Judgment Night Read online

  They had come so far now, by such devious ways, that she had no idea where she was, or at what level. She was sure the H’vani were equally at a loss. And it occurred to her briefly that they were at the mercy of their guides now—that the Andareans could come very close to putting an end to the Galaxy-wide warfare here and now in the dusty dark. For robbed of their leaders, the armies would certainly falter. But Juille felt quite sure that whatever the Andareans wanted, it was not peace.

  They had, perhaps, taken steps even surer than her own to make certain that the emperor’s peace conference came to nothing. The H’vani, primed with promises of mysterious weapons, would be in no mood to make a truce with any idea of keeping it.

  She demanded suddenly of Helia, still walking at her elbow in the old accustomed place, “Why haven’t the Andareans used these weapons themselves?” And she saw Egide’s broad back tense a little, the harp slung across his shoulder—where she had hung ignobly a little while before—shifting place at the motion of muscles beneath. She knew that he must have been wondering the same thing. And she knew he was listening.

  “As we told the H’vani,” Helia said, “we aren’t a nation of fighters any more, highness. And there are too few of us. We couldn’t risk losing the weapons in any tentative uprising.”

  So they’d told the H’vani that already, had they? And it hadn’t satisfied Egide any more than it did herself. Helia was a magnificent fighter. She had taught Juille all she knew. A determined, secret band of men and women armed with an unexpected weapon could have seized key positions on planets enough to swing the balance of power to themselves if they chose, and if they were gifted with the subtle minds the Andareans had already shown themselves to possess. Juille would not have hesitated, in such a case. And she didn’t think Helia would either, if there were no alternative.

  Obviously, there was an alternative. They were using the H’vani against the imperial forces—why?

  Suddenly, Juille saw the answer. It was the simplest strategy in the world, and the safest. You could risk an uprising, your own neck and ultimate failure by acting yourself, or you could pit the two forces of greatest power against one another, preventing any truce between them by devious methods, arming one against the other to maintain a perfect balance—until they had wiped each other out. When both sides had struggled to exhaustion, then let the Andareans step in and take over the control they had been prepared to take for so many centuries. It was so easy.

  “Here it is,” the Andarean in the purple tunic said.

  They all crowded forward to stare. And it was a sight worth staring at. The shadows hid most of the long room, shadows heavy as velvet curtains, as if their own age had thickened them into tangible things. But they could not wholly hide the weapons racked shining upon the walls, shining and defiant of dust and rust and the aeons. Cobwebs had formed upon them like festoons, gathering dust until their own weight tore them. There were many layers of such cobwebs, woven and thickened and torn anew over these untarnished swords and pistols and nameless things. Wherever the velvety dust of the webs revealed them, they were brilliant in the light. Some other lost race had known and buried with itself the secret of such metal.

  The Andarean dismissed that array with a gesture.

  “Unimportant things there, on the walls. Only variations of weapons already in use. Out of all this arsenal there are only three important weapons that haven’t been paralleled in later ages. We want to give you those three.”

  He padded silently forward through the dust, lifting his feet like a man who walks in snow, and took up from a clean-swept stand a little pistol not much bigger than the palm gun Juille had dropped in the council hall.

  “This,” he said, hefting its shining smallness on his hand, “discharges a miniature lightning bolt that feeds on metal. It leaps from armed man to armed man, or from girder to girder, feeding and growing as it goes, until the gap becomes too wide to jump.”

  Juille stared at the little gun, a confused realization taking shape in her mind that this war was to be unlike any war before in Lyonese history—unless she could escape somehow in time to prevent the use of these weapons. It would be as if the gods took part, so strange and new would the weapons be on both sides.

  The Andarean leader was looking at her uneasily. “Is it wise to let the princess hear about all this?” he asked Egide.

  The H’vani turned and for the first time since that moment in the council hall, looked straight into Juille’s eyes. She met the look almost happily, with a defiance he could not mistake. She was eager to bring into the open all her hatred of him, all her scorn. She wanted it put it into words, but before she could have spoken, he said in his faintly malicious drawl that she remembered very well, “You’d better stay here. Helia will keep you company.” It was a patronizing tone. Half turned away, he added over one shoulder, “I’ll be back—” and gave her a long look.

  Speechless with fury, Juille watched him plowing away through the dust with the others. Everything he had said might have been deliberately calculated to enrage her. She twisted her wrists futilely against the cords.

  Helia was looking at her with narrow, speculative eyes. Juille gave her a quelling glance and turned her back, looking up at the dust-swathed weapons with an angry, unseeing stare. Voices receded down the room. And as Juille’s anger ebbed a little, she found that the rack of weapons made a very interesting sight. Just possibly some of those guns might still be loaded. If their look of shining, immortal efficiency could be trusted, she might, with luck, find one that had been left in working order.

  And there had, she thought, been something a little false about the Andarean’s casual dismissal of the guns. She would have been willing to bet that six months from now, if the H’vani, with their gift of weapons, were gaining the upper hand too quickly over the imperial forces, there would be Andarean patriots from the tunnels to make a gift of other weapons to the Lyonese. These Andareans were much too subtle to give away their whole stock to the first comer. And if they were really holding back weapons to offer the Lyonese should the H’vani seem to win too easily, might not some of these devices on the wall be worth taking? If she could—if she only could—

  This rack before her presented a display of curiously shaped weapons half shrouded in velvet-thick webs of dust. Some of them looked vaguely familiar. She didn’t want those. Probably the Andarean had told at least a half-truth when he said many of them were simply variations of known things. But this odd, slim, flexible pistol, with a bell-shaped mouth and a coil of silver tubing twined about its length—

  Juille turned her back on the wall and glanced down the room. Helia was watching the group at the far end, where men appeared to be handling what looked like a big folded net of loose meshes with nodes that sparkled opalescent in the light. She could not hear what they said.

  Juille took three steps backward, soundless in the deep dust, hitched her cloak painstakingly out of the way and groped blindly with her bound hands through layers of velvety dust. She thought shudderingly of the spiders that had spun these webs, and it occurred to her that she would probably never like the touch of velvet again as she tore the clinging, thick softness from the gun she wanted. It was not easy, with her hands bound. She prayed for Helia to watch the other end of the room a moment longer—

  There. Cool and slick against her palms, enigmatic, potentially very dangerous—the slender gun was hers. What might happen when she pulled its trigger no one could guess. Probably nothing at all. But the feel of it was heartening. She thrust it down inside the back of her belt and let her cloak swing over it. And when Helia turned again to glance at her, she was looking up at a rack of daggers with bored, aloof eyes.

  “Those won’t help you, highness,” Helia said. “That cord I used on you is a woven plastic. Knives can’t touch it.”

  “I know,” Juille told her, not turning.

  Voices drew nearer along the big, dim hall. Juille glanced around. She could see that Egide wore the li
ghtning gun thrust through his belt, and Jair’s bull-bulk was padded even further by the heavy net folded and looped through his own belt. She could see no third weapon. She could not even guess what the net was for. But she had her own secret now, and her feeling of utter helplessness was mitigated a little.

  She watched them come slogging back through the dust, their voices rumbling between the walls. Now and then, curiously, a weapon’s delicate blade rang with a thin sound when some chance note of the voices struck it to response, as if the immeasurable past protested in futile, tongueless, inhuman speech against this violation.

  There was a new and triumphant assurance in the very carriage of the two H’vani as they neared her. Jair’s eyes and teeth gleamed from his ruddy dark face, and Egide glowed with a sort of shining exhilaration.

  At the door of the room he paused to look back along the shadowy depths, and his bright, carelsss face lighted. Then he grinned and unslung his harp. The others stared. Egide’s calloused fingers swept the strings into a sudden, wild, wailing chord, and another, and then a third. The underground room rang with it, and on the wall a quiver of life leaped into shining motion as here and there a thin blade shrilled response. Egide laughed, a deep, full-throated sound, and shouted out what must have been a line or two of some old H’vani battle song. His voice was startlingly sweet and strong and true.

  The arsenal boomed with the deep, rolling echoes of it. Somewhere hidden under tons of dust, a forgotten drum, boomed back, distant and softly muffled. Some metal cylinder of forgotten purpose took up the echo and replied with a clear, metallic reverberation, and down the hall an aeons-dead warrior’s helmet rang with its hollow mouth like a clapperless bell, and fell clanging to the floor and the silencing dust.

  Egide laughed again, with a timbre of sudden intoxication, and smote his harp to a last wild, shrilling wail, sent one more phrase of the song booming down the room. And all the room replied. The muffled drum boomed back, and the clear ringing twang of the hidden cylinder, and the little blades shrilled like tongues upon the wall, shivering and twinkling with tiny motion.

  Echoes rolled and rolled again. Egide’s voice sang on for a moment or two without him, diminishing against the walls. And this was no longer a thin, hopeless protest of the voiceless past against intrusion as the arsenal replied. Egide’s was a warrior’s voice, promising battle again, strong and savage with the savagery of a barbarous young race. These weapons had rung before, in the unfathomable past, to the voices of such men. Arsenal and weapons roared an answer to that promise of blood again, and the echoes died slowly among the blades and the drums and the hollow, hanging shields that might never echo any more to the sounds they were made to echo.

  Juille, meeting the unashamed melodrama of his blue eyes and his laughter as he turned away, was appalled by a surge of genuine warmth and feeling. This was naked sentiment again, like the deliberate romance of Cyrille, but to her amazement she found herself responding, and with an unexpected, overwhelming response she did not understand. Egide, laughing, had reslung his harp. He said:

  “Come on—now the danger starts. You have a ship for us, Andarean?”

  “Ready and waiting. You’d better not try to leave, though, until dark.”

  “The real danger comes then,” Jair rumbled.

  Egide bent a shining smile upon Juille. “That’s where you come in, my dear. We couldn’t have a better hostage.”

  Juille gave him her stoniest glance and looked away. She was profoundly troubled by that moment of sympathy with his unashamed romanticism. It made her think of the warm, resistless mood which had engulfed them both on the dance floor, and that hour on the starry cloud—swift, irresistible, and vanishing to leave nothing but humiliation behind, and a stronger dislike and distrust of the man who could evoke such weakness.

  They went back along winding, upward tunnels, past the carving of forgotten history upon the walls, past level above level of successive cultures whose dust mingled now under the feet of new rival cultures, one of which must pass so soon. Several times they edged past danger points again, and the leading Andarean twice closed and locked metal grilles after them across their path. The implication was ominous, though no one referred to it aloud.

  Egide’s intoxicated assurance began to ebb perceptibly and he grew more thoughtful as they neared the upper levels. Juille, watching his broad back and thinking with a sort of detached passion how pleasant it would be to set the bell-muzzle of her new weapon against it, began to wonder presently at his preoccupation.

  She saw him murmur to Jair, and saw the big red beard turn in the lamplit dimness to stare almost incredulously at his leader. Then Egide went ahead to murmur further with the purple-robed Andarean. Juille began to feel a bit cold. Were they talking about herself? Had the time come already to dispose of her? Surely not yet, before they were safely away—

  When they came out onto a lighted level that showed signs of Andarean traffic, Egide halted. Helia and Juille exchanged an involuntary glance of mutual query. Egide came back through the column to them. There was a strange, stilled look upon his face, as if he had come to some momentous decision in the grip of which he seemed to want human nearness, for he put out both hands and laid them upon Juille’s shoulders. Automatic reaction against the lèse-majesté made her tense to shake him off, but something about the look in his eyes halted her.

  “I’m going—out,” he said, in a quiet voice not at all like the melodious roar that had shaken the arsenal below.

  “They’ll catch you.” She had meant it for a threat, but his look subdued her and the words came out a warning.

  He shook his yellow head. “I think not. They tell me there’s a tunnel into the forest from here.”

  “But the forest—” Julie broke off and stared up at him, a sinking in the pit of her stomach. For the forest marked the edge of that forbidden ground surrounding the temple of the Ancients. They looked at one another briefly, antagonisms forgotten for a moment. Egide was nodding.

  “I think I need advice. None of us ever had this chance before. Now I’m here—well, I’m going to take it.”

  Juille stared up at him with real awe. Even the emperors of the Galaxy, with the stars of heaven for an empire, dared not think too deeply or too often of the living gods of Ericon. Long ago, she knew, there had been emperors who went to consult the Ancients in their temple. So far as she knew, none had done so for a long while now. Upon this one world of all the Galaxy, men lived side by side with the gods, and they had learned not to presume upon their nearness. The very aloofness of the Ancients, striking only to punish, never to reward, did not encourage familiarity. She looked up at Egide with eyes emptied of all thought but reluctant awe.

  His own eyes were very still. He had not quite her feeling of the god’s remoteness because, paradoxically, he had not lived so near them. But everyone tended to fall silent at the thought of the Ancients.

  He looked down at her thoughtfully, and for a moment Juille knew, with a sort of angry certainty, that he was about to kiss her. Her pride and her scorn of him made that thought intolerable, but a dissolving warmth was running through her treacherous body as she met his look, and the most humiliating gladness that her arms were tied so that she could not resist. Then the humiliation drowned everything else as he let his hands fall and turned away.

  “Tie her up somewhere until I get back,” he said briefly to Helia. “Jair, come with me as far as the tunnel—”

  Juille sat angrily on a floor deeply cushioned with dust, leaning upon a dusty wall. Profound dimness all around her was feebly diluted by the light of a distant lamp. Helia had left it, after a short disagreement with her companions. Juille realized that the Andareans probably distrusted the depths of Helia’s loyalty to themselves where Juille was concerned, and oddly, she rather resented their distrust. The cult of the amazon was still too new not to resent man’s misunderstanding of its principles. Juille was conscious of a sort of fierce pride in Helia’s betrayal of her lifelong
trust, for the bleak ideal of Andarean loyalty. The Andareans’ doubt of it was a slap in the face to all amazons.

  But she was not thinking of that now. She was mentally following Egide through the dripping green forest toward the temple which she had never seen. She knew it would be dark and broad and tall among the trees. She pictured Egide in his black velvet and charred silver mail, striding up to the portal and—But her mind balked at following him farther.

  And that, too, humiliated her. It seemed to her that she had been wallowing in enforced humilities for the past several hours, each of them more irritating than the last. This was particularly so, because it involved the moral courage she prided herself on possessing. She did not like to think of Egide walking boldly up to a doorway so awesome that she herself scarcely dared visit it in thoughts. Even the knowledge that he was a barbarian and an outworlder, with the courage of ignorance, was not too comforting. And presently, in the dimness, she began to wonder whether she could do as he was doing, supposing herself free again. Step in under that great shadowy, unimaginable portal and ask for guidance? Intrude her small human presence upon the living gods, whose millenniums of aloofness showed so clearly that they did not welcome human interference?

  Even if she were free, would she dare?

  Suddenly, hideously, there were tiny cold hands fumbling at hers.

  The darkness reeled about her. Mad thoughts went racing through her mind—denizens of the lower levels, creeping up in the dark to seize her? Unseen things against which the Andareans locked their great grilles in vain? Tiny, clammy-fingered demons from some lost race’s hell—Clammy-fingered—many-fingered—

  Juille sank back against the wall and laughed hysterically in the dark, weak with relief, feeling a sleek, furry side brushing her wrist as the little hands tugged at her bonds. The llar, of course, but how…how could it possibly have followed or found her here? No llar had ever done such a thing before. They had none of the canine’s fawning faithfulness. No, there must be rescuers close behind it, though how anyone could have followed her here unseen by the Andareans, she could not imagine.