Demon princes 01 05 the.., p.98
Demon Princes 01-05 The Star Ki, page 98
Two Companions frog-marched Gersen across the pavilion and down the slope toward the river. A third strolled negligently behind Nothing could have been more to Gersen’s satisfaction Down the steps to the boat dock they marched, and out to the far end, where the fairy lamps reflected in jerks and jiggles on the dark water.
The Companions seized Gersen by the arms and the seat of the pants Gersen hung supine and limp. “It’s to be one, two, three and on your way. So, here we go.”
“Here we go,” said Gersen. He swiveled, broke holds, struck the man on his left a fearful blow in the neck, crushing his larynx. He struck the other across the temple with his fist and felt the crush of bone Turning at a crouch he flung himself against the knees of the third man, who staggered, swayed, lurched backward, clawing at his side arm Gersen caught him in a clamp, flung him face down, planted his knees on the heavy shoulders, reached down into the man’s mouth, jerked up and back and snapped the man’s neck.
Panting, Gersen rose to his feet. In less than thirty seconds he had killed three men Gersen took up one of the long-guns, a pistol, a pair of daggers, then rolled the bodies into the river.
He started back toward the pavilion. The music had halted. The Companions, coordinated by radio-communicator, by one means or another had been notified of trouble at the riverside.
Gersen glimpsed a dozen Companions running at a crouch from the pavilion Howard Alan Treesong stood on the bandstand, scowling in his direction Gersen raised the long-gun, aimed, fired a round just as Howard Treesong jumped from the bandstand. He whirled in midair, struck in the shoulder Gersen fired again, and struck Howard Treesong in the groin, spinning him around again. He fell to the floor of the pavilion and out of Gersen’s range of vision.
Gersen hesitated, leaning back and forth, almost irresistibly urged to rush forward and make sure of Howard Treesong’s death.
Danger was too close If Howard Treesong were only wounded, as seemed likely, and Gersen were captured, it would be a grisly business. He could wait no longer Dodging into the shade of the larch trees, he ran around the pavilion to the driveway, where he crouched among the parked vehicles. Three Companions ran along the front of the pavilion, Gersen aimed, fired once, twice, three times, and three bodies tumbled to the ground.
Gersen gingerly rose to his feet and craned his neck, hoping for another shot at Treesong.
Danger hung heavy. Death was imminent. Gersen retreated to the road, crossed and took refuge in a copse of some dank local growth. A giant shape blotting out the stars descended upon the pavilion. Searchlights suddenly illuminated the entire area Gersen decided to wait no longer, infrared scanners would soon be combing the landscape. He ran to the riverside, lowered himself into the water, and floated away to the north, secure from infrared detection.
He swam across the river and emerged a quarter mile downstream. He climbed the bank, sodden as a muskrat, and stood surveying the scene to the south Failure once more Bitter, galling failure. For the second time he had been offered a shot at his quarry, for the second time he had inflicted only a wound.
Tenders drifted down from the ship and a moment later returned .The floodlights were extinguished, the ship, now a black mass picked out by lines of illuminated ports, rose to an altitude of a thousand feet and hovered.
Within the ship, Treesong’s brain would not be inactive. The alarm had emanated from the dock, where the Companions had taken the inept musician Who was this musician whom Professor Kutte had allowed to play in his orchestra? Obviously, the question would be put to Kutte, who would briskly tell all he knew the musician was an offworlder who wished to be present at the reunion.
An offworlder? He must be captured, without fail Inquiry quickly would be made at inns, towns, transport agencies, spaceports. At Theobald Spaceport, the Flittering would be noticed, boarded. The registration, in the name of Kirth Gersen, would duly be recorded and made known to Howard Treesong Gersen grimaced. He climbed the bank and trotted north to Glocher Way, then west beside the cemetery. The dead of Gladbetook, uncannily sentient in the starlight, watched him pass
At the main street Gersen hesitated a moment, thinking of the runabout, but Professor Kutte represented the greater urgency and he continued along Glocher Way to Kutte’s house. Light glowed from the front windows. Keeping to the deepest shadows Gersen approached the house. Valdemar Kutte, in a maroon dressing gown, paced back and forth, holding a towel to his forehead. So far, thought Gersen, so good; the normalcy of the scene made him wonder as to the accuracy of his projections. The spaceship might already have departed, with the idiot musician remaining as an unsolved, if trivial, mystery .... Nevertheless Gersen decided to wait. Behind a hedge he found concealment and settled himself.
Minutes passed, five, ten.
The street remained quiet. Gersen stirred fretfully. He looked around the sky, to find only stars and strange constellations. He heaved a sigh, adjusted his position, his clothes still damp.
A faint sound from above. Gersen became instantly alert. Again. Imminence.
Down from the sky drifted a small airboat. Soft as a shadow it dropped to a landing in the street, ten yards from Gersen’s hiding place. Three men stepped to the ground, dark shapes in the starshine. For a moment they stood in muttered conversation, evidently making sure of Kutte’s house.
Gersen ran crouching behind the hedge, circled Kutte’s hydrangea hushes, and waited behind the gatepost.
Inside the house Valdemar Kutte, in a posture of outrage and indignation, complained of the night’s events to a small plump woman who listened aghast.
Two men came along the avenue. They turned into Professor Kutte’s yard. Gersen hit one upon the forehead with an iron garden ornament, grappled the other and stabbed him to the heart.
There had been no sound. Within the house Professor Kutte continued as before, striding back and forth, nourishing his hands, pausing to emphasize some particularly heinous episode.
Gersen crept back behind the hedge to his former post. The third man stood leaning against the skycar. Gersen stepped quietly into the street behind him. Striking hard with the dagger, he cut the man’s spinal cord.
Into the back of the skycar Gersen tumbled the three corpses. He took the vehicle aloft, floated across Gladbetook, now dark and shuttered for the night, and settled into the yard behind Swecher’s Inn. He went quietly to his room, changed gratefully into his ordinary clothes, tucked The Book of Dreams into his pocket. Returning to the skycar, he rose into the night and flew south toward Theobald. Over the Oalglish River he lowered the skycar, jettisoned the three Companions, then continued south.
The scattered lights of Theobald presently appeared below. Red and blue twinklers marked the outlines of the spaceport.
Unnoticed and unchallenged, Gersen landed the skycar beside his Fantasm Flitterwing. He went aboard and started up the flight systems.
He considered the sky-car. If Howard Treesong found it here, near the spot vacated by a Fantamic Flitterwing, he would draw the natural and obvious conclusion. The depot official would supply him the Flitterwing’s registration codes, the trail would lead directly to Kirth Gersen, care of Jehan Addels, Pontefract, Aloysius ... Gersen overrode the safety latch, set the controls, and let the skycar fly off into the night.
He returned into the Flitterwing, sealed the ports, and left the Land of Lelander below. At an altitude of ten miles he hovered and searched the sky. Neither macroscope, nor radar, nor xenode detector discovered any trace of Treesong’s ship, which was just as well, since the Flitterwing lacked armament.
Gersen flew into the far north and landed on an expanse of desolate tundra, safe from Treesong’s detectors, should anyone think to deploy them.
Silence and starlight on the waste outside the observation ports Gersen consumed a bowl of goulash and sat slumped in his chair, profoundly tired hut prevented from sleep by a flux of queer moods. nervous excitement slowly waning, disappointment for his failure to kill Howard Treesong, contradicted by a grim satisfaction for the damage he had done, which would cause Treesong inconvenience, anger, fear, uncertainty, and pain not a bad evening’s work. The events themselves—they could only be comprehended in terms of Howard Treesong’s personality .... Taking up The Book of Dreams, Gersen began to study the contents. He was too tired to persist ... He went to his couch and soon slept.
14
In the morning Gersen went out to drink a cup of tea in the slanting sunlight. The air carried a smoky reek of fust, mud, and aeons of slow-decaying vegetation. Low hills huddled across the southern horizon; elsewhere a plain, half tundra, half bog, extended as far as the eye could see. Gray-green lichen covered the ground, punctuated by starved clumps of sedge and small black plantains with scarlet berries. The reunion at Gladbetook School seemed far distant in both space and time.
Gersen went into the saloon and drew another cup of tea. Sitting on the top step of the exit port, in the wan light of Van Kaathe’s Star, he once more set himself to an examination of The Book of Dreams.
The tea grew cold. Gersen read, page after page, and came at last to where young Howard had stopped his writing almost in mid-sentence.
Gersen put the book down and looked off across the distance. Once, Howard Hardoah had treasured this book. For Howard Alan Treesong it would represent a memento of the sweet sad days of his youth. And far more: it denned his being; it was precious beyond calculation. Suppose he were now to learn of its existence? ... There were dozens of permutations to the situation. Howard believed that the book had been taken from him by his friend Nimpy Cleadhoe. An all-important question: where now was Nimpy Cleadhoe?
Gersen sat thinking: of young Howard Hardoah, frail, tentative, sensitive; of Howard Alan Treesong, strong, radiant with confidence, pulsing with vitality. Picking up The Book of Dreams, Gersen thought to feel from the faded red cover a quiver of similar life ....
On first reading, the book had seemed a rather formless pastiche. There were personal assertions, colloquies between seven paladins, twelve cantos of narrative verse. A late chapter revealed the language Naomei, known only to the seven paladins, and included a syllabary of 350 characters, by which Naomei might properly be transcribed. Before young Howard had fully developed Naomei, the book came to its abrupt ending.
The book apparently had occupied Howard for a period of years. The initial manifesto occupied a page and a half: a statement in which a sympathetic ear might find much that was vivid and compelling, whereas a cynical spirit would hear only callow bombast. So much, thought Gersen, might be said for the entire book; final Judgment could only rest upon how closely achievement matched youthful fantasy. In this light the term “callow bombast” must be discarded. Feeble understatement, thought Gersen, was a more appropriate phrase.
The book began:
I am Howard Alan Treesong. I profess no fealty to the Hardoah ilk; I expect none. That my birth occurred through the agency of Adrian and Reba Hardoah is an incident over which I lacked control. I prefer to claim my substance elsewhere: from brown soil like that which I now clutch in my hand, from gray rain and moaning wind, from radiance discharged by the magic star Meamone. My stuff has been impregnated with ten colors, of which five are found in the flowers of Uahane Forest and five may be struck from the Meamone scintilla.
Such is the stuff of my being.
For ilkness I claim the line of Demabia Hathkens,[59] specifically from his union with Princess Gisseth of Treesong Keep, from which came Searl Treesong, Knight of the Flaming Spear.
My vistgeist[60] is known by a name of secret magic. This name is IMMIR.
May sullen rays from the dark star beside Meamone strike liver and lights of him who utters this name to scorn.
To the following page was attached a drawing worked by an unskilled hand yet infused with ardor and an earnest directness. Depicted was a naked boy standing in front of a naked young man, the boy stalwart and determined, with a bright intelligent gaze; the young man somewhat insubstantial but effulgent with a nameless quality compounded of daring, ardor, magical wonder.
This, thought Gersen, was young Howard’s concept of himself and his vistgeist Immir.
The next page listed a set of aphorisms, some legible, others so erased and altered as to be unintelligible:
IN COUNTERMANDS OUT.
Problems are like the trees of Bleadstone Woods; there is always a way between.
I am a thing sublime. I believe. I surge, and it is done. I defeat heroes; I woo fair girls; I swim warm with glorious longing for the ineffable. With my ardent urge I outstrip time and think the unthinkable. I know a secret force. It comes from within, exerting irresistible thrust. It partakes of all gaiety, of the striding gallantry of the beautiful Tattenbarth nymphs, of the soul’s conquest over infinity. This is VLON, which may be revealed to no one. Here is the secret symbol: I love Glaide with the blond curls. She lives in dreaming, as an anemone lives in cool water. She is not aware that I am I. I wish I knew the way into her soul. I wish I knew the magic to join our dream-ways. If I only could talk to her by starlight, afloat on quiet waters.
I can see the outlines; there are ways to control the beast. But I have much to learn. Fear, panic, terror: they are like wild giants who must be conquered and enslaved to my service. It shall be done. Wherever I go they will follow at my heels, unseen and unknown until I command.
Glaide!
I know she must be aware.
Glaide! She is made from starlight and flower dust; she breathes the memory of midnight music. I wonder I wonder I wonder.
Today I showed her the Sign, casually, as if it were of no importance. She saw it; she looked at me. But she spoke no word.
(The next few passages bore traces of erasure with passages overwritten in a stronger hand.)
What is power? It is the means to realize wants and wishes. To me, power has become a necessity; in itself it is a virtue and balm sweet as a girl’s kiss, and—similarly—it is there to be taken.
I am alone. Enemies and hurlibuts surround me, and stare with mad eyes. They flaunt their insolent haunches as they pass by on the run.
Glaide, Glaide, why did you do so? You are deprived to me, you are soiled and spoiled. O sweet soiled Glaide! You shall know regret and remorse; you shall sing songs of woe, to no avail. As for the dogskin Tupper Sadalfloury, I shall take him in the amber gondola to Slaymarket Isle and give him to the Moals.
But it is time to think beyond.
The text passed over a page, to resume in ink of heavy purple-black. The hand seemed more firm, the characters more regularly formed. The next passage was headed:
MWI RICS
The accumulation of power is a self-sustaining process. The first accretion is slow, but increases according to direction.[61] First, the requisite steps These are an equable and careless fare, where nothing is revealed. During this phase all strictures are methodically discarded. Discipline in itself is not a corrupt concept, only discipline that is imposed rather than self-calculated. Emancipation, then, is first from Teaching, from duty, homsetter emotions, which loosen the power of decision.
(An evident lapse of time, perhaps several months. The ensuing hand was tall, spiky, angular, and exuded an almost palpable energy.)
A new girl has come to town!
Her name is Zada Memar.
Zada Memar.
To think of her brings a blur of enthrallment across the brain.
She moves in a cosmos other own, colored by her own colors and urged by her own fascinating ardors. How can I join my cosmos to hers? How can I share our secrets? How can we merge ourselves into a unity of body and soul and ardo? I wonder if she knows me as I know her?
There followed several pages of extravagant speculations upon Destiny and circumstances subsequent to a chance meeting between himself and Zada Memar.
The next passage consisted of passionate apostrophes addressed to the inner consciousness of Zada Memar. There was no explicit clue as to the progress or outcome of the love affair, except in the termination of the passage a wild burst of emotion directed against the environment in which Howard Hardoah found himself.
Enemies surround me, they stare at me with mad eyes, walking or loping past, or veering as if blown on the wind, they flaunt their insolent challenges I see them through several minds, as is useful.
The time is Now. I call on Immir. Immir. To the fore.
A blank page, and a division in The Book of Dreams. For want of better terms, the foregoing could be designated Part One. Part Two was indited in a firm round hand. The rasping fervor or previous passages seemed under strong control. The apparent continuity between the final line of Part One and the first line of Part Two would seem to be misleading.
Upon that place made sacred to myself I bled my blood, I made the sign. I spoke the word, I called on Immir, and he came.
I said, Immir, the time is Now. Stand together with me. Assuredly. We are one.
Now we must set about our affairs. Let us form our company, so that each is known to each, mighty paladins all.
So it shall be. Come, stand in the ray from Meamone and by their redolent colors let them be known.
The ray struck down upon the black gem, so that a person of black splendor appeared; he and Immir embraced like boon companions of old.
Here is the first paladin; he is Jena Rais the Wise, and far of vision. He reckons eventualities and counsels the necessary, without weakness, pity, ruth, or clemency.
I give you welcome, noble paladin.
To Meamone’s ray Immir showed the red gem, and a person wearing crimson amphruscules[62] joined the three.
Here stands Lons Hohenger the red paladin. He knows and works the executive arts. Without effort he does deeds wondrous to the ordinary man. He is a stranger to fear. He cries: Ah ha ha! when the falbards are raised for combat.
Loris, I accept you as my red paladin, and I promise you feats and forays to surpass any which have gone before.
That is good to hear. Immir, who now will join us?
