Judgment Night Read online

  She and Egide reeled apart with singed lashes and cheeks burning from that sudden glare as the instantaneous fan of light died away. Her dazzled eyes saw dimly that he was gasping like a man who had taken a sudden sharp blow in the stomach, but he was not dead. He should be dead, and he only stood there gasping at her, blinking singed golden lashes.

  For a split second her mind could not grasp it. She saw the silver mail burned away across his chest where that fierce needle beam should have bored through flesh and bone. She saw beneath it not charred white skin and spurting blood, but a smooth shining surface which the beam had not even blackened. Everything was ringed with rainbows, and when she closed her smarting eyes she saw the outline of burned mail and gleaming surface beneath in reversed colors bright against the darkness of her lids.

  Then time caught up with her. Things began to happen again with furious speed. The explanation flashed into her mind as she saw Egide reaching for her. He wore some sort of protection even under his mail, then—some substance that deflected the needle beam into a blast of thin, scorching heat diffused into harmlessness. And she had an instant of foolish and incongruous rage that he had come thus protected, doubting the validity of their truce.

  Then Egide’s arm slammed her hard against the unyielding surface of whatever armor he wore beneath his mail. She felt a small, reluctant admiration of the strength in that arm—an unexpected strength, remembered from Cyrille—and of his almost instantaneous action even when she knew he must be sick and breathless from a severe blow in the pit of the stomach. The gun’s beam would have bruised him heavily even through the armor, before its force fanned out into sheer heat.

  It all happened too quickly to rationalize. She did not even have time to wonder why he seized her, or why Jair, bellowing with a sound of exultation, was dragging them both across the floor toward the far wall. She had a confused glimpse of her father’s bewildered and outraged face. She saw the guards leaning out of their hidden stations in the wall across from her, guns leveled. But she knew she herself was a shield for the two H’vani, though what they planned, she could not even guess.

  Other guards were tumbling from their posts, running toward them across the hall. Juille suddenly began to fight hard against the restraining clasp that held her. She bruised her fists upon the armor beneath Egide’s mail. Jair roared inexplicably:

  “Open up! You hear me? Open!”

  Egide crushed her ribs painfully against his corselet and swung her feet off the ground. For a dizzy instant the violet walls and the sunlit white arches of the ceiling spun in reverse around her. She was hanging head-down over Egide’s shoulder, seething with intolerable rage at this first rough handling she had ever known in her life. But she was bewildered, too, and off-balance and incredulous that such things could happen. She was briefly aware of cries from the hall, her father’s voice shouting commands, the guards yelling. And then came sudden darkness and a smooth, swishing noise that cut off all sounds behind them.

  The dark smelled of dust and age-old decay. Juille’s mind told her what her reason refused to accept—that somehow, incredibly, these barbarians had come forearmed with knowledge about some panel in the walls of the imperial council hall which a hundred generations of ruling emperors had never guessed.

  She was still upside down over Egide’s shoulder, acutely uncomfortable, her cheek pressed against something cold and hard, her eyes stinging from the heat of her own gun. Voices whispered around them. Someone said, “Hurry!” and there was the muffled sound of feet through dust that rose in stifling clouds. And then a long, sliding crash that filled the darkness deafeningly and made the eardrums ache from its sudden pressure in this confined space. Someone said after a stunned moment, “There, that does it.” Someone else—Jair?—said, “How?” and the first voice, familiar but unplaceable: “When they break through the wall, they’ll find this rock-fall, and a false tunnel that leads outside the city walls. They’ll think you went that way. We laid a trail of footprints through it yesterday. Safe now.”

  But who…who was it?

  “Put me down!” Juille demanded in a fierce, muffled voice. That someone whose tones sounded very familiar indeed, said:

  “Better not yet. Come along. Can you manage her?”

  And the nightmare went on. Someone ahead carried a light that cast great wavering shadows along the rough walls. Juille was joggling up and down across Egide’s shoulder through the musty dark, sick with fury and outrage and bewilderment. Her eyes streamed with involuntary tears as an aftermath of that heat flash; her burning cheek was pressed hard against the corner of something cold and unyielding—Egide’s harp?—and the dust rose chokingly all around.

  After smothered ages, the familiar voice said: “You can put her down now.”

  There came one last upheaval and Juille was on her feet again, automatically smoothing down her tunic, glaring through the dimness in a speechless seizure of rage. She saw Egide looking down at her with expressionless eyes, saw Jair’s savage face dark in the torchlight, his eyes gleaming. Between them she saw the familiar, comforting, tough-featured face of Helia.

  For an instant her relief was greater than she would have thought possible. All her life that face had meant comfort, protection, gruff encouragement against disappointment. In the midst of this bewilderment and indignity, the one familiar sight made everything all right again. Even in the face of reason—

  Egide still held her arms.

  “Turn her around,” Helia told him, in the familiar voice, with the familiar homely gesture of command Juille had known all her life, from nursery days. She found herself spun around, her arms held behind her, while Helia reached under the mail tunic and took away the little dagger that no one else knew about, the dagger that Helia herself had taught Juille to hide there and use unexpectedly as a last resort.

  Juille closed her eyes.

  “The others will be waiting,” Helia’s capable voice remarked calmly. “First, though—highness, I had better tie your hands.”

  Juille wondered madly whether that violet flash of heat had really killed her. Perhaps it had only stunned her—that must be it—and all this was an irrational dream.

  Helia’s familiar hands that had bathed her from babyhood, dressed her hurts, taught her sword play and target practice—were binding her wrists behind her now with sure, gentle swiftness. The well-known voice said as the binding went on:

  “You must understand, highness, before you meet the rest. I don’t want you to face them without understanding.” She drew the soft cords tighter. “I am an Andarean, highness. Your race conquered ours a hundred generations ago. But we never forget. Here under the city, in the catacombs that were once our own imperial halls, we’ve met to pass along from father to son the tradition of our heritage. We’ve planned all these centuries for a day like this. There.” She gave the cords a final pat. “Now, keep your head up and don’t let them see it if you’re confused. Wait a minute.” She came around in front of Juille, clucked disapprovingly, and took out a handkerchief to wipe the dust from Juille’s hot face where the tears had streaked it. Then she straightened the helmet that had fallen by its chin strap over one ear.

  “Keep your head up,” she said again. “Remember what I’ve taught you. We may have to kill you later, my dear—but while you live, you’re still my girl and I want to be proud of you. Now—march!”

  And so, bewildered to the point of madness, still choked by the dust in her nostrils, her eyes burning and her hands tied behind her, but with her head up because Helia, insanely, wanted to be proud of her, Juille let herself be marched forward, up shallow steps and into a big low cavern lighted by square windows through which light streamed from some outside source.

  There were people here, sitting along the walls on benches. Not many. Juille knew some of the faces—servants and small courtiers about the palace. A few of them held responsible positions with the defense forces.

  From among them a man stepped forward. Juille did not kno
w him, except that his features were Andarean. He wore a purple tunic and cloak, and he bowed to the two H’vani.

  “We are making history here,” he said in a soft, low-pitched voice. “This is the turning point in the war for Galactic domination. We of Andarea welcome you and the future you will control.”

  Jair drew a deep breath and started to say something. Juille was aware that Egide’s elbow jammed into his ribs. Egide, still breathing a little unevenly from the gun bolt in the stomach, spoke instead in his most courtly voice:

  “We H’vani will owe you a great deal. You’ve managed things perfectly so far. But we haven’t much time now. The weapons—”

  The Andarean’s long eyes slid around to Juille. It was at once a query and a murderous suggestion, without words. Juille felt a sudden shudder of goose flesh. New experiences had crowded one another in these last few minutes until she was dizzy with trying to adjust to them—she had never been man-handled before, she had never been treated like an object instead of a person, and she hotly resented the fact that Egide had not directly addressed a word to her since the moment in the hall when she had tried to kill him.

  Behind her dimly she saw Helia step forward to lay a hand on Egide’s arm. Suddenly she knew how Egide had learned of her presence on Cyrille—perhaps, too, why her assassins had failed to reach the H’vani during their ride into the city. But when Egide spoke his voice was firm, as if he had not needed prompting.

  “Juille is our hostage,” he told the Andarean. “There, I think, we’ve improved on your plan. If anything goes wrong, we still have something to bargain with.”

  The Andarean nodded dubiously, his narrow, impassive eyes lingering on her face as if in reluctance. “Perhaps. Well, we’d better get started. We—”

  “Wait.” Egide glanced around the cavern, dim in the light that so oddly came through from outside. “Are these all of you?”

  “Almost all.” The Andarean said it carelessly. “Our numbers have dwindled very much in the last few generations.”

  Juille narrowed her eyes at him. That was a lie. The Andareans were few, but certainly not this few. Grateful for some problem she could take a real hold upon, she cast her mind back searchingly over the past history of this race, making a mental note to have the heads off certain of her espionage officials if she ever got out of this alive.

  Long ago the earlier emperors had kept close spies upon their overthrown predecessors, but the watch had relaxed as generations passed and the Andarean numbers grew less. They were too few, really, to matter except in some such accident as this, when chance assembled just the right factors to make their treachery dangerous.

  So the two H’vani had come—why? Exactly why? Groping back among the tangled skeins of plot and counterplot Juille lost her grip again upon clear thinking. They were here because they thought in her weakness she had asked them to talk peace terms—because they hoped to trick possession of the Dunnarian weapon out of the Lyonese hands—because of some treacherous promises from these skulkers in the underground. And those skulkers themselves were lying out of the depths of further schemes of their own.

  She got a cold sort of comfort out of that. If the H’vani had deceived her and her father, they in turn were being deceived. For there were far more Andareans upon Ericon than she saw here. Their leader would not have lied just now if he were not playing some desperate game with his new allies.

  Weapons. Egide had asked about weapons. Were the Andareans offering him some new offensive measure to use against the Lyonese? And why? The Andareans were a subtle race; surely they had cherished the memories of their great lost heritage too long, if Helia told the truth, to give up their future to H’vani rule, supposing the H’vani won. And surely they were too wise in the ways of deceit to trust H’vani promises even should they win.

  Juille gave up the problem as Helia took her arm again and drew her after the others. They were moving out of the low cavern with its strange outside lighting. Helia padded along softly at Juille’s side, her eyes downcast. Juille looked at her in the dim light, finding no words with which to reproach her. She was still too stunned by this sudden failure of the solidest assurance in her life to look at it with any rational clarity.

  Nor was Helia a woman to offer apologies.

  “Look around you,” she said brusquely as they filed out of the cavern. “You may never see a sight like this again.”

  The cavern, seen from outside in clearer light, was obviously the collapsed remnants of a much higher room. What might once have been a hallway ran around it outside, the walls patterned with luminous blocks that shed a glow which must be three thousand years old.

  The walls showed scars of age-old battle. Juille’s first imperial ancestors might very well have commanded the guns that made them. For this uppermost level of the tunnels which lay beneath the city must once have comprised the lower stories of the palace the Andareans had built in the days of their glory.

  The ruins had been leveled off and sealed when the modern palace was built. Everyone knew of the honeycombing layers which went down and down in unknown depths of level under level. Some of them had been explored, cursorily. But they were much too unsafe for any systematic examination, and far too deep to be cleared out or filled up to give the city a firm foundation.

  The confusion of interlacing passages, level blending with level, was so complex that explorers had been known to vanish here and never reappear. And immemorial traps, laid down millenniums ago by retreating defenders in forgotten wars, sometimes caught the innocent blundering along dusty tunnels. Walls and floors collapsed from time to time under the weight of exploring footsteps. No, it was not a safe place for the casual adventurer to visit.

  But perhaps in each dynasty the survivors of the defeated race had lurked here in the cellars of their lost and ruined city, remembering their heritage and plotting to regain it. Perhaps—Juille thought of it grimly—her own people one day might creep in darkness through the shattered remnants of her purple plastic halls and jeweled arches, buried beneath the mounting stories of a new city, whispering the traditions of the Lyonese and plotting the downfall of triumphant H’vani. And perhaps they, too, might explore downward, as the Andareans had obviously done, searching the dangerous lower levels for some weapon to turn against the victors.

  From the murmurs that drifted back to her along the tunnels she knew that something valuable lay hidden here, unless the Andareans were lying again. It was hard to believe that any such weapon actually existed, unknown after so many generations of curious explorers. And yet the Andareans sounded very sure. Egide and Jair would certainly not have risked their necks on such a mission unless the promise had been soundly based on evidence.

  Indeed, it seemed incredible that these two foremost leaders of the revolt would have dared to endanger their lives and their whole campaign on such a gamble as this, had they not been very sure of escape.

  Someone ahead was carrying a radiant globe of translucent plastic on the end of a tall handle. She could see Egide’s confident yellow head haloed with light from it, and Jair’s great bulk outlined against the glow. The light sliding along the walls showed scenes of forgotten Andarean legends, winged animals and eagle-headed men in low relief upon which dust had gathered like drifts of snow. They passed windows of colored glass that no longer opened upon anything but darkness. They passed rooms which the soft light briefly revealed in amorphous detail under mounds of smothering dust.

  And once they came out on a balcony over a scene that took Juille’s breath away. The vast hall below them was built on a scale so tremendous that it seemed incredible that human minds had conceived it. Its vast oval was proportioned so perfectly that only the giddy depths below them made the room seem as large as it was. A muted blue radiance lighted it from incredible heights of windows lifting columns of blue unbroken glass from floor to ceiling, all around the walls.

  Helia said with a sort of gruff pride, “This was one of our temples once, highness. No one’s
ever built such a temple since. See that glass? The secret of it’s lost now. The light’s in the glass itself, not from outside.” She was silent for a moment, looking down. Then she said in a softer voice, “Andarea was a great nation, highness. You feel the same about yours. Remember what you said today, about breaking the truce? The end justifies any means you have to take. I think so, too.”

  It was as near as she could come to apology or explanation. And Juille, after a moment of blinking dismay at this application of her own theories turned against her, was conscious of sudden respect for this inflexible woman at her side. Here was the true amazon, she thought, more ruthless than any man in the naked simplicity of her cast-off femininity. This was the one quality Juille could respect above all others. She glanced ahead at Egide’s broad back, despising him for the lack of it. Unswerving faithfulness to a principle, whatever that principle might be.

  Juille wondered what Egide was thinking, how he interpreted to himself her attempt at murder. Well, if she had failed it was not for weakness like his. And there might come another chance. Her mind had begun to awaken again after the stunning shocks of the past half hour. Already she was making plans. Helia she thought she understood. Helia would protect her while she could. She would see to her comfort and save her face whenever possible, but when the time came, Helia might kill her with a steady hand. And Juille would have despised her if the hand shook.

  They went down a sweep of tremendous stairs and filed, a pigmy row, across the floor of that vast hall under the shining blue columns of the windows. And from there they went down sharply, and down again.

  There was tension in the air of these lower levels. Once an Andarean went ahead to a curtain of spider-webs that veiled the passage and lifted it aside on the point of a staff, with exaggerated care, while the party passed beneath. And once they balanced carefully in single file along a bridge of planks laid upon perfectly solid flooring.