Authors: Christopher Rowley
Together Hut 416 ate soup and ration-bread. Joana discussed young Wana's mysterious ills. To Jon, the symptoms sounded like the black-spot virus. He suggested that Joana take Wana to the infirmary, but Joana just pointed at the near-empty money pot. Jon chewed soup and schemed of some way to add to their slender financial reserves. For his own labor he received the ration-bread and water that maintained the hut. The labors of the younger children brought small cash payments, enough so that normally the Hut stayed ahead of the rent and heat bills. Sab and Gelda, who worked in the vineyards, would be due their monthly payment of wine soon. If he sold some of that, there would be money for Wana's visit to the infirmary. If little Wana lived that long, if it really was black-spot disease. It could be awfully quick. And then the Hut would be fumigated. It would stink for months.
There was a sudden noise, a shudder went through the Hut. A few moments later the door banged open, and Little Gita—one year older than Wana—flew in, all pigtails and waving hands. There was an uproar somewhere in the distance.
"What do you think's happened?" Joana asked, peering over the township roofs toward the back of Firgize hill.
"A spaceship must have come!" Sab shouted. "Like the one that brought Lady Magelsa to wed the Lord Innoo. Everyone will take the afternoon off!"
Jon checked the sky, no trace of exhaust fumes was visible against the cloudless blue.
The hill blocked off all but the view of the four towers of Firgize. Except that now Jon saw there were only three! "The cracks!" he shouted. "The cracks in the tower!"
A pall of dust was rising where the great tower had collapsed. Jon slipped out onto the Alley and ran down to the township gate. A mob of human workers was pouring over the causeway. Their faces were a tapestry of rage.
"Hundreds are dead. The whole tower has collapsed."
The men gathered in the township square. Red Urk was hoisted to speak. "The Overseer Ushmai was warned of the cracks!" He bellowed. "We demand the Overseer's expiation in the Agony Booth."
The crowd roared at that and flowed back to the causeway. But at the other end of the causeway the Guards, seven-foot-tall human pinheads, were massed in phalanx. The Guards held their shock batons at the ready. Steel helmets covered their tiny skulls. They were not noted for their compassion; at the whistle they charged the men.
For once the battle was long and furious; the men of the township were enraged by the latest in a long line of disasters brought on by Firgize incompetence. But eventually, the Guards broke through and by late evening had complete control of the main alleys of the townships. All that night huge bounding warriors with diminutive skulls ran through the Huts in an orgy of violence, rape, and slaughter.
In the morning rebel survivors were gathered inside the Keep of the Palace. They were harangued by Deshilme Firgize and then the identified ringleaders were taken for expiation. One by one they were thrust into the Agony Booth. Their chilling screams rang out all day and night, completing the dismal atmosphere that lay over the castle and its surroundings.
Jon waited on line for the Booth, having been marked down by Ushmai himself. Around the captives towered the huge microcephals, who nudged them and tittered at each quavering shriek from a dying man in the booth.
There was a movement on a balcony a few meters above, where a party of blueskins had appeared to witness some of the expiations. Jon noticed the Lord Innoo, heir to Castle Firgize, and his bride, the Princess Magelsa Gnovii among the laowon.
Ahead of him Rad 4623 was thrust into the booth. The clamps closed around his neck leaving only his head visible. The pain began and Rad bellowed mightily.
As the bellows hollowed out into the fluting screams in the "middle passage," so Jon noticed the Princess wince and stop her ears with her fingers. Was she perhaps dismayed at the heavy-handed ways of the frontier worlds? She looked down and for a long moment his eyes caught hers. Her scrutiny became a very careful one.
An unconscious Rad was removed from the booth and his body tossed onto the pile of those who had already expiated. The big microcephals enjoyed these events immensely, and they were giggling as they thrust Jon into the booth. He glanced back to the blue Princess on the balcony. She had taken her husband's arm and was speaking passionately in his ear.
While the clamps were swung into place around his neck, Jon noticed the booth stank of human excrement, sweat, and pain. He stared back along the line of doomed rebels and those who were drawn up to witness the expiations.
Unexpectedly a command in laowon was bugled down from the balcony. After a moment of shocked hesitation among the steel helmeted pinhead guard, the command was repeated with considerable impatience.
The clamps were lifted, Jon was pulled from the booth and hurried away to one side and around a corner, where a small door opened unexpectedly in the smooth wall of the castle. He was thrust through it.
In total darkness he climbed a winding secret stair. A guard was waiting for him above and he was taken through another secret door, then down a long corridor paneled in pale ochre velvet and wall mural landscapes to a white door. Within, waited the tall, angular Princess Magelsa. In short order she offered him first the velvet suit of a valet to Lord Innoo, and then herself, in her own bed. Not long afterward she conducted his initiation into interspecies sex. She was young and energetic and had acquired a taste for all kinds of unusual pleasures on Ratan, her sophisticated homeworld.
Laowon and human were similar enough physically to find such encounters mutually rewarding, but long afterward Jon lay on the enormous circular bed in Magelsa's bedroom and stared out the window. From far away, almost from another planet it seemed, he could still hear the agonized screams of those who were expiating for the rebellion.
At first his life seemed indeed to have taken a turn for the best. Magelsa arranged for the bar-code on his forehead to be reduced by plastic surgery, but demanded that a slight addition, a small brand with her laowon initial code, be burned into his right buttock.
In the Palace, he worked under the fretful eye of Old Chalmes, the human Head Valet. As Jon worked and learned to avoid Old Chalmes, so he found a wealth of opportunities for enriching the diet of his mother and hutfamily. Every week he took them the pickings of the meats, bottles of good wine, slabs of bread and cheese.
After the first few weeks Magelsa's demands upon him began to slacken. He realized that his time as her favorite was coming to its end. He also realized that all was not well within the Firgize household. Magelsa was unhappy. She disliked Lord Innoo, whom she found dull. She hated quiet, rural Glegan with its cool forests and windswept heaths. She longed for the bright lights and excitements of Ratan's great cities. Endlessly, she begged Innoo for permission to travel.
This did not endear her to Lord Deshilme. He had not sought the connection with the Gnovii. They were of Blue Seygfan, he of the Red and thus out of favor at court. Magelsa was a compromise of Seygfan, and while the link did add to the security of Firgize on Glegan, it also represented the leash of control held by the Heir himself.
Indeed, long interstellar voyages were most expensive. The cost of improving Castle Firgize to represent Deshilme's royal lineage was heavy. He would not consider another large outlay of funds. Not while he still awaited a grandson and heir.
Of course, Magelsa applied retroactive contraceptives every day with the hope that eventually she would get her way and be sent home to Ratan. There her disastrous marriage could be dissolved and she could resume the pleasures of her previous life.
Unfortunately for Magelsa, her dissatisfaction had been noted by Lord Firgize's own wife, the Lady Flaam. Flaam believed she had found her last chance to cement her own line to Firgize. Flaam came from the family Castigrii, upstarts on Glegan's south continent. She dreamed of enriching the Castigrii element in Firgize by arranging a match between Innoo and a young female cousin of Castigrii now entering puberty. But to achieve that end Magelsa had to be killed and disgraced. Should there be simply a divorce, once more freeing the princess on Ratan, then Innoo would be forced to wed another female Gnovii. The Gnovii would insist upon it, and they were well placed in Blue Seygfan. Only if there was some provable taint upon Magelsa could their claim be turned aside under cult rule.
One day, therefore, Jon was awakened early in his own bed by a pair of microcephals. Wearing silly little grins, the huge idiots bound him and put him into a sack, then carried him away and released him, much later, in the presence of the Lady Flaam. She was clad entirely in black, seated in a chair carved to represent the snarling skull of an angmot.
Jon realized he was in great danger. The Lady Flaam allowed no visitors and enjoyed a reputation for poisonings in her own family and casually disposing of her human favorites by dropping them into an underground pool swarming with bloodworms.
"You approach the end of your wretched existence, young man, unless you do exactly as I bid you." Her voice was a harsh whisper as she delivered her instructions then ordered him removed.
Back in his own room Jon faced a critical dilemma. According to Flaam, all he had to do was to disarm the security system on Magelsa's suite door and to send a signal when Magelsa and he were next entangled, naked and sweating on her bed.
Flaam and her guards would then burst in with cameras and microphones and catch Magelsa in the act. This would be Jon's pretext for using a hidden weapon, a small energy blade that Flaam had given him, to take Magelsa hostage and to kill her with when the guards went "berserk" and jumped him.
Flaam assured him that should he perform adequately, some other hapless fool would be substituted in the Agony Booth. Jon would instead be released onto the margins of the Polar Continent where a few small human settlements existed.
Was it possible to trust Flaam? He could visualize that last drop into the seething tank only too easily.
Later, alone with Magelsa, he took pity on the young princess and informed her of the plot that was taking shape around her. She had, after all, saved him from the Agony Booth.
Magelsa was instantly terrified. Her mother-in-law was already a figure of grim speculation from all the stories she'd heard. Now she became a source of hysterical fright. Magelsa ran to Innoo, threw herself down before him, and begged him to help.
Innoo was a survivor. He knew his younger brother would cheerfully seize any opportunity to replace him. He also knew that his mother cared little for him and disliked his match with the Gnovii. He made some thoughtful calculations and then called Jon into his presence.
"You must get into my mother's personal quarters one more time. I will see that you are equipped with the weapons for the job. You must kill her. If you succeed, I will reward you with freedom for yourself and your Hut group."
Jon had no choice but to agree. He submitted to the surgeon and one of his canine teeth was replaced with a poison fang. In addition, the end bones of his middle fingers were removed and replaced with artificial bones containing tiny pistols.
Several days later, Jon approached one of Lady Flaam's black-suited microcephalic Guards and gingerly handed the big man a slip of paper, then hurriedly withdrew. Later that same day, two huge guards appeared in the wardrobe where he worked. Solemnly they stripped him, examined him, and thrust him into the sack.
He was dumped out upon the carpet before Lady Flaam's grim throne.
"Why have you not done as I ordered?" She said.
"I cannot gain entry to her bedchamber. She has a new favorite."
Flaam's withered face screwed up in sudden rage. "You lie, I monitor her nightly orgies. She has no new favorite." She pressed a stud on the arm of her throne. A secret hatch opened in the floor, exposing a dark pit. He heard water lapping far below and something else—the excited hiss of bloodworms.
Jon whirled abruptly and caught the nearest guard napping. His hand lanced out, his finger rested momentarily on the man's tiny forehead. Jon pressed down, hard. There was a little
crack
, a flash of pain, as the end of his finger burst, then the guard's head exploded and he fell like some human tree, to land with a heavy thud on the carpet.
The other giant sprang forward, picked Jon up to crush him against the wall, but Jon bit down on the massive biceps. He felt his left canine crumple and spat furiously to eject any remaining poison. The guard fell backward with Jon atop his chest.
The Lady Flaam produced a handgun and fired. The pellet singed Jon's cheek and exploded in the masonry behind him. He dove at her feet and knocked her flying.
For a laowon of more than ninety-six years, Lady Flaam was remarkably agile. She landed well and spun to shoot at him again, but Jon had seized one of the guards' pain wands and hurled it straight into her face. She went down with a shriek and then he was on top of her, his hands around her throat, blood from his finger all over her face, his thumbs pressing deep into her esophagous. A red tide flowed across his vision, a roaring rose in his ears, and when he was finally done, she was dead. He stood up and stared about himself. Blood dripped steadily from his shattered fingertip, and more blood seeped from where her nails had raked his cheek. Quickly, he tilted the bodies into the pit and listened to them hit the water far below. The sound of the worms built to a horrible frenzy. He found the switch on the throne and closed the hatch once more.
Sucking his finger to avoid leaving a trail of blood, he ran to Innoo's apartments with his news. Innoo was not there, an ominous departure from the agreed plan. Nor was there a response at Magelsa's suite. In desperation Jon ran from the palace and hid himself in the woods.
The next day there was a hunt. Microcephals and sniffer grenk worked over the grounds of the estate. Jon ran farther into the hills. He lived wild, but his finger began to rot and after four more days he slipped into the township in search of medical assistance.