COMPLEAT Collected SFF Works, page 347
"Private beam!" Falvi snapped—or perhaps it was "line" or "circuit." I couldn't translate literally. But I got the sense of the words and heard them as colloquial rather than formalized because I was used to thinking colloquially myself.
There was a pause during which Falvi's gaze moved uneasily about the room. I shrank back shyly among the cloaks. Then an oily giggle sounded.
"I am in spasms," said a thin voice. "Yes, positively in spasms. Purdelor has told me the funniest quip I've heard in years. I nearly split myself laughing. I laughed till I cried. Do you remember Dom Pheres? He always insisted—"
"Coriole, listen! This is Falvi. Somebody else has come through."
"—insisted that his name ought to be pronounced Peres—don't interrupt, I must tell you this."
Falvi was trying to mention somebody named or called the Hierarch.
"Be quiet," Coriole said with thin cheerfulness. "Insisted that his name ought to be pronounced Peres—you have that? So Morander, one evening over dinner, said, 'If you please, Dom Peres, will you hand me the paselae?' Paselae! Oh, ha, ha, ha, ha!" There were wild giggles.
"Damnatio!" Falvi said, presumably seeing no more point to the joke than I did. I felt a twinge of sympathy for the harassed priest. What Coriole needed was an appreciative studio audience, I thought. But I was underestimating the man.
Falvi said with furious patience, "I was guarding the Earth-Gates tonight and another one came through—a man, this time—and he knocked me out and got away. Ha, ha."
Coriole's chuckles died.
"Well," he said, "I suppose you were playing with the Earth-Gates—"
"I never touched them."
"Lie to the Hierarch if you like but don't try it with me, Falvi. What was the man like, eh?"
It was a curious sensation to me, cowering in the clothes closet, hearing myself accurately described. I had a momentary sense of having been discovered, as though the shadows had been driven away by a bright light. I stared at Lorna's face beyond Falvi and the balcony. That steadied me.
Very often in Malesco I needed that steadiness. I kept finding myself inclined to slip over into an odd state in which everything seemed quite unreal and it was difficult for me to move or even think.
A touch of that helpless passivity gripped me now, and for a second Falvi seemed unimportant and unreal. The fact that he was announcing his decision to find and kill me had an abstruse interest, no more than that.
"If you harm him I'll break your neck," Coriole said. "You hear me?"
"All right, I won't touch him," Falvi said in an unconvincing tone. "If any of the other priests have found him he may be dead already. I don't know."
"He sounds like the man you say Clia described. Well, meet me at the Baths immediately."
"But this is the night the—"
"Bless me, this is the night I thought I was on horseback," Coriole said and chuckled again. A humorist, part of my mind said. The other part was considering Lorna's face a block away and the name CLIA under it. So I sounded like the man Clia described, did I? That meant Clia was Lorna, a deduction which required little brilliance on my part.
"It's nothing to joke about," Falvi said. "The Hierarch won't believe I didn't touch the Earth-Gates."
"Naturally he won't," Coriole said. "He knows you're a liar. Meet me at the Baths immediately. Hurry along. This man who came through may be exactly what we need. If you harm him I'll be inclined to wash my hands of you."
"Listen, if he's wandering through the Temple in the clothes he had on he'll be stopped before—"
"There's been no alarm yet, has there? Come along. Leave the thinking to me. I'm qualified for it. And don't try to act on your own. You're not indispensable."
"Perhaps you're not either."
At this Coriole burst into wild thin giggles, sounding rather like a disembodied goblin, and gasped, "Saturn mend you, indeed! It would be less trouble to make a new one. Oh, hurry along. When I explain you'll see why we need this man alive. Less trouble to make—" The giggling died.
"Damned comedian," Falvi said under his breath, then, louder, "Your jokes smell. You're a fool, Coriole. Nobody thinks you're funny. And if I find that man I'll kill him so fast he won't even notice. Maybe it doesn't matter to you whether or not I get in trouble but—"
His words became mutters. I gathered that the "walkie-talkie" had been turned off before Falvi began his diatribe. This seemed to indicate that Falvi was both sensible and cautious.
Then a door slammed and it was time for me to decide what to do next.
-
Chapter V
THAT was not difficult to figure out but the trouble was to put any sort of plan into action. Any move I made might reveal my identity to enemies. And I had excellent reason to suspect that this temple, or palace, or skyscraper was full of potential enemies—all quite willing to kill me on sight once they discovered I was no Malescan.
So I had to find Lorna. I was completely blindfolded. What I needed most of all was information. What I most wanted was information about how to get home. Meanwhile I badly needed to be briefed. Lorna—going under the name of Clia, I gathered—had found a safe spot in Malesco. I couldn't tell how she'd done it nor, naturally, did I know exactly how safe that spot might be. But if some sesame existed I wanted to know it.
It was quite simple: I was in a dark labyrinth, full of pitfalls and traps, and there was a gleam of light in the distance. So I had to reach that light, which meant information and perhaps help. My immediate goal was Lorna, and I didn't dare think beyond that. While I hated the idea of leaving the room which connected, somehow, with my New York apartment, finding Lorna would mean a very real contact with my own world.
It took me no time at all to make sure the room was empty, cautiously emerge from the closet and, on second thought, dive back into it and search till I located a headdress with flaps such as Falvi wore. It had blue stripes and shadowed my face effectively when I donned it. Then I went to the outside door and peeped out in time to see Falvi walk through a doorway down the hall and disappear.
That left the hall quite empty. I stepped boldly out and hurried after Falvi, passing a few closed doors. Along the ceiling there were more of the metal cups, pouring out light, a milky flowing glow that dissolved in the air and gave a gentle daylight illumination.
Several I passed were burned out and another one was flickering wanly. On the doors themselves I noticed symbols engraved: a formalized bird and a trident on each one and Roman numerals, XVI, XVII, and so forth.
Where Falvi had vanished was an opening in the wall, as large as a doorway. It seemed to be a small elevator shaft, lighted from within. A foreshortened Falvi was twenty feet below, floating down very gently.
I supposed it was Falvi, but all I could see were the headdress and his feet. He resembled a squashed dwarf. He didn't look up and I laid one hand on the wall to brace myself and stared down at him.
There seemed to be no cables nor other mechanical elevator devices, though of course Falvi might be standing on a perfectly transparent floor that was slowly sinking beneath him. I noticed his shadow appear on the wall behind him and vanish as he went on down.
When I looked up I saw part of my own shadow—the deformed head startled me till I remembered the flaps of my headdress—across the shaft, so I understood that Falvi was dropping past similar openings on other floors.
I leaned farther out and counted the brighter patches of illumination. Falvi went down seven levels before he stepped out. Then the shaft was empty and it seemed to go on down for quite a distance.
I was considering the possibility of tossing something into the shaft as a test to see if it would float or plunge when my shadow on the opposite wall blurred slightly and became suddenly double. My state of mind by now was such that I found myself seriously considering whether I could possibly have two heads. In the same instant I turned to see what had cast the second shadow.
I found myself looking into a pair of very bright expectant eyes on a level with mine. Another priest had come up behind me without a sound and was watching me with a look that reminded me uncomfortably of a cat watching a mouse.
There were extraordinary alertness and anticipation in the face between the flaps of the priestly headdress. He was young and there was a faintly dissipated air about him as though he'd had a big night recently. He wore his robes with a certain negligent elegance that was far from ecclesiastic.
I went into a state of concealed shock. How long had he been following me? From Falvi's door? And why? That expectancy on his face was frightening. He was so clearly waiting for me to do something. But what? From the penetrating interest of his eyes I was ready to believe that he was reading my innermost thoughts and finding them, on the whole, rather amusing.
I had no idea what one priest did when he met another. Before I could come to any decision about how to save my hide, though, he saved it for me by murmuring, "Pardae-se," in a polite voice and squeezing past me into the shaft, still not taking that ironic gaze from mine.
I had a strong impression that he knew exactly what had been happening and was simply waiting for me to give myself away. He lifted one eyebrow at me as he slowly sank, a quizzical look that seemed to ask what I was waiting for.
That decided me. After all, what would John Carter have done? The priest was about ten feet down, his head still tilted back to watch me and a grin was beginning to broaden upon his face. I took a deep breath and stepped out into emptiness, confidently expecting a sort of antigravity skyhook to grip me and lower me gently down the shaft.
This did not happen. I dropped like a bullet, head over basket, with the full velocity and acceleration of a freefalling body. I had a glimpse of the priest floating down calmly beneath me—he seemed to be standing still—and then I hit him and we were in a wild Laocoon group, with me playing the python.
He grabbed me, not that it was necessary, because I was hanging on to him like a frantic cat. There was a brief, mad scuffle, which subsided gradually. Clinging together, we drifted slowly downward.
Our faces were quite close now, naturally enough, and the priest's was full of triumphant excitement. I had an idea that I had given myself hopelessly away and that this was just what he'd expected. The look on his face said he knew I was from New York, knew I'd come through Falvi's forbidden Earth-Gates, whatever they were, and the next stop would be the ecclesiastical firing squad.
Just to clinch the matter he spoke to me. It was, of course, Malescan and it meant nothing at all. My ears were ringing anyhow and I was shaking all over with shock and sheer un-heroic fright. The shaft below us looked bottomless. I breathed hard and stared into the bright triumphant eyes about six inches from mine.
He repeated himself more slowly and this time I understood.
"You're lucky I caught you," he said. "You might get reported."
I had heard enough of the spoken Malescan tongue to catch the right emphasis and accent. But I still wasn't sure I could speak it naturally. I had to try though. My words came out in a series of gasps—an excellent way of disguising unfamiliarity with a language, by the way.
"I was thinking of something else," I said.
The effect on him was tremendous. I think if I hadn't been clutching him so tightly he might have let me drop in his surprise. For a moment I wondered if I'd made some astounding error in speech. Then I realized that the fact I'd spoken at all—in Malescan—was what startled him so much. He hadn't expected it. His face went perfectly blank for a moment.
When expression came back to it he allowed only the slightest glimmer of what must have been great disappointment to show through before he pulled himself together and spoke again. This time the malicious expectancy and the penetrating intentness of his look had vanished.
"What did you say?" he asked politely.
"I said I was thinking of something else."
A flicker of the keen suspicion came back into the quick gaze he turned on me. I realized then that I simply didn't know Malescan well enough to pass as a native.
"Well, you'd better think of the Hierarch next time," the priest said, his eyes never swerving from mine. "What are you talking like that for?"
"I bit my tongue," I said hastily.
"Bit your nose?" he asked. "How could you do that? Oh, your tongue."
I met his bright stare briefly and then glanced aside at the walls, slipping up slowly around us. Was he simply amusing himself with me? I wasn't sure and I didn't think he was either. Certainly he was suspicious, but he had nothing definite to go on. The fact that I could speak Malescan even passably seemed to knock the bottom out of whatever theory he had formulated about me. Still ...
"Where do you want out?" he asked, still politely, his tone making a rather insolent contrast to the look on his face.
"I'm going to the Baths," I hazarded.
"Oh, are you? I'll let you off at the main floor, then. I don't know you, do I? You must be fresh from the Crucible."
I nodded.
"No?" the priest said. "But—"
"I mean yes," I corrected, making a mental note on the permutations of symbolic gestures in various cultures. "I'm still fresh from the Crucible."
"A little too fresh," he told me. "You must be from Ferae. Nothing personal but the Feraen dialect is suitable only for talking to dogs. I'm Dio and I know the best"—he used a word I didn't catch—"in the city if you need advice."
"Thanks," I said, wondering if I should tell him my name and finding my mind totally blank when it came to choosing a Malescan nom-de-guerre. I didn't know enough about proper nouns. I might ignorantly call myself the equivalent of Santa Claus or Little Bo Peep.
I grimaced and said my tongue hurt.
He seemed to be thinking. "Did I bite your nose?" he asked suddenly. "I don't remember doing it. But when you fell on me that way—"
"It's all right," I said.
"Where's your pouch?"
"I forgot it."
"Don't they teach you anything at the Ferae crucible?" He glanced up the shaft. "Here we are." He lunged forward, carrying me, and we found ourselves standing in a room the size of Grand Central, quite as noisy and crowded and busy. To the left was a great open archway with darkness beyond. The fresh wind blowing in told me it was the open air.
"No use going back for your pouch now," the priest Dio said, reaching toward his belt. "I'll lend you some grain." He put a few coins into my hand. "Don't forget to pay it back. I'm Dio, remember, on the twenty-third Goose of Hermogenes at the fifth Cherub."
"Well—thanks," I said. He looked at me blandly. His dissipated young face had lost its brilliant intentness now and was a little sleepy, as if with satisfaction. Sometime during our brief conversation he had come to a decision about me.
I couldn't understand him at all. If Falvi's prognosis were right any priest who recognized me for a newcomer from Earth was pretty certain to shoot first and ask questions later. Why, I didn't know yet.
Dio's behavior was simply confusing the issue still further. If he knew me for a stranger, he ought to report me. If he didn't, why was he looking so complacent now? He was the cat that had swallowed the canary, and found it more than satisfying.
"I hope they taught you honesty at the Ferae Crucible," he said.
Was he really going to let me go? I could hardly believe it. There might even be time to catch up with Falvi, given a little luck.
"I'll pay you back," I said. "Don't worry."
He shrugged and I started to turn away, hardly believing my own good fortune. Either Falvi had exaggerated the danger that waited me from the priests or—
"Just a minute, you," Dio's voice hailed me over the half-dozen steps that parted us. I knew by the tone of it, even before I turned, that he was grinning. The bright malice was on his face again as our eyes met.
"I think there's something you ought to know," he said. "There haven't been any Crucibles in Ferae for thirty years."
He beamed at me. "Well, good night," he said and stood there, smiling.
I felt exactly as if he'd kicked me in the stomach. There was danger. If I'd ever seen danger in my life I saw it in his face. He knew all about me or enough about me to get me killed. And yet he was still standing there, still smiling, waiting for me to go.
I took a tentative backward step as soon as I could 'breathe again. He was perfectly capable of letting me get to the very door before he raised a shout and set the pack on me. It was open season for Earthmen, all right, and Dio liked the idea.
I thought, "He'll give me sixty seconds, then he'll yell," and I turned and walked toward the door with long, firm steps. The best I could hope for was to get out into the dark before he started the alarm. It wasn't much, but it offered a better chance than this crowded hall.
