Strata (18 page)

Silver considered this. ‘True,’ she said, and splintered the bars with a backhand swipe. ‘If we’re baddies, let’s be
bad
.’

Marco stepped forward with two knives levelled to throw as the demon wriggled through the gap. There was a smear of pink blood around his wound. Would it have helped the dead archer to know that a kung in a fighting rage was practically awash with regenerative enzymes? It had been hard enough for earthmen to see kung fight on with their flesh healing like boiling wax.

‘I do not trust this creature. Grab him!’

Silver shot out an arm and caught Sphandor by his scaly tail. With the other hand she unwrapped a length of cable from her waist and knotted it several times around the creature’s neck. Sphandor screeched.

‘
WHERE
ARE
YOU,
SOIGNATORIE,
UNSORE, DILAPIDATORE
—’ he began.

‘Shut up,’ advised Marco, taking the other end of the cable from Silver. ‘All ready? Soon people will overcome their fears.’

They rose quickly. Marco hovered fifty metres up and looked down at the demon, a tall shadow in the moonlight. Sphandor shrugged. The big wings unfolded.

‘
I
SHALL
REQUIRE
A
RUN
TO
TAKE
OFF.
’

Kin watched Marco bob above him as the demon loped across the ground, the wide wings rattling. Halfway across he brought them down with a
whump
that threw up a dust cloud, and he hung there for several seconds while the wings hammered on the air. Then he rose ponderously, like a giant heron.

When he was level with them, but a hundred metres away, he took a length of cable in his talons.

‘
FAREWELL,
FOOLS
!’ he bellowed, and tugged. A look of dismay crept over his face.

With the belt’s lateral stabilizers full on Marco hung immovable in the air. When he reeled in the line no amount of wing flapping could budge him. When the horned head was just a few metres away the kung whispered: ‘I’m told you can read minds …’

‘
ONLY
SURFACE
THOUGHT,
LORD
.’

‘Read mine.’

After a second Sphandor’s face was a mask of terror.

With the creature in tow they moved slowly, because the wide wings acted as an air brake. The demon held a loop of cable in both hands and glided behind them unsteadily, peppering them alternately with entreaties and curses.

The smoke no longer dominated the sky. It
was
the sky. Winds in the upper air had teased it out into a ragged mushroom.

Apart from the background noise behind them they flew in silence, Kin and Silver following a little behind Marco. Finally Kin’s radio chimed.

‘This is Silver, transmitting on your suit frequency only, Kin. You had something to say? If you move the switch to position four Marco will not hear,’ the voice added.

‘Silver, he slaughtered them! They didn’t have a chance!’

Silver made a noncommittal noise. ‘They outnumbered him ten to one.’

‘They weren’t expecting a kung, damn it!’ Kin felt the bottled up words rushing to be said. ‘He enjoyed it! You saw him, he even killed ones who were running away, he threw … their only crime was that they happened to be in his way, it was completely inhu—’ She choked on the word.

After a while Silver said: ‘Quite.’

Kin thought about the first contact with the kung. Men had already met the shandi, who apart from their duelling had no concept of warfare and viewed mankind’s ragged history with barely-concealed horror. So the first ship to land on Kung had no weapons aboard at all.

Five deaths served to convince men that, considered on the galactic scale, they were gentle and peace-loving. Perhaps it had been worth it.

‘We all think we understand each other,’ Kin heard Silver say. ‘We eat together, we trade, many of us pride ourselves on having alien friends – but all this is only possible, only possible, Kin, because we do not fully comprehend the other. You’ve studied Earth history. Do you think you could understand the workings of the mind of a Japanese warrior a thousand years ago? But he is as a twin to you compared with Marco, or with myself. When we use the word “cosmospolitan” we use it too lightly – it’s flippant, it means we’re galactic tourists who communicate in superficialities. We don’t
comprehend
. Different worlds, Kin. Different anvils of gravity and radiation and evolution.

‘If that winged creature is used to reading human minds, no wonder Marco’s terrified it.’

Marco’s voice cut in, spiky with suspicion.

‘What are you two talking privately about?’

‘Female hygiene,’ said Silver crisply. ‘Marco, shouldn’t we land again? We should interrogate this creature.’

‘I agree. I will watch for a suitable site. I am sorry to have interrupted your conversation.’ There was a click as he switched out.

There was a noise that might have been a shand chuckling. Then Silver said, ‘There is another minor matter, Kin. Are ravens a very common bird?’

‘Hmm? I don’t think so. Why?’

‘There has been one in the sky ever since we left Eirick. Sometimes it merely tags behind, sometimes it flies a parallel course.’

‘It could be just coincidence,’ said Kin doubtfully.

‘We’ve been flying at well over a hundred miles an hour at times, Kin.’

‘Good grief! You mean it’s keeping up with us?’

‘Yes. No, don’t try and find it. It’s well beyond human visual range, as it doubtless intends. It’s only by accident I saw it once or twice, and then I started watching for it. At the moment I’m thinking in terms of a small flying robot.’

‘There was the raven in the ship,’ said Kin. ‘It got out of the box, remember? And before that it had arrived mysteriously at Kung Top. But we killed it in vacuum, didn’t we?’

‘I wonder if we did?’

They passed over a village where the only movement was in the flames of a burning house, and Marco cut in briefly to tell Kin to take Sphandor’s tether while he went lower to investigate.

The demon hung a few metres away, wings pounding the air heavily. In the early morning light Kin looked at him closely for the first time. She looked again. There was no doubt about it. He was fuzzy around the edges.

‘I see it too,’ said Silver. ‘As if it’s slightly out of focus. How odd.’

Sphandor regarded them sullenly.

‘
YOU MEAN TO KILL ME,
’ he whimpered.

‘Not unless you attempt to do us harm,’ said Kin.

‘
THE
SKINNY
ONE,
THE
KALI-ARMED,
HE
WISHES TO
KILL
ME
.’

‘That’s just his general wish to the universe in general, not specific to you,’ said Kin. ‘I won’t let him harm you.’

‘
I
WILL
IMPLORE
BERITH
TO
GIVE
YOU
GOLD! TRESOLAY
I
SHALL
SUMMON
TO
MAKE
YOUR BEAUTY
EVEN
MORE
…’

Marco was a dot on what, if it had been more than just a muddy open space, would have been called the village square.

‘The place is empty,’ came his voice, ‘unless you count corpses.’

They tethered Sphandor to a post in what had been the village forge. Kin touched his skin gingerly, and under her fingers the demon appeared to be vibrating like a wineglass in a concert hall. Touching what looked like skin felt like fur, sticky with static.

A puzzle. She dozed off in the shade, watching Silver strip panels off the dumbwaiter and take the workshop manual from its drawer.

When she awoke the sun was high and ’waiter modules were stacked neatly in the dust. Silver was half visible behind a pile of panels.

Through half closed eyelids Kin watched Sphandor. He was hopping around anxiously on his tether, sometimes darting forward and passing a tool to the shand. When Silver’s hand came out and groped in the air over a make-shift brazier for the soldering iron she’d made out of a piece of scrap copper, Sphandor reached into the coals and withdrew the rod by its glowing end, laying the other carefully in Silver’s black palm.

‘He just picked up a piece of red hot iron,’ said Kin, ‘hot end first.’

Silver looked at her blankly, then looked at Sphandor, then at the rod in her hand, then shrugged and turned back to the ’waiter’s innards with a preoccupied air.

‘It is a function of demons that they can withstand heat,’ came her muffled voice.

‘How’s the ’waiter?’

‘Only superficial damage, but you know how it is – one has to remove half the machinery just to reach one wire. I’ve nearly finished.’

Kin stood up, stretched, and wandered out into the square. She remembered something, and looked up at the sky.

‘There is a raven perched on the big stone building over yonder,’ said Silver behind her.

‘Do you think it’s some sort of spy?’

‘What do you think?’

‘I think it’s some sort of spy.’

‘That’s what I think.’

Kin turned round. ‘Where’s Marco?’ she asked. ‘It’s time we interrogated wrinklebelly here.’

‘
I
PLEAD
.’

Silver slotted the last module into the dumb-waiter and started to clip the panels back before answering.

‘He said he was going to have a look around. I told him about the raven.’

Kin shook her head. ‘Not clever,’ she said. ‘Now he’ll want to catch it. Sphandor could tell us more. About matter transmission, for one thing.’

Silver glanced up sharply, then looked at the demon. He cringed. The shand walked over and stared at him, which made him attempt to shuffle behind the pole. Finally she took a magnifier out of the ’waiter toolkit and held it against his skin.

‘Commendable reasoning,’ she said at last. ‘What gave you the idea, Kin?’

‘He shouldn’t be able to fly, even with chest muscles like that. And at that weight he should have legs like an elephant. And there’s the fuzziness, of course, and the slight vibration.’

Silver switched off the magnifier.

‘I imagine the fuzziness is due to a malfunction in the transmitter,’ she said. ‘Well, well. It’s a neat solution to the transmission problem, I’ll give them that. Very neat. Frankly, Kin, you can stuff the disc. It’s just a toy, a nasty toy. But this is something worth having.’

‘Right. Let’s find Marco.’

They found him inside the stone building that dominated the village. At one end of it was a square tower, but he was standing like a statue in the gloom of the main hall. He turned as they came in, and in two of his hands were a pair of long candlesticks.

‘What’s this place?’ asked Kin, staring up into the shadowy roof.

‘A house of religion, I think,’ said the kung. ‘I was considering investigating the tower. There appears to be a stairway inside.’ He was unnaturally cheerful, and looked at her in an odd way.

‘The view from the top should be extensive. We could plan the rest of the day’s flight without putting a further drain on the belts’ batteries.’

‘But the belts are perfectly—’ Kin began, and stopped. Marco was semaphoring wildly with his two free arms.

‘We must conserve our power!’ Echoes bounced back from the depths of the building. He looked at Kin and pressed a finger to his lips for silence.

‘Stay here, Silver,’ he said. ‘I want to show Kin this carving.’

But when she went to step forward he pressed her back with one hand and walked away alone. He moved the two candlesticks expertly. It sounded as though two people were walking across the floor.

He’s going really mad this time, Kin thought. Silver was smiling to herself.

Marco came back. ‘Now let’s all go up the tower,’ he said. ‘This way, folks.’ He handed the sticks to Kin and pointed to the further end of the hall, then soft-footed it towards the open door. They saw him flatten himself against the wall.

‘Well, let’s go,’ said Kin weakly, and started swinging the sticks. There was some difficulty in getting Silver up the winding staircase at the far end, and Kin felt a real fool helping two sticks to climb stairs.

‘Learned something very interesting about the demon, Marco,’ said Silver. Then she replied in a remarkable impersonation of a kung: ‘What was that, Silver? Well, you know matter transmission has been tried and doesn’t work? Well, it does on the disc. How do you mean? Kin noticed it.