a hand in dismissal. "I mean besides Faulkner. The boy could not do this alone. It is obvious that Faulkner foresaw his ... present circumstances and alerted the king to their possibility. It is reasonable to suppose that the prime minister also provided the king with a plan of escape and a method to effect it. You say he was told when of the prime minister's demise?"

"At one-thirty in the morning," Acron said impatiently. "One of the bloody assistants alerted him."

"It was Faulkner's machine, no doubt?"

"Yes." Acron's ill temper was growing. "The machine was torn to pieces by my men. It saw nothing. Obviously it was programed by Faulkner to check
on his well-being every fifteen minutes or so. When it discovered—"

"Yes," Besh said, continuing to stroke his chin. "It then went immediately to young Dalin. It was very clever of the prime minister. But now . . ."

"But now what
? Where is he?
"

"There were no obvious clues, I'm afraid, Acron. He seems to have vanished into thin air." Besh continued to rub his chin. "But there are always clues, Acron. Always."

Even in death, Prime Minister Faulkner continued to surprise Dalin Shar with his knowledge. Dalin had spent his entire life sleeping in this particular bedroom—yet he had never had even the faintest knowledge that there was a secret passageway built into the wall next to his bed. It had been put there, Faulkner informed him, by Dalin's father during the same period that the underground rooms had been built in the palace.

Faulkner...

When the door from his bedroom closed behind him, leaving him in a dark corridor with only a slim handlight for guidance, a fear went through him like he had never known before.

For the first time in his life, he felt truly alone.

When his father had been murdered, Dalin had been young, and there had been constant attention and diversions. There had been nursemaids, and there had been ... Faulkner.

It occurred to Dalin now that the prime minister had always been there. Always. From the very beginning, Faulkner had been ever-present, as tutor, adviser, confidant. Never could Dalin recall a time when the prime minister had been unavailable or too busy to listen to whatever petty grievance or problem the king found himself in the middle of. A broken toy, or a nuance in diplomacy—these had been equal things which Faulkner had dealt with in appropriate ways. Though stiff, fussy, punctilious, and often imperious, the prime minister had . always been there.

And now he was gone.

Gone forever.

A pang of something like panic went through Dalin. Even now he could hear the entrance of someone into his bedchambers not twenty inches behind him. Beyond that wall, there were shouts and angry recriminations.

They were looking for him now. No doubt to kill him.

But his panic was not a matter of fear for his own life.

It was that he would have to face what came
next alone.

Without Faulkner.

As the shouts grew louder in the bedroom, Dalin Shar took one step and then another, the pencil beam of his handlight illuminating the dusty, narrow passage before him—and he resolved in his mind that the men who had taken Gorlin Faulkner away from him, who had murdered the man who until now he had not realized was the most valuable friend he had ever had, would pay for what they had done, and pay dearly.

The remainder of Dalin's night was no better than it had begun.

The passageway, which seemed to go on forever, cut first sharply right and then sharply left, narrowing to a seemingly endless series of steps downward before becoming even narrower and continuing its zigzag course. Dalin passed behind many rooms throughout the palace and was able to identify some of them by the sounds without: the frightened chatter of the cooks in the galley, gathered from sleep with the news of the murder within the palace; similar buzzing from the secretaries and clerks, in their separate offices; and, most telling, the angry cries of the Imperial guard being put under arrest to prevent their presumed dedication to Dalin's well-being.

The passageway finally did end, though, and in the spot that the prime minister had told him it would. Dalin emerged in the cellars they had so recently used for offices; immediately, he sought a second passage, easily found though just as well hidden as the first, and just as dark. This one was also possessed of a rank, wet smell, and the habitation of at least one rat, which scurried, red-eyed, away from the handlight's beam to splash off into the darkness.

This passage was wider than the first and proceeded straight for a good way before ending abruptly at a wall, which was inset with footholds leading up through a kind of well.