Treason (25 page)

Destroy them. Did I already, so casually, plan murder? But it’s war, I insisted to myself, and wondered then who had declared it and why I thought I was on the good side. I need not ask the earth on this one, I realized. This time it wasn’t a matter of eating vegetables. I meant to kill men, kill them in cold blood, kill them for a noble cause, but kill them just the same.

Was the cause really noble? Was I striking a blow for Mueller’s independence? From what? Perhaps these illuders were actually doing something valuable for our miserable planet. They were ending the bloodshed, weren’t they? Ending the competition among Families, unifying the planet to achieve a common purpose.

No. Wrong. They were not ending the competition. They were winning it by fraud, and that was a different matter. It struck me as being unfair.

Which is, after all, the only way any man decides what is right and what is wrong—how it seems to him. To me, this was
wrong
. Other men’s minds were solving the problems of the universe. Other men’s blood and genes had gone into winning the iron Mueller had taken from the Ambassador. And those minds and that blood were being stolen without anyone’s knowledge that the crime was even taking place.

I remembered being a radical regenerative. I remembered standing at the window, observing the pens, imagining myself among the monsters of many legs and arms who were fed from troughs and denied even the slightest shred of humanity. It was cruel, though how else rads could have been treated God only knew. Still, even that cruelty might have been bearable, or at least partly bearable, because the rads knew that they were doing it for Mueller. Doing it to ensure that their families and their families’ families would be the ones to sell offworld, would be the ones to make the starships and go out into space and be free.

If that hope had helped keep them sane, it was a terrible thing to turn it into a lie and have their suffering and loneliness and loss of humanity be for a race of strangers who insinuated themselves into families—

I hated Dinte. I had despised him before, but now I hated him. I pictured myself going into the palace at Mueller-on-the-River and walking up to him and going into quicktime and seeing the man who really was Dinte, the man pretending to be my brother, the man who had destroyed my father and robbed me of my inheritance; and when I saw him, I could picture myself killing him, and the picture gave me pleasure.

(I could remember the earth moaning with the cries of dying men, but I shut out that memory. Not that memory. Not today. I had blood to shed before I was ready for that memory again.)

But first, Percy Barton, Lord Barton’s “son.” I had to learn from him where he came from and who his people were, and then I’d destroy them all. If they
could
be destroyed. Was there any way to make an end to people who could appear to be something they were not, who could trade places with a man before your eyes and never have you notice, who could pretend to be your brother for years and never give you a clue?

How did they do it? How could I fight it?

As I descended from the hills of Humping, I felt a terrible sadness, because I knew I was leaving my truest home in order to go out and destroy my peace of mind and cause agony to the earth. I remembered the spokesman of the Schwartzes telling me, “Every man who dies at your hand will scream into your soul forever.”

Almost I turned back. Almost I went back to Glain and Vran. Almost.

Instead I rode on for twelve days until I came to Gill, the capital of the Family of Gill, and also the capital of the empire called the East Alliance. In my days of travel, I had figured nothing out and knew no more than I had known before. I hadn’t even taken elementary precautions, didn’t even have the sense to arrive in quicktime, which is why they caught me in Gill and killed me.

Lord Barton’s servant, Dul, had reached Gill ahead of me. That had been predictable. What I had forgotten was that if Dul heard enough of our conversation to want to poison us, he also heard enough to know that I was Lanik Mueller.

Did they believe him? Did they suspect that Lanik Mueller had survived, had reemerged from Ku Kuei after two years? Perhaps they doubted it at first, but once word reached Mwabao Mawa, there would be no more doubt. She would remember having seen me in Jones a year ago, and they would be certain.

It was an academic question at the moment, however. Whoever I was, Lanik Mueller or Lake-drinker or Man-in-the-Wind, I had discovered the existence of the illuders and I had to be destroyed. They had my description, and when I came to the gate of Gill, the soldiers took me, dragged me from my horse, and held me while the captain compared me with a written notice that he had some trouble reading. “He’s the one,” he finally said, but there was a little doubt in his voice.

“You’re wrong,” I said. “I just look like him, whoever he is.”

But the captain shrugged. “If somebody else comes in who fits the description, we’ll kill him, too.” The soldiers put me in a cart, blindfolded, and dragged me off through the streets.

I was concerned. If they believed that I was Lanik Mueller, and if they knew—as the illuders surely did by now—that Muellers regenerated, they would kill me much too thoroughly. I might really die from beheading or burning. It would be beyond my ability to save myself, and so I would have to escape before they performed the execution; and the only methods of escape I had were too demonstrative of my abilities to fail to raise a real alarm among the illuders.

I was lucky. Dul, whoever he was, was not bright enough or well-enough informed to realize that if I really was Lanik Mueller, they couldn’t kill me in the ordinary way. Executions in Gill were by squads of archers. Arrows are easily taken care of by any Mueller, unless there are too many of them all at once, and to a rad like me, they didn’t have enough arrows to destroy me beyond my body’s ability to heal.

The soldiers were very businesslike. In Mueller every person—stranger, slave, or citizen—had the right to a hearing. In Gill, apparently, strangers were exempt from that particular formality. I was arrested, carted off in a wagon through the streets of Gill (the people apparently disposed of rotten fruit and vegetables by casting it as a parting gift into the executioner’s wagon), pulled out of the city through a back gate, dragged from the wagon, and placed in front of a large pile of straw, so that misses wouldn’t result in a lost or damaged arrow.

The archers looked bored and perhaps a little irritated. Had this been their day off? They lined up casually, selecting arrows. There were a dozen archers, and all looked competent. The captain of the guard, who had escorted me to the place of execution, raised his arm. There were no preliminaries, no last words, no final meal (a waste of food, of course), no announcement of what I was supposed to be guilty of. When he lowered his arm, the arrows loosed in a commendably uniform and accurate flight. All the arrows landed in my chest, and though two were stopped by ribs, the others all penetrated, with four piercing my heart and the rest wreaking havoc with my lungs.

It hurt. I knew that I didn’t need to breathe, knew that my brain could stay alive far longer with scant oxygen than most people’s; and while the arrows had stopped my heartbeat, as long as they were still in my body they also partly stanched the flow of blood from my heart. Still, the wound was serious enough, the pain sudden and drastic enough, that my body decided that it was dying, and collapsed.

They didn’t rush over and pull out the arrows, unfortunately, so my heart couldn’t yet begin to heal; and it would not be politic, I decided, to reach up and pull the arrows out myself. So I went into slowtime—a mild slowtime that left me stiff to them, while their handling of my body left painful bruises, but that was nothing my Mueller body couldn’t heal on its own. I figured they’d probably be rid of my body within fifteen minutes—they showed no tendency to wait around—and that would be about five or six minutes of subjective time, leaving me a few seconds to remove the arrows and heal before my body started hurting for lack of blood. I could live for some time without breathing, but the blood had to flow.

They cut it close, and for one terrible moment as they carried me by a furnace I was afraid they practiced cremation, in which case all bets were off. Instead they dumped me in a hole in the ground and yanked the arrows out of my chest, tearing open my heart where it had started to heal around the arrowheads, but allowing it, at last, to start healing properly. As soon as they had quit shoveling on the dirt, I went into realtime, muscled the dirt out of the way enough that I could remove the arrows, and lay there healing for a while. Once I was in reasonable health again, I went back into slowtime—no point in trying to endure hours of being shut up in a grave if you can avoid it—and only came out when I estimated it would be evening.

It was nearly dawn. I woke the earth around me, and it raised me gently to the surface. I spread my arms, and the earth took its firm shape under me. I looked around to see if I had been observed. I had not.

The graveyard, like the place of execution, was near the southern edge of the city, outside the wall. The sea was nearby, and festering garbage on the shore, mixed with the smell of the normal number of clumsy crabs that couldn’t remember which way the water was, made the place unforgettable to my nose, if not to my other senses.

I refused to be stupid the same way twice. This time I would enter the city more subtly.

I pushed into quicktime and made my way among the hovels clustered around the walls until I found what I dubbed “garbage gate” and went inside. I saw only the seamy side of Gill. In the years since then, I’ve seen many cities, but for slime and sludge Gill is queen of them all. Their position at the isthmus between Landlock and Slashsea won Gill a role as the largest merchant Family in the East. Yet the wealth didn’t show up in the city of Gill itself—people with property moved east into the mountains, building wood or stone mansions that would make princes in other Families jealous.

In Gill, poverty and business made an uneasy division of the town. Warehouses and manufactories and wholesale houses made way for slums and whorehouses and gaming rooms. In the nighttime, the gaiety must have been something to see; in the early morning, the city seemed weary. And still a little drunk.

There were corpses on the roads leading to the garbage gate. I passed a wagon loaded with dead bodies, stopped in the middle of the road. Several men who looked little healthier than their cargo wearily hoisted another piece of human flesh into the cart for the trip to the graveyard. There are few places where life isn’t cheap, but this was the first place I had found where even the poor (especially the poor, who are often kinder to their dead than the rich) had so little regard for the dead that they were cast like garbage into the street.

The palace of the governor of Gill, now the headquarters of the East Alliance, rose from the warehouse district like a wart among moles: there was no attempt at grace, only a great grey block of stone brooding among smaller and yet somehow more inviting structures that stocked cloth, salted meat, and leather.

Gaining entry to the palace was difficult. The doors were all closed, and guards stood with their backs against them. There would be no subtle way to enter, even in quicktime—not through the doors. It attracts too much attention to knock over a guard. And the force of my passage, in quicktime, might well kill him.

I would have to wait until later in the morning, when people were passing in and out. So, for nostalgia’s sake (and probably with an unconscious plan for petty vengeance) I sought out the gate where I had been taken the day before. As I walked along the streets I became more and more depressed. I wondered if Gill were really exceptionally vile, or if all cities, even Mueller-on-the-River, were this bad to those who had no money. The harsh hill country of Humping was kinder to its residents than this artificial desert of stone and dirt.

I saw in the distance as I neared the gate that the executioner’s cart was already in business. What a busy day it had ahead of it! I toyed with the idea of breaking an axle, but decided it wasn’t worth the time or trouble. Instead I went on to the gate, hardly glancing at the cart and the hooded prisoner as I ran past, and found what I was looking for. The captain who had so silently taken me to my death the day before was in a guardroom whose door was latched. I unlatched it and walked in. Placing myself directly in front of the captain, who was alone, I slipped back into realtime. I had seen the effect often enough in Ku Kuei—from his point of view, I simply materialized out of thin air.

“Good morning,” I said.

“My God,” he answered.

“Ah, first question answered. You can speak. It was quite irritating not even to be greeted yesterday before you took me off and killed me.”

His look of terror was delightful. “I am not a vengeful man, but now and then this kind of thing does wonders for the soul. I won’t bother you long. I’m just checking up on this murder business you have here. For instance, who decides who’s going to die?”

“P-Percy. The king. It isn’t my fault. I don’t decide anything—”

“Never mind all that, I don’t do the judging around here. How many people a day do you take from the city gates straight to the graveyards?”

“Not very many. Honest. You yesterday, Lord Barton today, and I can’t remember anybody for months before that. And usually they’re taken as they’re leaving, not as they arrive.”

I tried not to look shocked. Barton! He’d ignored all my advice and come here anyway.

“You handle it very efficiently,” I said.

“Thank you,” he answered.

“What happens to you if something goes wrong?”

“Nothing does.”

“But if it did?”

“I’d be in trouble,” he said. He was beginning to act a bit more confident with me, and I suspected that in a moment he’d reach out a hand to see whether I was solid or spirit.

“Then you’re in trouble,” I said. “Because Barton isn’t going to die. And if you should succeed in killing him, I’ll be back for you within the hour. No matter how much trouble you get in for his failure to die, just remember it’s better than what you’ll get if you actually kill him. Now have a wonderful morning.” I slipped into quicktime, pausing before I left to turn an inkwell upside down on his head.

I ran down the streets in earnest, and soon found the executioner’s cart. If I had looked closely before I would have recognized Barton’s clothing—he was dressed as he had been that day in the cliff house. I climbed into the cart, then slowed to normal time long enough to say, “Don’t worry, Barton, I’m with you.” Then I was back in quicktime and out of the cart. The driver hadn’t noticed me, and if any passerby saw me, he’d only blink and wonder whether the alcohol from the night before was still in his blood.

I got to the place of execution and waited out of sight among the stacks of straw. It took a half hour for the cart to arrive, and then the routine of the day before was followed—the archers lined up, very casually, and their leader, not the captain from the gate, raised his arm. I slipped into quicktime and walked out into the space between Barton and the archers. I paced back and forth (I become visible when I stay in the same place too long) until the leader’s arm fell and the arrows were loosed. Then I collected the arrows in midflight, took the hood gently from Barton’s head, and stuck the arrows through the hood into the straw directly behind Barton’s chest. Then I walked back to my concealed observation point and watched.

It took a second in realtime before the archers realized that Barton’s hood was off and no arrows were sticking into his chest. Then, angrily, the leader of the archers told them to go collect their arrows, furious that they had missed. When they found the arrows sticking through the hood in the straw, however, even the leader became a little less outspoken. There was no natural way those arrows could have ended up directly behind him.

Barton was smiling.

“I don’t know what kind of tricks you’re pulling,” the leader said furiously (yet there was fear behind his voice), “but you’d better stop ’em.”

Barton shrugged and the leader formed up his archers for a second try. I slipped back into quicktime. In order to put an end to this quickly, I took the arrows in midflight and this time shoved them through the pulling wrist of each of the archers. For good measure, I took a few more arrows out of one archer’s quiver and impaled the leader’s hand, fastening it firmly to his thigh, while similarly sticking the three men lounging around watching the execution. Then I was back to my observation post and into realtime.

A howl of pain from a dozen throats told me that my work had been effective. The archers dropped their bows, clutching at the arrows in their wrists. The pain was nowhere near as bad as the shock. It isn’t every day that you fire an arrow and have it turn around and hit you.

Barton’s presence of mind was astounding. He haughtily said, “This is your second warning. There won’t be a third.”

“What’s going on!” shouted the leader.

“Don’t you know me? I’m the emperor’s father. I’m Lord Barton of Britton. And it’s a crime for commoners to shed royal blood.”

“I’m sorry!” cried the leader. Several of the archers chimed in—most were too preoccupied stanching the bleeding.

“If you’re sorry, you’ll go back to your quarters and cause me no further trouble today.”

They were sorry. They went back to their quarters and caused him no further trouble that day. As soon as they were gone, he looked around for me and found me lying against a pile of straw, laughing. He came over looking a little upset. “You didn’t have to wait until the last minute, did you?”

“I told you not to worry.”

“You try not worrying with a dozen arrows pointed at your heart.”

I apologized profusely, explaining that I wanted to spread a little fear of the supernatural among the people of Gill. He agreed at last to overlook the matter, since I
had
saved him and since he
had
disregarded my order that he remain in Humping. We headed out of the place of execution, toward the city. “The one thing they won’t expect us to do,” he said, “is come into the city after they’ve tried to kill us both.” Then he laughed. “It
was
funny. I wouldn’t like to be the soldier who has to report this to my dear son Percy. What
are
you, anyway?” he asked.