The Altar at Asconel (13 page)

A
SHORT
eternity later they were together again, in the Warden’s suite of the palace: the brothers, and those who had most signally served Asconel during its time of terror, among whom were Tigrid Zen and Eunora. The mutant girl sat a little apart, clutching in both hands a big cup
of sweet fruit-juice, while the men relaxed over wine of Asconel’s finest vintage. Tharl had taken a place next to her, as a symbol of apology for the way he had first reacted to the news of her talent.

“That’s what turned the tide for us,” Spartak murmured, thinking of the way Lydis’s robe had fluttered to the ground.

“Well, obviously,” Tiorin agreed from the head of the table around which they had gathered. “It turned my stomach, I tell you frankly, and I’d already begun to suspect something of the sort.”

“But how could Hodat not have known?” Vix snapped. It wasn’t the first time they’d had this discussion, but it was the first time they’d been able to relax during it; up till a few days previous, the business of setting to rights the chaos of a whole planet had kept them busy from waking to sleeping.

Tigrid Zen cleared his throat. “I’ve been making some inquiries. If you’ll forgive my admitting that I probed into the private affairs of your family …?

“Go on,” said Spartak. “It’s one of the chief penalties of being born into a position like ours that our private affairs are of public interest to a good many people.”

“Well put, sir. In fact, what turned up was to your late brother’s great credit. There was no foundation for the common gossip about a liaison between him and Lydis. He’d stuck strictly to his original intention of marrying a woman who’d advantage Asconel’s future by allying us with some other prosperous world. He was deluded into believing that Lydis’s mind-reading was—well—at his service, so to speak, and he flattered and bribed her to make her stay on his side.”

“Where did the marriage story get started, then?” Tiorin asked.

“Who can say?” Tigrid Zen shrugged. “Perhaps she planted the rumor herself. We’ll never know now.”

True enough. The death of her alien parasite had killed her within an hour.

“Speaking of things to people’s credit,” Tiorin murmured, “I don’t believe I ever got around to complimenting you, Eunora. I’m sure Spartak and Vix have stood deputy for
me, but now things are less hectic than they were, I must thank you. And ask you something, too.”

He paused. Everyone grinned broadly. They had become perfectly accustomed to Eunora’s talent, and the last trace of the Empire’s anti-mutant policy had faded even from Tharl’s mind.

“How I withstood the probing of both Lydis and Shry while I was giving the flowers to Bucyon?” Eunora nodded. “I don’t think I shall ever know. All I remember is the sense of shock which I had when I realized the two things I hadn’t known beforehand: first, that Lydis was directly in contact with Belizuek, and second, that Shry was also, but far more—more firmly.”

“The parasitic growth on his back,” Spartak put in, “must have weighed as much as he did.”

“And felt like it,” Eunora agreed grimly. “All I can say is that when I reacted to the shock, I must have forced myself into the identity I’d taken on. I was just a simple-minded little girl, over-awed at being in the great man’s presence, scared at my own daring in offering him the flowers.…I blanked out until I came to under the stand half an hour later, and then I had to hide to keep out of the way of all the people who were fleeing from this final horror, the exposure of Lydis.”

“But that’s what turned the tide, as I said,” Spartak repeated. “Even with Belizuek dying, and cut off from mental contact with his slaves; even with Bucyon killed in front of them, there were people in that crowd who’d staked their futures on Bucyon, and to the Big Dark with the rest of the citizens—let ‘em rot!”

Tiorin’s face darkened. “Don’t I know it! Most of them came fawning to me directly, saying didn’t I want the cooperation of those who had been administering the planet under Bucyon because they knew all the ropes now.… Some of them were men I’d known in father’s day, too. And of course, a lot more of them tried to bribe their way off-world. But we caught most of them, I think.”

“And got their cooperation,” Tigrid Zen rumbled. “If not exactly in the way they hoped. We’re going to have the best harvest in years, both by land and sea, thanks to their bare-handed efforts.”

“Excuse me, sirs,” Tharl put in diffidently. “Something I’ve been wondering … How
was
it that killing the—the main Belizuek got rid of all the others so easily?”

“Hmmm?” Spartak turned his head. “Oh, yes. I wasn’t absolutely right in what I told you back at Penwyr, but nearly so. Remember I told you that Belizuek was insane, and especially afraid of competition, even from his own derived images?”

Tharl nodded, frowning with concentration but making a gallant effort to follow Spartak’s exposition.

“For fear that one of his—ah—duplicates should achieve independence and usurp his uniqueness, he’d made sure the mental linkage between them was very tight. It proved too tight. The effect of death on the central organism was reflected in a sort of psychic paralysis of all the others; they could have existed as separate entities, but he’d forbidden them to. They weren’t actually dead till they were exposed to the air, but effectively they were in a sort of trance due to the shock of telepathically experiencing death.”

He shrugged, and Tharl muttered thanks.

“I’ll tell you something, sir,” he added after a moment. “You came to me later and congratulated me on the uncanny rightness of the timing for the last bolt I fired, yes?”

“Agreed!” Tiorin said warmly. “It was a real crisis point—”

“Well, sir,” Tharl broke in, looking unaccountably depressed, “I’d saved that bolt, for a mixture of all sorts of reasons. First, I was going to save it for myself; then I thought, if I’m discovered, all I need do is jump down this shaft I’m in—a fall of a hundred-odd feet to a rock-hard floor should finish me off. So instead I saved it in case you were wrong about the way to kill Belizuek. I figured I could at least kill Bucyon if he went through with his plan to sacrifice you.”

“But you fired again before I struck Bucyon down,” Vix objected.

“Yes, sir. I thought and thought, and for a long time I was worried because Spartak was standing so close to Bucyon, I couldn’t get a clear shot. Then finally I decided it was taking too long for things to settle down—I couldn’t have completed the job—and there was a clear shot at Shry, who was after all Belizuek’s chief spokesman and chaplain to
Bucyon and all the rest of it. I figured if Belizuek was already dead, he’d be in a really frantic state, and he wasn’t—he was calling people up to help him, and peering into the hole my bolts had made, as I could see clearly through the telescope on my gun.…So I said, ‘What’s more likely to put a stiff dose of fear in their guts than to see Belizuek’s best-beloved shriveled like a leaf in a fire?’—and I let the last bolt go.”

“To which decision we owe the fact that we’re here now,” Tiorin said soberly. “Along with some other things, such as that Bucyon wasn’t an able man, just a greedy and power-hungry one. And careless! Look at how far we’ve managed to come in the short time since we took over again! I swear, there’s more talent, more know-how, more skill on Asconel than any other world this side of the present Imperial boundary. If he’d made use of the resources under his hand, no one, not even the Empire at its height, could have toppled him.”

“That was Belizuek’s fault, not his,” Spartak contradicted. “Belizuek liked to push his subjects down to the mud. Ignorant, blindly adoring, they’d take anything he offered and come back pleading for more.”

“In any case, it’s due as much to Spartak as to anyone that we have regained so much lost ground,” Vix put in. “For an unpractical person, he’s worked miracles of organization and administration.”

Tiorin gave a nod of agreement, suddenly looking very tired.

“May I ask a question, Warden?” Tigrid Zen said formally.

“Go ahead.”

“Are your brothers going to stay here now? I feel Asconel needs them still”

Tiorin glanced at the other two, inviting them to speak for themselves.

“No,” Vix said gruffly, and got to his feet. He paced across to the window and stood with his back to them as he went on. “No, a fighting man is a center of discord on a peaceful world, and that’s what Asconel is going to be from now on. I’ll away back to my roving. And—and there’s something else, too.”

He didn’t elaborate, but neither of his brothers had to ask what he meant. Vineta had died during the day following their capture by the priests from the injuries sustained when she was shot down. And for the first time in his life, the loss of one of his women had touched his heart. He had said privately that even if it was his home, he could not bear to remain on the world where Vineta had died.…

“You, Spartak?” Tiorin said, to distract them from the vaguely embarrassed silence that followed.

“No, I shan’t stay here either,” Spartak said at length. “Oh, I’ll not be leaving till I’m sure Asconel is on the proper orbit again, but in a year or so I’ll say farewell.”

“I shall regret your loss,” Tiorin said quietly. “But—as you wish. Back to your studies on Annanworld, then?”

“Annanworld? Oh no.” Spartak gave a smile that made him look briefly like a wild beast.

“Why not?” Vix demanded, surprised. He turned away from the window to face them again. “The way I understood it, your order would take you back if you didn’t soil your hands with violence while you were away, and everything you did to help overthrow Bucyon was of the nature of—well—of scheming rather than fighting. Or are they so super-subtle they’d define what you did to him as violence?”

“No, we distinguish force from violence, and force is occasionally unavoidable.…But why should I say ‘we’?” Spartak leaned back in his chair. “I’m not returning, I’m sure of that.

“No, you see, after much cogitation I’ve come to a conclusion. My Superior, Father Erton, was half right as well as half wrong when he warned me against leaving for Asconel. The rightness lay in his saying that to stand against the—what do they call it?—the onset of the Long Night was beyond any man’s powers. What we’ve done here on Asconel is good, and worth it, but it’s not turned the tide of galactic decline, has it? Only built an island around which the tide will flow. Perhaps the clearest warning lies in the fact that one mentally sick survivor of a race which grew weary and departed before we left our original system could bring one of our finest planets into total subjugation.

“I’m going to look for the seeds of the first truly human galactic conquest. I’m going to the rim, to the worlds where for ten thousand years the Empire shipped its mutants and its misfits, and where rumor says men—yes, men, for they’re born of human loins—build their own starships instead of borrowing the leavings of another species. I don’t know exactly where to make for, but a good start might be to resume our interrupted journey to Nylock—hm, Eunora?” He shot a twinkling grin at the mutant girl.

“And when I find someone in a position to do something, I shall report on the existence of a world called Brinze. For the priests of Belizuek were human too, though they’d sold their birthright and their power of free thought. And before I die I hope to see the people there set at liberty as those of Asconel have already been.”

The words died in the silent room. Finally Vix went to Spartak’s side and stood gazing down at him.

“You’re right,” he said. “And if you want a ship and a pilot, say the word.” He put out his hand.

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