"Well, then," Marool purred. "If you think so...."
She staggered to her feet and directed them, Bane there, Dyre here. They were acquiescent, even eager, but somehow, the machine didn"t fit properly. Bane got out of the proper position and knelt down, fussing with the mounting, Dyre turned and twisted, and then joined Bane. "d.a.m.n thing," he muttered.
"It"s perfectly all right!" She laughed, still feeling quite giggly and giddy, far more amused than annoyed.
"It"s not all right. There"s something there that pinches! You don"t believe me, you try it."
Which she did in a state of high amus.e.m.e.nt, only to find the cinches closed and the bands locked, and Bane trying to wrench the ring off her finger as the machine started its initially gentle motion.
"Stop this!" she shrieked through a gale of laughter. "You don"t know what you"re doing!"
Bane stopped trying for the ring and growled into her ear. "We know. Our daddy, he told us how you"re the one took us from him and left us in the care of n.o.bodies. He had to come hunting for us over near Nehbe. He says to tell you, him and the Machinist, they"re old friends and kinfolk. He says to tell you, this is his payback for the daughter you were supposed to bear him. He says, tell Marool good-bye for me!"
"Your daddy?" she gasped, breathlessly. "Who?"
Bane was hastily donning his clothes. "Thunder and Ashes, our daddy. You knew him, Marool, b.i.t.c.h. Don"t say you didn"t. There was witnesses, and they told us all about you."
"Ashes!" she cried, suddenly and horridly aware.
"He found us over near Nehbe, with that goat farmer, where you sent us, you b.i.t.c.h."
"Oh, by Morrigan, do you know who your mother was? Do you know who I am?"
"Our mother died birthing us, and you"re the b.i.t.c.h stole her babies. Daddy said we had to get rid of you before we could get our inheritance. That"s all we need to know." He struck her then, hard across the mouth, shutting off further words, then ran for the tunnel entrance that gave upon the gardens. Dyre was not far behind him as the machine shifted into a slightly more energetic mode of action.
43.
A Journey Toward Dosha.
As Questioner set out on her search for her vanished entourage, she swept the hallways with all her senses, hoping that all the servants were abed or about some other business, for she did not want to explain where she was going. She did not want her ship or the Council of Worlds to be involved in this. Though she knew she was probably being watched from every side by unseen eyes, they did not trouble her, for they were not the eyes of mankind.
When she had discovered the wallways in the small salon, she had closed each one behind her, but when she, Mouche, and Ornery entered the room, one of them had been reopened. The wideflung panel disclosed the same narrow tunnel she had identified as the route taken by Ellin and Bao. A lit candle sat on the floor inside the opening as though to say, This way This way.
"You, boy?" Questioner asked. "Name?"
"Mouche, Madam."
"You will lead."
Mouche looked at the opening with a feeling of dawning delight. He forgot his pain. This sneakway was familiar to him, totally familiar, so like those wallways in House Genevois that it was obviously made by the same creatures and obviously ... oh, obviously leading to the same kind of place. He shut his eyes for only a moment, calling upon his Hagion to let him become an intrepid explorer whose delight was entering dark, unknown territory in search of heaven knew what.
Questioner"s eyelids rose, an expression of surprise that she used seldom and felt almost never. The boy had accomplished a very pretty somatic maneuver there, in very short time. She had been monitoring his internal pressures and tensions, as well as smelling certain secretions in body and brain. All had responded to whatever invocation he had made. He was now exactly the person she would have selected to a.s.sist her in this journey. Not foolhardy, but daring and quite ecstatic about the venture!
Well, it must be conditioning. No doubt s.e.xual consorts would need a good deal of conditioning. She would make time before she left the planet to speak to the head of his school or academy or whatever it was. If she survived to leave the planet.
"You next. What"s your name, sailor?"
"Ornery, Ma"am."
"Well you then, seaman Ornery." She winked at Ornery, much confusing her. "And, I bring up the rear. I am ma.s.sive enough to keep almost anything off your back. If I say Ornery." She winked at Ornery, much confusing her. "And, I bring up the rear. I am ma.s.sive enough to keep almost anything off your back. If I say back back in a loud, imperative voice, both of you come back close to me. I have certain defenses to help us all survive." in a loud, imperative voice, both of you come back close to me. I have certain defenses to help us all survive."
Mouche oozed into the opening in the wall, turned briefly to catch the freshest airs-a.s.suring himself that outside must lie in that direction-and advanced into the wind. The sneakway sloped slightly downward, and since the small salon was on the second level of the Mantelby Mansion, it stood to reason they would have to go down to get away from the house.
After shutting the opening behind them, Questioner emitted a cone of light wide enough to contain herself and Ornery as they wound slowly along the pa.s.sage. The slope soon steepened into a ramp, the ramp gave way to steps leading into blackness. They slowed, taking more time to light each step, each corner, each twist and turn of the way.
The stairs and ramps, some of which creaked ominously under Questioner"s weight, were interrupted by horizontal stretches with frequent peekholes. Mouche glanced at a few of these with practiced ease, which Questioner noted before turning her own attention to the spyholes. She judged they were winding through a part of the house devoted to the servants, for there was much scurrying and late-night tidying going on.
At one point a stench came through some few holes like that from a fresh dunghill, and Questioner turned down her receptors. Her senses were connected to her mind, just as people"s were, and she found the smell atrocious.
They dropped farther. The smell did not depart, though it abated, and a certain deadened quality in the sound of their feet told them they were now on soil or stone rather than wooden floors, though the peekholes were still aboveground. The sneakways had obviously been designed to give maximum access without regard for the distance between points, and they had walked quite a long winding way to drop only these few meters. They continued to go downward, losing the peekholes on one side, and soon heard a sound, a rhythmic and inexorable ratcheting that grew louder as they progressed.
Mouche stopped in his tracks, his breath coming quickly, as though at some suddenly perceived threat. Questioner told Ornery to stay in place as she went forward to the place Mouche stood.
"What is it, boy?"
"The sound, Madam. Not the mechanical sound, but the screaming? Do you hear it?"
Until that moment, she had accepted the noise as mechanical, as of some unoiled bearing, some ungreased pivot shrieking across a metal plate. A moment"s concentration told her Mouche was right. The ratcheting was machinery, but the other sound could be from a living creature.
Questioner took the lead. They went forward and down another flight as she ran her sensor-tipped fingers along the wall. Here, and there, and then, yes, here, a door. She tried it in various ways until it sighed open, flooding the place they stood with increased noise and a wave of the familiar stench.
They stood in a cellar, stone floored, rock walled, softly lit, luxuriously carpeted, hung with great swaths of satin and velvet and centered by a warm fountain that steamed gently in the cool air. All around them stood the horrid legacy of some nightmare craftsman: ogre-racks of bra.s.s and steel, chimeric skeletons of gold and silver, squatted toad bones of hard iron, all wed to springs and cams and drive shafts, soft cushioned in places and fanged in others, all with red-lit eyes staring and metal arms spread wide.
The atrocious squealing and screaming came from the far side of the room, where Questioner went speedily.
If it had not been for her enhanced senses, she would not have recognized Marool. She was no longer a person but only a piece of living meat clamped into a machine that had hung her by her ankles as it thrust at her from above and either side. Questioner took one quick glance at the mechanical linkages, reached forward to an oscillating rod, and snapped it between powerful hands.
The ratcheting noise stopped with a shrill sc.r.a.ping noise. A frustrated mechanical whine built to a howl. The inhuman squealing went on. From behind her, Questioner heard Mouche"s gasp, Ornery"s m.u.f.fled curse.
"Can"t you do something?" cried Mouche, distraught.
"I can," Questioner agreed, though with peculiar reluctance. She reached upward, extruded a needle from her palm, and injected a strong opiate into the woman"s body.
In a few moments, the squealing subsided to a dull, grunted moan, endlessly repeated. The machine itself reached a point of no return; a linkage shattered; silence fell.
Questioner turned to find Mouche"s horrified eyes fixed upon her. Of the three of them, he was the only one unsurprised.
"You knew about this?" she asked him.
Mouche gulped, turned his ashen face aside, and told her about the picture in the hallway at House Genevois. This, he said, was the same machine.
" "Mistress Mantelby at Her Pleasures," you say?"
He gulped. "That was how it was labeled, Most Honored One."
"Call me Questioner. We will have no time for honor-ifics on this journey." She turned back to the puzzle before her. The machine would not reverse. There was no real way to extricate the woman, for there were linked escapements preventing the machine from going back to its original configuration until it reached the end of the cycle or was unlocked. As if in answer to this need, Marool"s b.l.o.o.d.y arm flopped downward with the wrist at eye level before them, the key dangling.
Questioner broke the light chain that held it and unlocked the machine, which immediately disengaged from Marool"s body with an intimate, sucking sound, and dropped her to the floor, where she lay, still faintly moaning.
"Marool," said Questioner, "listen to me. Who did this?"
"Dyre," gasped Marool. "And Bane ... for ... ahhh ..."
"It is dire and baneful, but who ..."
"That"s their names, Ma"am," interrupted Mouche. "I can tell who it was from the stink. It"s the Dutter boys, Bane and Dyre. That"s their names."
"My sons," Marool gasped, her face transfigured by rage. "My sons ... for that d.a.m.ned Ahhh ... shes." She cried out, a long angry howl that went out of her interminably, dwindling into a final aching silence.
Mouche turned away, hiding his face, and Ornery put an arm around his shoulders.
"She has died," said Questioner. Her voice and motions were stiff and mechanical as she straightened the limp form where it lay then jerked one of the hangings loose to cover the body. "No doubt many others have died in this place. Look at the ring she wears. See that face upon it and the name engraved around the edge: Morrigan. In the Temple I learned of Morrigan, a deity of pain and destruction. Marool selected her G.o.ddess and became her own sacrifice."
"What shall we do for her?" whispered Ornery.
Questioner murmured, "She has done for herself. It was she who brought this deadly device to this place, perhaps even she who designed it. Certainly it was she who used it upon others. The machine is not new. See the wear patterns around the pinions, the stains on the straps. It has killed before."
"Why ... why would anyone do ... do that?" Mouche begged, as he hurried to the door through which they had entered. "I never understood the pictures, the why of any of it...."
Questioner emitted a very mankindlike sigh. "It is a very primitive emotion, and even when we explain it, we do not understand it, Mouche. If we all understood it, there would have been no need for Haraldson and his edicts."
"Prey, property, or opponent," gasped Mouche, who was now in the door they had entered through, breathing the cleaner air of the sneakway. "Madame said that"s how gangs think."
Questioner nodded. "One like this was a gang unto herself. So long as we think of such people as humans and attempt to treat them as humans, we cannot protect the innocent."
"They really can"t be cured?" asked Ornery.
Questioner waved the idea away. "We haven"t found a way. Haraldson said that if a being has sufficient sense of justice and civility to know it has done wrong, knowing it has done wrong is often sufficient punishment. If the being has no remorse, punishment will only increase its anger."
She sighed, gesturing at the scene around them. "I don"t think Marool felt any remorse." She turned toward Mouche and called, "What did she mean, "Her sons, that d.a.m.ned Ashes"?"
Mouche was by now sitting head-down in the sneakway, still fighting his nausea and revulsion. He turned reluctantly. "I"ll tell what I know, but if you"re finished, Ma"am ... Questioner, can we get out of here?"
Questioner nodded. Her olfactory receptors were still turned down, but the others had no such amelioration. She herded them ahead of her.
When they were inside the wall with the opening shut behind them, Mouche mopped the sweat from his face on the sleeve of his shirt. "When Bane and Dyre first came to House Genevois, they broke all the rules, and Madame sent for someone. I never saw him, though I heard his voice. When Bane and Dyre were sent to him, he did something painful to them, and he told them to mind themselves. Later on, Madam had to summon that person again, to stop their attacking me-"
"Why?" she interrupted. "Why attack you?"
"I"d had a run in with them before, at home." He gulped, suddenly overcome with a longing for that home. "I stopped them killing a little native creature I"d made a friend of, and they hated me for it. It was Bane did this to my face, later on. Well, the person Madame summoned could have been their father, their real father, for he smelled as they did, and I know Dutter wasn"t their real father. The Dutters were only paid to rear them."
"Was Marool really their mother?" asked Ornery.
"Does it fit in with what we"ve heard from other sources?" Questioner asked.
Ornery offered, "The gardener said she"d disposed of two or three a year since she"d been back, so she was away, somewhere, perhaps long enough to have had those two."
"So. If she bore these boys, she was guilty of mis-mothering?"
Both Mouche and Ornery nodded, Ornery adding, "Oh, my, yes Ma"am. That"s about as mis a mothering as anybody could do. And then, playing about with them here ... Well, that"s as bad a thing as you can do on Newholme."
"Most places would agree," said Questioner.
"She"d of been blue-bodied sure, if anyone had caught her at it."
Questioner murmured, "I wonder who Ashes really is...."
"Jong," interrupted someone. "Ashes is jongau."
The voice sent a thrill through Mouche, shivering him to his feet. "Timmy," he whispered, as though to himself. "Timmy?"
The others turned, Ornery crouching defensively, searching the darkness. The voice came as a spider-silk whisper, drifting to their ears a word or two at a time, from any direction and from none: "Mouchidi."
A caress, that voice, as it whispered, "She, the evil one is gone."
And another voice. "She will never come to the Fauxi-dizalonz where Bofusdiaga waits. She will never be remade."
Questioner turned on her ma.s.sive feet, peering into the darkness. She saw only a vanishing glimpse of moving colors around a globe of wavering green, like a cloud of seagra.s.s.
"It"s the Timmys," cried Mouche, who had turned an instant earlier. "The dancers!" He could not mistake that movement, that slender, sylphlike form. The most graceful creatures mankind could produce could be only an awkward copy of that.
Questioner muttered to herself, "Aha. So here is our indigenous race!" Then, making her voice soft and un-threatening, she called, "Why have you come here?"
The first voice came again, fading, departing: "We were coming for Mouchidi. Corojum said go get him. Now you are coming anyhow, so we will lead you across the seas, but you must hurry."
Questioner stood, immovable. "Why should I listen to you? You have stolen my people."
"They are not hurt," said a slightly different voice, sounding both impatient and surprised. "We do not hurt things as you do. Two of them are dancers! We needed dancers. Even now they skim the waters, on their way across the seas to the Fauxi-dizalonz. They go there to help us with the dance."
The last words faded into distance. She or he or it was not waiting for them to get closer, so much was clear.
"What dance?" whispered Ornery.
"I have no idea," Questioner replied. "Though I had no doubt dancers might be helpful."
"Oh, Questioner, we"ll find out," cried Mouche. "What an adventure!"
Adventure or not, he stood as one stunned by delight, incapable of movement. It had been her, its voice. The voice of divinity.
"Come," said Questioner, shoving him gently. "I think haste may be appropriate."
Down the road from Mantelby Mansion, the man known as Ashes sat in a carriage behind two black horses. They and their saddled stablemate, tethered to the back of the carriage, heard the sounds of approaching feet before Ashes did. They started and stamped their feet, ears erect.