The Altar at Asconel (4 page)

A
FROWN
of self-directed anger pulling his brows into deep furrows over his nose, Spartak glanced around the lower cabin, barely taking in the pathetic few belongings which bore witness to the occupancy of it by the girl Vineta. He had not meant to spark an argument with Vix; it was simply that ten years on Annanworld had accustomed him to going straight to the point in the interests of exposing the truth, and he had largely forgotten how to use tact. He had been shorn of most of his false conceptions of himself, and was glad to have lost them. But it made no odds that Vix had almost certainly treated his girl the same as he had always treated women—even beating her occasionally. To have told him that she had probably grown tired of him and run off was a stupid error.

Sighing, he cleared away the miscellaneous junk disposed on the shelves and in the drawers. Without his at first realizing, they made a picture to him: a kind of implied portrait of their owner. This curiously shaped seashell, from some planet where the mollusca had a copper-based metabolism to judge by the bluish sheen of the lining; this necklet of rock crystal, pink and blue and yellow; this solido of two smiling elderly folk—her parents, possibly?

It wasn’t until he came to tall closets in the far corner and found half a dozen costumes hanging there, together with a small stringed instrument which he did not recognize, that he checked and started to think seriously about the conclusions he ought to draw. Even then he went ahead with what he had originally intended—changing clothes, putting aside the brown robe of his order in favor of garments not worn since his arrival on Annanworld, but still a fair fit to his body, whose leanness had remained constant since his late adolescence.

There was a reminder in that stringed instrument of his own mother, who had been a wandering singer and teacher. It was the means of getting a living. Surely that, and the clothing, would not have been left behind, no matter how eager she was to escape Vix and lose herself on Annanworld?
And it was still less likely that she should have abandoned small souvenir items, like the solido, which were no burden to carry and presumably held emotional significance for her.

Maybe she went aground to buy something,
he told himself at last, marveling how sluggish his mind had been made by the annoyance his disagreement with Vix had caused.
I must tell Vix not to do anything rash—

In that instant, when he stood with one leg in his old but serviceable breeches of Vellian silk, the ship’s gravity went on, and within seconds he felt the surging of the drive. This was not the slickly smooth operation of a large liner, elaborately maintained for the passengers’ comfort—like the only other vessels in which he had ever flown space. It was the jarring violence of a scoutship stripped for action, without frills, and seemed to vibrate all the way into his belly, triggering a reflex nausea.

He resisted it in near-panic, thinking what foul company Vix would be if he worked out for himself, many systems distant, what Spartak had just deduced from the clothing still in the cabin.

He struggled out into the corridor, and as he turned from sliding shut the cabin door, caught a glimpse of movement at the foot of the companionway leading up to the control room. It was too brief, and the drive-induced nausea was now too strong, for him to get a clear view of the person who had gone by, but the obvious deduction was that Vineta was aboard after all.

He had no time to work out where she might have been hiding; he was completely unfamiliar with this design of ship, and if Vix hadn’t found her she must have concealed herself very thoroughly. Or else Vix himself wasn’t yet aware of all the nooks and crannies in his prized new possession.…

No, rational thought was beyond him at the moment. Wait till the drive settled down to free-space operation—that would be soon enough to solve the riddle.

He was on the point of returning to his cabin when he heard the cry.

“Spa-ar-tak!”

And the drive went off.

The shock was like a dash of cold water, clearing the fog from his brain. With reflex speed he made for the companionway, scrambling up it with the agility of a Sirian ape.

The shock was renewed as soon as he saw what was happening in the control room. It was no girl that he had glimpsed passing this way. It was a man, huge and bulky as a Thanis bull, his hair wild, his body cased in crude leather harness and his feet in steel-tipped boots, who now was wrestling chest-to-chest with the tough but far smaller Vix, overbearing the redhead in a crushing embrace.

Vix tried to butt him on the nose, failed as the attacker jerked his head back, lost his balance to one of the steel-tipped boots as it cracked against his ankle, and went slamming down to the floor. He had had no time to draw his sidearms, obviously—perhaps he’d mistaken the sound of the stranger’s approach for Spartak’s—but he’d done well in the first instance, for a short sword lay at the foot of the control board: his assailant’s, logically, which he had somehow contrived to dash from his grip.

Horrified, Spartak saw the two antagonists crash to their full length, saw the stranger break Vix’s grasp on his right wrist and force his hand closer and closer to the redhead’s throat. Wild pleading showed in the green eyes, but there was no breath available for him to call for aid again.

To renounce his oath so soon? To pick up the sword from the floor and drive it into the stranger’s back? It could be done, but—

And then he remembered, as clearly as if he were hearing it in present time, the voice of one of his earliest tutors on Annanworld. “Always bear in mind that the need for violence is an illusion. If it seems that violence is unavoidable, what this means is that you’ve left the problem too late before starting to tackle it.”

Spartak dodged the struggling men and made for the control board. As he scanned the totally unfamiliar switches, he heard a sobbing cry from Vix—“Spartak, Spartak, he’s going to strangle me!”

Time seemed to plod by for him, while racing at top speed for his brother. But at last he thought he had it. He put one hand on the back of the pilot chair, and with
the other slammed a switch over past its neutral point to the opposite extreme of its traverse.

Instantly he went head over heels. But he was prepared for this; in effect, he fell to the ceiling like a gymnast turning a somersault, and landed on his feet with a jar that shook him clear to the hips. The universe rolled insanely around him, and through a swirling mist of giddiness he saw that what he had intended had indeed come about. Locked in their muscle-straining embrace, Vix and the unknown had crashed ten feet to the ceiling as the gravity reversed, and now Vix was on top—and breaking free! For the force of the upside-down fall had completely stunned the stranger.

Spartak reached out, clutching Vix by the loose baldric on which he normally slung his energy-gun, and reversed the gravity once more, restoring its normal direction. The attacker slammed to the floor again while he and Vix fell rather less awkwardly; this time, he moved the switch with careful slowness, not exceeding a quarter-gravity till he felt his soles touch the floor.

And then he said, “Who is he?”

“I—I—” Vix put his hands to his temples and pressed, breathing in enormous sobbing gasps. “What did you
do?
”

“I put the gravity over to full negative.”

“But—” Vix began to recover. “But—how? Do you know these ships, then?”

“No, I’ve never seen one before. But it followed logically. There’s always an automatic gravity compensator on a starship, for high-gee maneuvering in normal space, and it seemed reasonable to expect a manual over-ride on a vessel like this which might get damaged during combat.”

“You mean you just took a chance on it, while he was throttling the life out of me?” Vix exploded.

Clearly the redhead had suffered one of the worst frights of his life. Spartak hesitated.

“Why didn’t you just pick up his sword and run him through with it?” Vix blasted on.

“Ah—well, if I’d done that,” Spartak countered in the calmest tone he could manage, “he wouldn’t have been able to tell us who he is and why he set on you. As it is,
here he’s no more than stunned, and you’re alive to ask him the right questions.”

“I guess so,” Vix agreed sullenly, and gave the dazed attacker a prod in the ribs with his foot. “I look forward to beating some answers out of him, at that. Here, I’l put some lashings on him before he wakes up.”

He started to a corner chest in search of ropes.

“I don’t think you’ll have to beat the information out,” Spartak ventured. “I have some stuff with me which will probably make him talk a lot faster than that.”

“Such as what?” Vix found a length of braided leather and a short flexible chain, and started to bind the man’s limbs.

“I—uh—brought some medical things I thought might come in handy,” Spartak said, swallowing hard. Ever since his childhood, fighting and violence had physically upset him, and the glee in Vix’s voice as he proposed torturing the man to make him talk had picked up the backwash of the nausea from the drive and redoubled it. “I’ll go fetch it right away!”

But first, he told himself, he’d better take a dose of something to calm his own stomach.

He was at the door of the lower cabin, fumbling to open the sliding panel, when he felt the knocking beneath his feet.

Astonished, he stared down at the flooring of featureless metal plates. The knocking came again, more vigorously, and his eyes suddenly spotted a small cluster of bright new scratches at one end of the plate on which he stood.

“By the moons of Argus!” he exploded, and dropped to his knees to lever up the plate and push it aside.

In the compartment beneath him lay the missing Vineta, a crude cloth gag in her mouth, her clothing torn and a huge bruise discoloring the soft olive skin of her right cheek. She was small and slender, but even so her assailant had had to cram her by main force into the tiny space under the floor.

Frantically he lifted her out and set her on her feet; she stood for a second holding on to him, shaking out her space-black hair, then seemed to recover a little and let
go of his arm. He made to remove the gag, but she shook her head and tore it out herself.

“Are you Vix’s brother?” she whispered. Her voice was pitifully hoarse.

“Yes—yes, I’m Spartak.”

“Is he—?”

“He’s all right. He’s up in the control room tying up the man who attacked him—and you too, presumably. How did it happen?”

“He had a message sent from the port controller to say he was some sort of official.” Vineta swallowed painfully. “And Vix had told me that on Annanworld they had lots of regulations left over from Imperial days, which we’d have to comply with or be delayed in leaving … so I let him come aboard.”

She passed a weary hand over her forehead and then touched the bruise on her cheek, wincing. “Thank you for letting me out,” she whispered. “I was so afraid …”

And she turned to hurry in search of Vix.

Spartak watched her go. The rips in her costume exposed much more of her tight, firm body than he cared to see, and a completely irrational envy overcame him against his will, at the thought of the endless succession of beautiful women Vix had enjoyed and abandoned. Contrary to the assumption Vix had made, his order on Annanworld didn’t demand celibacy, and even Father Erton had kept up an association with a woman in the same specialization as himself, which had endured for almost thirty years. But his own two or three attempts to form such a relationship had foundered on his shyness and his reluctance to detach himself from his studies.

Now, without warning, he found he was wistful, as if he had left some very important part out of his life.

T
HE LAST
thing he expected to find when he returned to the control room clutching his large black medical case was a full-blown shouting match. But he heard it even before he came in. Vix was bellowing at the girl.

“You realize he could have killed me? You just let him in—opened the lock for him and let him in! You didn’t keep a gun on him, or anything sensible like that—oh no, you wouldn’t have thought of it!”

“But you told me yourself we had to.…!” The answer dissolved on a high note which foreshadowed tears.

“What conceivable reason could the controller have to send someone aboard before I got back?” Vix thundered. “I ought to take the hide off you!”

Spartak pushed the door aside, and Vineta ran into him blindly, making headlong for the privacy of the lower cabin. He caught her with his free hand, and spoke sharply to Vix.

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself! Just because you’ve been scared white, that’s no reason to take it out on her. She’s had a worse shock than you have—look at that bruise on her! And you know where I found her? Folded up like an embryo in a tiny hole under the floor of the lower corridor! Here,” he added in a gentler tone to the girl, looking for a place to set down his medical case. “I’ll put something on the bruise and give you a pill to calm your nerves.”

She accepted his ministrations dumbly, swallowed the pill as directed, and whispered, “Can I go now?”

“Lie down for a while—you’ll be all right.” Spartak gave her a comforting pat on the shoulder and stood aside for her to leave.

“I’m—sorry,” Vix said with an effort as the door slid to. “You’re right, I oughtn’t to talk to her that way.”

“It’s better to think of points like that in advance and not afterwards,” Spartak answered curtly, and crossed the floor to drop to his knees beside the bound man. “Hm! How long has he been awake?”

“Awake?” Vix echoed in astonishment. “I thought he was still knocked out.”

“Hold it,” Spartak rapped, foreseeing that Vix’s next impulse would be to kick the man into talking. “Let’s see what I can do to loosen his tongue before you—” He reached behind him for an injector and a small phial of grayish liquid.

“What are you going to give him?” Vix demanded.

“It’s one of the old Imperial drugs—not really meant as a truth drug, but supposed to bring forgotten experiences back to consciousness during psychotherapy.” With deft fingers he loaded the injector.

“Why did you think that, of all drugs, might come in handy?” Vix grunted. “Think I might be precessing with my gyros, maybe?”

“You do take everything personally, don’t you?” Spartak sighed. “As a matter of fact, I thought it might help us to find out how this Belizuek cult gets the hold it’s supposed to have over apparently rational people like Hodat. There,” he added, shooting the dose into the bound man’s wrist veins.

“How long does it take to work?”

“A few seconds … Open your eyes, you!”

The bound man complied after an obvious struggle to go on feigning unconsciousness.

“Who are you? Where are you from?” Spartak asked.

“I’m—” Another, equally unsuccessful struggle to still his tongue, and a yielding. “I’m Korisu, and I come from Asconel.”

“From—!” Vix took a pace forward in amazed horror.

“What was your mission and who ordered you to do it?”

His eyes fixed open and seeming glazed, the man whispered, “I was sent by Bucyon to track down Vix and kill him.”

“Why?” thundered Vix.

“Because he’d heard that you planned to raise an army and depose him, and wipe out Belizuek on Asconel.”

“I’m Spartak, Vix’s half-brother,” Spartak said softly. “Does my name mean anything to you?”

“Y-yes. After I’d found and killed Vix, since I was on Annanworld anyway, I was to locate you and eliminate you as well.”

“Has someone been sent after Tiorin?” Vix demanded.

“I—I don’t know for sure. I think so. But nobody knew where he was when I left home. There was a rumor that he had gone towards the hub, to travel in what’s left of the Empire. Someone mentioned Delcadoré.”

“Then that’s where we’ll go!” Vix declared, and strode towards the control board.

“Just a moment,” Spartak said. “There are some other things I want to set straight. You, Korisu—are you a follower of Belizuek?”

“Of course I am. Everyone on Asconel is nowadays.”

Vix uttered a filthy string of oaths.

“What is Belizuek?”

“He is all-seeing and all-powerful. He reads the inmost thoughts of men and no one can stand against him. He’s a superior being and men ought to recognize that and serve him.”

“Is he a telepathic mutation from human stock?”

“I’ve never seen him. But the priests say he’s different. Superior. Deserving of our worship.”

Spartak wiped sweat from his face. “I’m told he demands human sacrifices. Is that true?”

“No, of course not!” Shocked, the bound man tried to sit up, and failed. “The priests say it’s blasphemy to call it sacrifice. It’s a free-will offering, and it’s an honor to serve Belizuek in that way just as in any other.”

Spartak’s jaw set in a grim line. If in such a short time Bucyon and his consort Lydis had managed to persuade all—or even a substantial part—of the citizens of Asconel that this transcendent rubbish was the revealed and mystic truth, their mission wasn’t going to be confined to so simple a task as deposing the usurper and restoring the rightful Warden.

“Where does Belizuek come from?”

“The priests say he’s existed since the beginning of the galaxy.”

“Then where is Brinze?”

“That’s where Shry and Bucyon and Lydis and some of the others come from. But I don’t know where it lies.”

“Delcadoré,” Vix muttered to himself, over at the control board. “I’d not meant to go so close to the hub—there are still idiots around there with dreams of Imperial glory, and it’s risky. But if that’s where Tiorin is said to be …” He glanced over his shoulder. “I have a course set up now. Anything more you want from him?”

“Not right now.” Spartak straightened. “What shall we do with him?”

“Put him where he put Vineta, why not?”

“No, that’s too small—literally and absolutely. In a closet we can lock; that would do.”

“There’s an empty one next to the head,” Vix grunted. “I’ll help you lug him down there.”

Still weary from the mental strain as well as from the physical effort of hauling the reluctant Korisul to his prison, Spartak stole into the lower cabin. Vineta had stretched out on the left bunk, and was sleeping with deep and regular breathing. Near her pillow she had ranged the little objects to which she plainly attached a great deal of value: the shell, the solido, the cheap jewelry.…

Spartak put his medical case away and crept out again.

“You again, Spartak?” Vix called as he re-entered the control cabin. “Say—uh—I ought to thank you. I guess I was too shaken up to remember. It was very smart, the way you stopped the fight. And it was just as well we tackled him your way and not mine. Apart from anything else, I imagine you’re now convinced that I wasn’t spinning you a wild fantasy about what’s happened on Asconel!”

Spartak shook his head distractedly. “It’s incredible,” he muttered. “The speed and completeness of the process, to have produced a fanatic like Korisu in so short a time—it almost persuades me that you were right about witchcraft.”

Vix hesitated. Then he put out his hand. “Brother, I was in two minds whether to go to Annanworld and seek you out. I wondered if I might not burden myself. But ten years is a slice out of any man’s life, and love for a world like Asconel is a bond to bring men together.”

Spartak put his hand into the other’s grasp.

But the full measure of Korisu’s fanaticism did not emerge until much later—until the time when they went to feed him in his cramped prison and found that he had contrived to strangle himself, against all probablity, with the braided leather Vix had used to bind his arms.…

The shadow of that incredible death still lay over them when they gathered in the control room to watch the planet Delcadoré grow beyond the main ports. To break the intolerable silence between them, Vineta—recovered almost
completely from her treatment at the hands of Korisu—spoke up.

“What sort of a world is this one, now?”

Vix, occupied with the controls, tossed an answering grunt over his shoulder. “Ask Spartak—he has the head full of knowledge. I’ve not followed the progress of events down here towards the hub. Still too rigid and organized for my taste!”

The girl glanced at Spartak rather shyly—they had hardly yet got to know one another during this brief trip, and she had spent most of her time out of the way of both brothers, although Spartak had seen enough to convince him that Vix still at heart regarded women as expendable; currently, he just did not have the time to get himself another if he lost Vineta, and was doing his clumsy best to keep on her right side.

“Well,” Spartak commenced, “this was formerly one of the main garrison systems for the Imperial fleet, and when the Empire began to lose its outer reaches this was one of the—the foci, so to speak, on which retrenchments were made. I think it’s now effectively a frontier system. The Empire hasn’t: vanished, of course, but only shrunk to a fraction of its former size.”

“That’s what’s worrying me,” Vix interjected. “I’ve tangled with certain bone-headed parties who seem to imagine the Empire still flourishes. For my part, I think it’s now a farce, and will only prove a handicap to some new and more stable foundation.”

Spartak nodded in surprised agreement.

At that moment a light sprang up on the communicator panel, and Vix reached over to activate the circuit. A voice boomed out with a ring of crude authority. “Identify yourself and your ship!”

“See what I mean?” Vix muttered wryly, and added more loudly, for the benefit of the distant challenger, “Vix of Asconel piloting my own vessel, on private business and landing on Delcadoré.”

“Asconel, hm?” The voice was as clear as if it came from the next room, even when at lower volume it continued, “Where in all of space is that?”

Other voices, much fainter but quite distinct, chimed in.
“Asconel—isn’t that where.…? Well, it’s off towards the Rim anyway, so I guess it’ll do.… Anything to shift this problem off
my
back … Yes, we’ll settle for this one—we don’t want to wait till the galaxy freezes just to find a ship bound for the Big Dark or somewhere
really
distant.…”

Vix and Spartak exchanged appalled glances, and the first voice roared out again.

“Vix of Asconel, you’re under Imperial requisition. Do you hear and understand? Your ship is under Imperial requisition. Do not attempt to evade this order, or it will be the worse for you!”

“What does this all mean?” Vineta whispered.

“Right now, that’s what it means!” Vix replied in white-lipped fury, and gestured towards the viewport which moments ago had held only Delcadoré, its larger moon and the stars beyond.

Now, like a monstrous fish swimming leisurely to intercept smaller prey, there loomed the gigantic shape of an Imperial ship of the line, the ancient Argian symbols blazoned at prow and stern, for all the galaxy as though Argus could still issue orders to a million planets, and prepared to back this false contention with the all-too-real support of fire-power equal to the output of a minor sun.