Judgment Night Read online

  As a result, horseback riding is highly fashionable, pleasant enough and sufficiently picturesque to satisfy those of that world who go abroad for amusement. Actually, the terrene of other planets is much more familiar, and more easily reached, because of these restrictions, than the surface of Ericon itself.

  The party had been riding a long time, and the tension in the room where the watchers sat was growing unbearable, when a nagging familiarity about one of the mounted figures she watched struggled up past the level of awareness into Juille’s conscious mind.

  “Focus it down, Helia,” she said sharply. “I want to see those men.”

  The picture swooped dizzily as the vision seemed to hover downward above the slowly moving procession. Then the two H’vani were large upon the screen in bright, three-dimensional life, the rustle of their cloaks audible in the room, the creak of harness, the clink of fire sword against belt.

  Juille struggled against a moment of sheer suffocation. She was horrified to feel a tide of prickling warmth sweep up within her, clear to the roots of the dark-gold braids. Too many emotions were striving for dominance in her mind—the effect made her reel. For she knew this blond and bearded young man with a harp slung across his shoulder, riding a tall horse toward the city. She knew him very well, indeed.

  Then their meeting on Cyrille had been no accident. And—that half-forgotten grip upon her throat had been no caress. For a moment, her mind and her gaze turned inward, calling back the brief, puzzling idyll which the urgency of recent events had so nearly eclipsed even from memory now. It came back vividly enough, with that picture moving on the screen to remind her.

  She sat quite still, sorting out the memories of those three careless, oddly disturbing days on Cyrille. Egide—that was his name, then, Egide the H’vani—must surely have come there because of certain knowledge of her presence. And he must have come with a purpose that was not hard to guess. Especially not hard now, when she looked back to those few strange, tense interludes when she had been frightened without understanding why.

  But he had never fulfilled his mission. He had come to kill her and he had let her live. She felt a sudden triumphant flush of vindication—she had guessed his weakness even before she knew his name. It was all there to see in that sensitive and sensuous mouth of his, and she had forestalled him through sheer instinct in the moment of his greatest resolution. A wave of scorn for him washed over her. A man like that was no fit leader for revolutionaries to follow. She had forestalled him in his most urgent duty—but how had she done it? Juille felt the deep blush returning, and bent her head futilely to hide it as her mind went back to that strange, frightening, delightful interlude upon the cloud.

  Whatever her motive, she knew it had been herself, not he, who made that first inviting gesture. He had meant to kill her. Every calculating compliment he paid, every scene of elaborate romance he lead her through, had been meant only to lull her to unguarded ease. He must have had no other purpose. But she…she took it all at face value and had seemed in the end to beg for his kisses. The deepest depths of humiliation closed over her head as she sat there motionless, burning to the hairline with a red blush of rage.

  When her swimming gaze focused again, she met Helia’s warning eyes and fought for self-control. And because Helia had bred discipline into her from infancy, after a moment she gained it. But the turmoil of her thoughts went on. No wonder, she thought bitterly, he had agreed to this conference. He had every right to think that she knew him now—had recognized him in some portrait or news screen if she did not recognize him on Cyrille—and he must believe that she herself had insisted upon the meeting, that the terms of peace were hers. He might preen himself now with the thought that his amorous work upon Cyrille had borne fruit already in her betrayal of her own people into compromise with the enemy. She thought hotly that he would judge her by himself and think her as ready as he to toss principles away for the weakness of a personal desire. She had to fight down another surge of blinding humiliation that she had made herself vulnerable to the patronizing scorn of such a man as this. And for an instant she hated, too, the amazonian upbringing that had left her unarmed against him.

  Well, there was one good thing in the ugly situation. She would never have to face him again. Her assassins had delayed unpardonably already, but they surely would not delay much longer. He would die without seeing her, without knowing—without knowing she was not deceived! Still thinking the peace plans were hers, because of love for him! No, if he died now she thought she would die, too, of sheer anger and shame.

  She sat forward in her chair, watching the two H’vani, reading insolent swagger into every motion they made. To her eyes they rode like conquerors already, coming to accept the peace they thought her ready to hand them on a platter. And she knew she must kill Egide herself or never know self-respect again.

  They were at the city gates now. She watched feverishly, on a sword-edge of impatience for the assassins to fail after all. Trumpets echoed from the high white walls and the procession wound along broad streets toward the palace. Juille, waiting on tenterhooks for the flash of the gun that would rob her of her last hope for self-respect, began to realize as the procession moved on, that somehow her hope was to be granted. Somehow the assassins had failed. It was too late already for any efficient job of killing to be done, here in the crowded streets. She leaned to the screen, breathless, seeing nothing else.

  She did not know that Helia was watching her anxiously, or that the Dunnarian’s great luminous eyes dwelt upon her face with a fathomless sort of speculation.

  She paused outside the arch of the conference hall, balancing the llar upon her shoulder, drawing a deep breath. Behind her Helia whispered, “All right, all right. Come along now.” The familiar voice was marvelously bracing. Juille smiled a grim smile, tossed her cloak back over one shoulder and strode in under the archway, hearing the trumpets blare for her coming.

  They rose from their chairs around the white table in the center of the room. She would not look at individual faces as she swung down the room with a clank of empty scabbards—externally she must keep the truce. She felt very sure of herself now. She held her bright-helmed head arrogantly, making the cloak ripple with every long stride, hearing her spurs jingle as she came. The trumpet notes shivered and echoed among the arches of the ceiling.

  Above them rose the soaring transept of a vast hall. Its purple walls paled to violet and then to white as they rose toward an intricate interlacing of arches through whose translucent heights pale sunlight came pouring. It was a very old hall. The emperors of Ericon had reared it upon the ruins of the race they had displaced. And that race had built here upon the ruins of other emperors, ages before.

  The present emperor stood white and tall at the head of the table. Juille bowed to him formally, but she flicked over and past the other two men a glance so icy that it barely acknowledged their presence.

  In one glance, though, she saw all that she needed to see. It was Egide. The same handsome, rash, blue-eyed young face with the curly short beard, the curly hair. He had hung his harp over the chair arm where he sat, and Juille thought it the ultimate touch of decadent foppishness, incongruous in a barbarian prince. He wore today not an extravagantly designed cloak of blood or hair, but black velvet that looked spectacular against the silvery gleam of his mesh mail. There was a fire-sword scar half-healed across his cheek and temple, and he looked a little more tired and wary than the careless lover of Cyrille. But the blue eyes were as confident as ever on her face.

  All this in one cold, flashing glance that ignored him. She folded her fingers lovingly over a tiny palm gun hidden in her hand, its metal warm from that close hiding place. Her glance flicked over the other man and went on.

  Big, bull-chested, with reddish hair and beard and eyes. Huge forearms crossed over his chest. A barbarian, typical of the savage H’vani. And yet so openly savage, with such a direct, fighting glare on his scarred face, that she felt a reluctant flash o
f kinship with him. Such a man, she thought, her own remote forefathers must have been who conquered the Galaxy by brute force and left it for her heritage. Beside him Egide looked the fop he was, and her father the senile idealist.

  She nodded distantly as the emperor introduced the two. Egide, hereditary leader of the H’vani, Jair, his commander in chief. Her only thought was a murderous one. “If I can kill them both, what a blow to the H’vani! And what fools they were to come!”

  Her father was speaking. She scarcely listened to the sonorous voice whose echoes went whispering among the arches in confused murmurs high overhead.

  “We sit today,” the old man declared, “over the graves of a score of races who made the same mistake we are on the verge of making here, and who died because they did.”

  She could feel Egide’s blue stare upon her face. It was intolerable. All the ages of imperial pride rose behind her, the pride of a hundred generations that had commanded the stars in their courses. This one bearded barbarian sitting here staring at her unashamedly, as if he were her equal, as if he thought she, too, must be remembering a fantastic nighttime ride upon a cloud, under stars like burning roses in constellations without a name.

  She turned full upon him one bright, furious glare that flashed like a violet fire sword beneath the helmet brim. “You ought to be dead,” the burning glance implied. “When I find who failed me, and why they failed, they’ll be dead, too. You’re living on borrowed time. You ought to be dead and you will be soon—you will be soon!” She made a chant of it in her throat, letting her eyes half-close to slits of bright fire-blade violet.

  The emperor talked on. “We are too evenly matched. Neither can win without such destruction as will cast the whole Galaxy back a thousand years. On all the worlds of that Galaxy—many new worlds that have not yet known war—our forces stand poised in armed, precarious truce, watching what happens here today. If we join in battle—”

  Juille made an impatient gesture and recrossed her legs. The little palm gun was warm in her hand. She wished passionately that the platitudes were over. And then a treacherous spasm of pity went over her as she listened to the deep old voice roll on. He had been a great warrior once, her father. This meant so much to him, and it was so hopelessly futile—But there was no room for pity in the new Galaxy of today. Her lips thinned as she fondled the trigger of her gun. Soon, now.

  “The H’vani are a young race,” the old man went on. “A crude race, unlettered in any science but warfare. Let us give you the incalculable wealth we have to spare, that you could never take by force. We can teach you all our science has learned in the rich millenniums of our history. In one stride you can advance a thousand years.

  “If you refuse—there is no hope for you. At the very best, we can and will destroy you, if only after such struggles as will cost us all we have. At worst—well, other races have met in deadly conflict on Ericon. Where are they now?” He pointed toward the marble floor. “Down there, in the dark. Under the foundations of this hall lie the building stones of all who fought here before us. Have you ever been down there in the catacombs, any of you? Do you know the old kings who once ruled Ericon? Does anyone alive? And will anyone remember us, if we fail to learn by their example?”

  Juille’s hand came down roughly on the sleek-furred little animal that had slid down upon her knee, and then all her scornful inattention vanished as the small body twisted snake-like under her hand. She snatched it back with lightning quickness, just in time to avoid the slash of her pet’s teeth. It stared up at her, nervously poised, clutching her knee with flexible fingery pads, a look of completely spurious benignity and wisdom in its round eyes even now.

  A new voice, so deeply resonant that the air shuddered in response to it, was saying powerfully, “When peace terms are proposed, it’ll be the H’vani who dictate them!”

  Juille looked up sharply. The emperor had paused. He stood beside her now with his head sunk a little, watching the two envoys from under his bristling brows. She felt a fresh spasm of pity. But the new voice was making strong echoes rumble among the arches of the ceiling, and she knew it was time to pay attention.

  Jair was on his feet, his great fists planted like mallets upon the table edge. “We’ll talk peace with the Lyonese,” he boomed triumphantly, “but we’ll talk it from the throne. Time enough for—”

  Juille shoved back her chair with a sudden furious motion and leaped to her feet, her eyes blazing across the table. The llar had sprung sidewise and caught the emperor’s arm, where it hung staring over its shoulder at her with enormous benignant eyes.

  But before she could speak, Egide’s chair scraped leisurely across the floor, the harp strings ringing faintly with the motion. He stood up almost lazily, but his words preceded hers.

  “We ask the emperor’s pardon,” he said in a calm voice. “Jair, let me talk.”

  Jair gave him a strangely blank look and sat down. Egide went on:

  “What my general means to say is that peace terms must come from us if they’re to come at all. What the emperor says is true and we realize it, but we believe it to be only part of the truth. A divided victory isn’t enough for the H’vani, no matter how many secrets you offer as a bribe. My people are not to be bought with promises for the future.” He smiled whitely in the impeccable flaxen curls of his beard. “My people, I am afraid, are a very literal race. Not too ready to trust an enemy’s promises. Now if you had some specific benefit to offer us here and now—something that might reassure the H’vani about your sincerity”—he glanced from Juille to the emperor and went on with an impulsive persuasion in his voice that Juille remembered well—“I think we might have a better chance of convincing my people that you mean what you say.”

  Juille met his guileless blue gaze with a steely look. She knew quite well what he was hinting. So that was why they’d come, was it? To wheedle the Dunnarian weapon out of the emperor’s senile, peace-bemused hands, and taking full advantage of their supposed immunity because of what had happened upon Cyrille, because they must think that she herself was equally bemused at the memory of it. Obvious strategy, and yet—Juille glanced at her father. No expression showed upon his thoughtful face, but she felt a sudden cold uncertainty about what he might decide to do. Surely he could not believe that the H’vani meant what they said. Surely he must see that once they had a share in the new and subtle weapon from Dunnar there’d be no stopping them this side of the imperial throne. No, he was certainly not yet mad.

  But this was only the beginning. Talk would go on and on, endless circlings around the proposal Egide had just voiced. Endless counterproposals from the emperor. Days and days of it, while Egide still went on believing that she was the reason why he had been invited here, still exchanged with her these sudden blue glances that recalled their days upon Cyrille—the crystal platform drifting through flowery branches and the green evening light of spring. The starry lake beneath their feet as they danced, and the long smooth rhythms when they moved together to enchanting music. The landscapes unreeling beneath their couch of cloud, the great stars blazing overhead.

  No, she would not endure it. She would end it here and now.

  “Egide—” she said in a clear, high voice.

  He turned to her with a quick eagerness she had not seen before. This was the first word she had addressed to him upon Ericon, the first time she had ever spoken his name. He was searching her face with a look of eagerness she did not understand. She didn’t want to.

  She walked slowly around the table toward him. They were all on their feet now, looking at her in surprise. All speech had ceased and the hall was very still. The emperor said, “Juille?” in a voice not yet very much alarmed, but she did not glance at him. She rounded the end of the table and saw Egide push his chair out of the way with a careless thrust that knocked the harp from its back. In the silence, the jarred strings wailed a thin, shrill, plaintive discord through the hall, and Egide caught the falling instrument and smiled uneasily at
her.

  She came toward him without a flicker of returning smile. “Egide—” she said again. She was quite near him now. Near enough to see the crinkling edges of the scar that furrowed his cheek, the separate curling hairs of his shining beard, his thick golden lashes. Behind him she was aware that Jair had drawn an uneasy step or two nearer. She was looking straight into Egide’s blue eyes, large and unfathomable at this nearness. She came forward one last step, bringing her gun hand up.

  “I want you to know,” she said distinctly, “that I had no part in asking you here. I hate your race and all it stands for. I mean to do everything I can to prevent any truce between us. Everything. Do you understand me?”

  The emperor did. He knew his child. He took one long stride toward her around the table, crying, “Juille, Juille! Remember the truce—”

  But he was too far away. Juille fixed Egide’s fascinated stare with a hot, exultant stare of her own, and her lips drew back in a tight grin over her teeth. With her face very near his, and her gaze plumbing his gaze, she smiled and pulled the trigger.

  Then time stopped. A dozen things happening at once, jumbled themselves together bewilderingly, prefaced and veiled by a great fan of violet heat that sprang up terribly between her face and Egide’s. Juille heard Jair’s roar and her father’s cry, and the crash of overturning chairs. But her brain was numbed by the shock of that violet heat where there should have been no heat—only a thin needle beam of force boring through Egide’s corselet.