The Sorceress of Karres (41 page)

It was one of the tattooed men. They were something of a legend among the eaters. They'd been the greatest of the other races to face them since the evil time when the eaters had come to this place.

"I am Ta'zara. I have come to challenge."

The tattooed man spoke the language of the eaters as if he was born to it. And at a suitable volume to make himself heard in the furthest seats, to the no-bone men in the back row.

"You are one of the lesser people. You cannot challenge," Gwarrr said dismissively. He made a gesture. "Kill him."

Several of the arena guards took the wonderful opportunity and flung themselves onto the kill. Ta'zara just stood there. The Cannibals bounced off a solidness, without quite touching him. It was as if an invisible wall kept them off.

One of the guards produced a jangler. It did not have any effect. In fact, it did not seem to have made actual contact. Another drew a blaster looted from some unfortunate spacer. It, too, had no effect at all.

"I am Ta'zara. Are you too afraid of my challenge, Gwarrr?"

Gwarrr was not sure where it started . . . but the other Cannibals began to call for it.

"Gwarrr, fight!" the chant began. Louder and louder. Tumultuous.

And the leader of the eaters knew he had little choice.

"I will fight."

He was Gwarrr. He had killed several hundred. He would eat this one's finger too.

The captain took away the cocoon shield as the huge Megair Cannibal stormed in. Pausert was a lot less confident than the Leewit was about her champion. He was ready to use the shield again at any moment. And Goth, he would bet, was ready to intervene too. He wondered just what she would teleport into the fight that would do much good, though. Even as quickly as her klatha powers had grown lately, she was still sharply limited when it came to mass. And while a small rock could do wonders inserted into delicate machinery, he was pretty sure a Megair Cannibal would barely notice it.

But the Leewit was right this time. Ta'zara used his opponent's strength against him, catching and accelerating his lashing long-nailed foot and sending it skywards. Gwarrr landed hard. Ta'zara let him get up. This time the Cannibal was more cautious. He attempted to close with the tattooed man . . . who grabbed his arms, and fell backwards . . . somehow planting both feet in Gwarrr's stomach, and tossing him into the air, to bounce across the arena. And that was just Ta'zara getting warmed up. He proceeded to use Gwarrr as a bouncing ball and throw-toy. The captain didn't want to watch after a while. The Cannibal audience did. Gwarrr was their great eater. But he had finally bitten off more than he could chew, and Ta'zara was making sure that the audience knew it.

It was a fight that could only have one end.

Pausert was glad that Ta'zara had colluded with Goth to do a light-shift of him biting off that finger.

Ta'zara walked over to the champion's chair as they dragged Gwarrr away.

"Eat," he said, as the Illtraming had explained was the tradition. "Tomorrow we return to our own place. We leave this accursed place forever. Every ship and every eater." The Leewit was proud of that speech.

There was silence.

"But . . . the enemy ships," said someone querulously.

"Do you challenge my leadership?" said the Leewit, through the finger-bone shaped speaker. The Illtraming, she had to admit, were good artificers. "I have come to lead you home."

There was another silence. Then they started cheering.

A little later they sat, spyshielded, still in no-shape, in the great-eater's chamber with Ta'zara.

"I am afraid I have to do it, mistress," he said apologetically to the Leewit. "Raider-ships are led by lesser eaters. But the whole fleet? It can only be me, unless you can somehow put an illusion of me in the command chair."

"I could if I was also on the ship," said Goth.

The big Na'kalauf bodyguard shook his head. "No. That would not be safe. I have my responsibility and this is it. They must fly into the rift. I will go. You will just have to teach me some words of their language."

Goth narrowed her eyes. "We have the coordinates for this rift. Let me get onto the subradio."

"I'm not going to let you go, Ta'zara," said the Leewit.

"Leewit. Come with me," said Goth imperiously. "Captain. Put Ta'zara in a shield cocoon. We're not having anything happen to him."

Ta'zara might have wanted to protest, but he never got the chance.

"So what do we do?" said Pausert. How easy it had become to share decisions with Goth, these days, he suddenly realized. How had he managed before this?

Goth grinned. "Exactly what he wants to do. But Karres can be close enough to help out. Cloaked, of course, but right there. We have the coordinates. We can transmit from close enough for the Leewit to do the voice and for you to shield him if need be. And then for my father to 'port him out of there. Touch-talk to the Leewit, he'll get the exact image of Ta'zara."

"But . . ." said the Leewit.

"But nothing," said Goth firmly. "He's decided he wants to be a hero. Let him. You can explain how come he isn't living with the Cannibals forever, later. It's that or send both Ta'zara and you swimming along the Egger Route. And them as well. This way he gets to feel good about it and we save a lot of energy."

Fun
, said the little vatch.

And thus it was.

The eaters still in a galaxy dimensions away refer to the commands of the tattooed one who led them out of hell and back to the place of their fathers. So of course they ate their fathers and tattooed themselves.

But that too was a kind of rightness and happiness.

And the little vatch was quite correct in predicting that the explanation was fun.

Three days later, when the world of Karres swung peacefully in orbit around a hitherto planetless star some few days from Uldune, Pausert sat with his Great Uncle Threbus on the porch and discussed the things men sitting on a porch do: the destruction of worlds, star-spanning conquerors and how to stop them; and, greatest problem of all, the female of the species.

"We've more or less worked out the entire sequence of events," said Threbus. "Vatches, it appears, are quite involved in various dimensions. And have complex 'games' in them. The Chaladoor was part of her game."

"So the little vatch was manipulating things. Right under our noses."

"Well, you know how they like to watch. And set their dream things problems."

"They do indeed," said Pausert wryly. "But I hope she never planned on me being part of the mother-plant."

"No cravings to return to the plant?" asked Threbus cautiously.

Pausert shuddered. "The addiction? No, not so far as I've noticed. Look, Mebeckey had it in him for years—and I gather that being part of the plant was the first time in his life he felt he belonged to anything. That he wasn't racked with guilt about killing his first employer. It made him feel good. Look at the other victims. Many of them are criminals—and yet some are desperately trying to rehabilitate themselves now. It didn't affect everyone in the same way."

Threbus sucked on his pipe. "Well, it's true that even Mebeckey is cooperating to the absolute fullest. We've had truth-speakers listen to his testimony. He's barely strayed from the absolute truth, at least as far as he knows it."

"That's always the problem, isn't it!" said Pausert. "As far as he knows it."

"Yes," admitted Threbus. "But we've been able to cross-corroborate parts of it. I'm afraid, grand-nephew, that I was partly to blame with that expedition into the Chaladoor in '008. For a trip into dangerous territory, it was an uneventful one. I didn't realize what seed of future problems we'd brought back."

The
Venture
brought back various relics from that trip, most of which were sold to help pay for it. It hadn't been a very profitable voyage. That included the seedling drip-irrigators, thought to be goblets, that eventually found their way, along with the log of the
Derehn Oph
—one of the first ships to have stumbled on the cinder-homeworld of the Melchin—to the dealer Mebeckey's illegal antiquities sales.

"We didn't take very much off
Derehn Oph
—it was too much like a graveyard. But I did take a couple of those goblets."

"Drip-irrigators."

"Yes. Leaky goblets. And that box that turned out to be the map-device. The curious thing is that I'd read that log. The ship was centuries dead and all the next-of-kin must have been too. So we left it there. We did visit the world Mebeckey tracked down. We'd tried digging down to the signal with our nova guns. Got nowhere. The
Derehn Oph
had tried too, and picked over the various wrecks. They'd left after collecting some loot from the various wrecked ships—including the Illtraming flagship—that had crashed almost intact, as it was heavily armored, and they had taken what was described as the Illtraming map."

"So . . . why didn't the Illtraming stop the
Derehn Oph
—and yourselves—from going to the Melchin motherworld?" asked Pausert thoughtfully. "The Nuris and Moander?"

"Yes," said Threbus, grimacing. "They'd already begun infesting the area around Megair, and the world was dead. Except that the stasis box had some kind of detector on it, and it began broadcasting when sensors detected something other than a Melchin/Illtraming drive. It was intended as a trap."

"And it succeeded!" said Pausert.

"Yes, in a way it did. But the mother-plant had expected to emerge to a galaxy full of Illtraming. To having no problems finding its host species. Instead it came out to a universe populated by humans—useless to it for breeding purposes. The persona of the xenoarcheologist suited it while it hunted for traces of the Illtraming. But of course it found none. Until it happened on the Melchin relics and the log of the
Derehn Oph,
which mentioned the sheet of metal that they had taken from the wrecked ship, and of course the goblets, which the mother-plant recognized as plant-feeders. When one of those turned up from Nikkeldepain, the mother-plant was on the trail."

Goth came in. She'd kept her hair the way Vala had worn it. "Are you two finished talking yet?" she asked. "Because you promised to take me out, Pausert."

Threbus raised an eyebrow at his daughter. "She's growing up fast, Captain Pausert!"