Silence is Deadly (8 page)

Hands seized him and threw him to the ground. His pot shattered; the contents went sprawling. Looking up, he saw one of the black-caped assistant priests positioned over him with a multiple-thonged hand whip upraised.

Darzek launched himself at the priest’s legs and sent him toppling backward. The same instant the priest crashed to the pavement, Darzek was on his feet. He leaped aside as the second black-cape’s whip came down. One lash struck his arm, sliced through the tunic, left a line of oozing blood. Stung by the pain, enraged at the unexpected, cowardly attack, Darzek seized the young priest, picked him up bodily, and hurled him at his fellow, who had just regained his feet and was advancing menacingly with whip upraised. Both crashed to the ground, and neither moved.

Darzek looked about him, hand pressed to his bleeding arm. He stood in the black circle at the base of the soaring Winged Beast, and he was surrounded by black-caped, whip-armed priests. They advanced on him slowly, in a tightening circle. He saw no way through it, so he stood still and waited.

Then one priest stepped out of the circle and approached him. Darzek acted before he could raise his whip. He charged, dove, knocked the priest backward. The two of them crashed through the circle, taking another pair of priests with them. The three priests landed heavily, with Darzek atop the one he had charged. He sprang to his feet at once and darted away.

He did not look back until he had reached the first row of vendors; but the priests were not following him. They stood quietly in a group, and a male in sailor’s garb, wearing the high hat of a captain, was facing them.

Darzek did not wait for the denouement. He quickly lost himself in the crowd of shoppers. A moment later he encountered the sign of a manipulator, a doctor of external medicine. (A doctor of internal medicine was called a purger.) He went in and for a copper coin had his wound dressed. The doctor applied a fragrant herbal liquid to the bandage and tied it expertly. He asked no question about the source of the wound, which was just as well—Darzek hadn’t been able to think of an answer. He preferred not to admit that he had absently—and stupidly—walked through the holy circle of the Winged Beast, and a priest had whipped him.

He bought another pot and filled it with strongly scented merchandise. Then he left the mart, walking up one of the narrow lanes of artisans to the boulevard, where he seated himself in the park, bought a goblet of cider from a vendor, and in addition treated himself to a strange sort of sandwich which was a small loaf of pie-shaped bread with the meat filling intermixed and baked with the dough. It made a satisfying meal for him and gave him some fortification for the trek home.

He walked along the boulevard, studying the pink cobblestoned surlanes that connected with it. He had no difficulty in picking out the one he had traveled that morning. He followed it for more than a kilometer, and suddenly it took a sharp zig he did not remember and widened into a flower bedecked oval he knew he had not seen before.

He turned back immediately, found the boulevard again, and picked another surlane. This time he was certain he had the right one, but he walked all the way to the city gates without recognizing the house he was seeking.

At dusk he was back at the boulevard again. He selected another lane and walked it until the darkness became total and he no longer could distinguish the color patterns of the houses.

Not until then did he admit that he was hopelessly lost.

CHAPTER 6

It was midnight, with all of Kamm’s moons high in the sky, when Darzek found the warehouse. He knew that he could not go on much longer, that he had to find a place to rest. The crowning irony was that by Kammian standards he was rich. The coins he had picked up so casually amounted to a small fortune; and yet he had no notion of how to find an inn or even a flophouse. He did not even know whether Kamm had such things.

He needed a place to rest, but he also had to contrive a new disguise that he could wear with confidence. After the fiasco in the mart, every black-caped priest in Northpor would be on the lookout for the perfumer who had profaned the holy circle. He had to find the uniform of a different occupation, preferably one that he could perform; and as far as he knew, on the entire world of Kamm there wasn’t any.

Peering through a window, he saw, in the warehouse’s dimly moonlit interior, a bin filled with something that might have been clothing. The building’s door was multiply hinged and secured with a crude wood lock. Reminding himself that noise didn’t matter, Darzek pounded the tough wood with a rock and failed to dent it. Then he remembered his knife, and he quickly picked it.

He opened one of the hinged sections and slipped silently into the building. For a dozen steps he tiptoed. Then he stomped a foot and said aloud, sternly, “You don’t have to, dammit! You can fall over things and slam doors and break everything in the place, and no one can hear you!”

The habits of a lifetime did not respond to logic. He continued to tiptoe.

He went directly to the bin; but the contents proved to be large sacks of a coarsely woven material. These would have provided him with a bed, but he knew that anyone finding a professional craftsman, a perfumer, asleep in such a place would have his curiosity aroused in more ways than Darzek was prepared to satisfy.

Darzek felt his way from bin to bin, still walking quietly; but the other bins were empty or contained only more sacks. Despairingly he turned to leave.

A faint noise overhead caused him to look up. A large trap door in the ceiling was open. So was a vent in the roof directly above it. A stream of moonlight clearly delineated the face peering down at him.

It was a child, a female whose Earth age might have been nine or ten. Her appearance starkly contrasted with those of the children Darzek had seen in the mart that day. Her hair was its natural, rather grubby color, arranged in a matted tangle instead of a piled hairdo. She was skinny and obviously undernourished, and she had an unwashed, unhealthy look about her. She wore only an undergarment, something like a baggy slip of coarse cloth.

She leaned forward, and her fingers moved.
What are you looking for?

He hesitated. Then, feeling that he had nothing to lose, he raised his hands and answered.
Clothes.

The dark, serious eyes regarded him steadily. Then her fingers spoke again.
Come up.

Before Darzek could reply, a rope ladder dropped through the opening. He regarded it uncertainly for a moment; but he still had nothing to lose, so he climbed up.

The child had disappeared when he reached the top. The upper floor had rows of giant crocks down the center and along the walls were enormous bins filled with grain. Darzek looked about for the child.

She stepped from behind a crock at the far end of the building and gestured to him. She had raised a section of the flooring, and she was fumbling in a sack like those he’d seen on the lower level. It was her secret hiding place, and from it she was pulling garments and arranging them into sets.

Whose clothing is it?
Darzek asked, holding his fingers under her nose as he spoke because the light there was dim. He didn’t want the child to get into trouble.

My father’s,
she answered.

Darzek held his fingers under her nose again.
Where’s your father?

The Winged Beast took him.

He examined one of the sets of clothing. It was work apparel, dull brown in color, and it seemed clean and smelled fresh, but there was no hat or cape or apron.

He asked,
What was your father’s work?

Sweep,
she answered.

Earlier that night he had seen crews of males in the distance, sweeping nabrula manure from the lanes by torchlight. By sheer accident he had found clothing for the one job on Kamm he could perform.

The child disappeared the moment he began to undress. He stripped to his undergarment. Then he removed all of the coins from his perfumer’s clothing and fashioned a money belt from a leg wrapping he found with her father’s clothing. He concealed most of the coins around his waist. Then he dressed himself.

When he finished, he saw the child standing on a crock at the other end of the building, looking out of a high window. He wondered how she lived and whether anyone looked after her. When she saw him walking toward her, she scrambled down and hurried to meet him. He held up his discarded perfumer’s clothing.
Can this be sold?

She fingered it as carefully as a tailor, examining with a scowl the cut left by the whip, holding the cape up to the light to inspect its lining.
Yes,
she answered.

Will you accept it in payment for your father’s clothing?

She smiled and hunched her shoulder affirmatively.

Where do you live?

She gestured.
Here.

She was a street urchin. He should have been aware that even such a prosperous and beautiful city as Northpor would have its slums, its poor, and its destitute, who lived where they could and scrounged for survival. Perhaps her father had been employed in some way by the warehouse’s owner, and she knew her way in and out and simply continued to live there, in hiding.

They smiled at each other. Her youthful features gave Darzek a new insight into feminine beauty on Kamm: large eyes and perfect features; and, without the towering hairdo and ornate clothing, a delightful, unspoiled freshness.

Her smile illuminated even such drab surroundings as these.

He asked her,
Is there a safe place to sleep?

She led him to the side of one of the bins and removed a panel. The bin’s bottom was slanted steeply to facilitate the flow of grain, leaving a vacant, triangular space between its bottom and the warehouse floor. Sacks were piled there. Darzek crawled into the inviting opening as far as he could and stretched out on the coarse material. He was completely exhausted. He turned to look back; she had replaced the panel. “The time to worry about tomorrow is when it happens,” he told himself. He fell asleep at once.

When he awoke, he could see light through cracks in the end panel. He turned over and stretched. Pain stabbed at his wounded arm, which was throbbing alarmingly. He crawled toward the light and carefully removed his bandage. His entire arm was swollen, but there seemed to be no sign of infection. Awkwardly he replaced the bandage, and then he sat back to meditate his hunger and think what he should do.

His career as a sweep would have to be postponed until he could move his arm effectively. He closed his eyes and reviewed again his blundering attempt to locate the Synthesis headquarters. He had not bothered to learn the cumbersome written language of Storoz. Only a special class of scribes had acquired that knowledge, so it had seemed unlikely that Darzek’s ignorance would embarrass him; but evidently the average citizen had sufficient mastery of the strange glyphs to recognize street signs and his own house number. Darzek had thought he would have no problem in recognizing the glyph above the lintel on the Synthesis headquarters, but on his return, all such designs looked alike to him. He’d thought he couldn’t mistake the pastel-shaded stone of the house and its distinctive pattern, but he’d found a hundred buildings on each lane that looked identical.

Perhaps the beehive-like incense burner would provide him with the clue he needed. The one at the Synthesis headquarters had not been in use, and he had puzzled over its function before setting out. As soon as night came, he should be able to walk about in his sweep clothing and look for a burned-out incense burner.

“Unless,” he told himself ruefully, “they let all of them go out at night.”

The panel opened and the girl looked in. She handed something to him.

It was a sandwich of bread and meat, such as he had eaten the day before. He accepted it with a smile. She ducked back out of sight and returned to offer him a crude wood mug filled with cool cider.

Again she vanished, and this time she returned with a sandwich and mug for herself. She sat down on the pile of sacks and kept her eyes on him while they ate in silence. When they finished, she placed the mugs and the crinkly wrappings from the sandwiches outside the opening. Then she sat back and continued to watch Darzek.

He slipped his sleeve down and showed her the awkwardly tied bandage. She immediately moved to his side, removed the bandage, studied the wound for a moment, and then replaced the bandage, tying it gently but firmly.

She resumed her place, once again keeping her eyes on him. He wondered if she had sold the perfumer’s clothing to buy their food, and if she would be offended if he offered her money. Finally he handed her some coins and told her, For
our next meal.

She smiled at him.

There was much that he wanted to ask her, but he would have to shape his questions so as not to arouse her suspicions. He decided to begin by stating the obvious. He could not remember the fingering for “stranger,” so he said,
I am a non-citizen.

She made no comment.

He asked,
How would I get work as a sweep?