Collected Short Fiction, page 332
Barsac wondered about the Dywain, bound now for the Rim stars without him, and about Zigmunn in whose name he had parted with his profession and his freedom. He thought of the girl Kassa, so long dead now. And, on those occasions when a silver-masked Glauran crossed his path, he thought of the Cult of the Witch, and of the dead world of Azonda where his blood-brother had gone.
Winter came, and with it snow; Ystilog decided time had come to return to Millyaurr and live off the summer’s profits. To Millyaurr they returned, stopping occasionally along the way to recoup food expenses by giving a one-day showing in some small town. Wearily Barsac helped pack and unpack the crates. He was almost fond of Ystilog’s menagerie of monsters, now, though he knew that any of the creatures would gladly kill him given the chance. He prayed for the lucky accident that would release a poison-tongued rain-toad for Ystilog, since it was impossible for Barsac wilfully to turn the beast loose on his master.
Winter held Millyaurr tight when the caravan finally returned to the Street of Liars.
Seven months had gone by since the week of Barsac’s leave. He had grown gaunt and his eyes now lay deep in shadow, but his old stubbornness remained alive in him, imprisoned only by the web of hypnotic command.
But lines of despair now traced themselves on his face, as once they had on dead Kassa’s face. He frequented dangerous sections of town, hoping for the release of death. He drank often in the bar where he first had met Kassa, sitting alone at the table in the rear.
He was there one night in late winter, spending a borrowed three-unit piece on liquor, when the front door opened and framed in it stood a silver-masked figure, a member of the Cult of the Witch.
Instinctively the other patrons of the bar huddled inward upon themselves, hoping not to be noticed, as the Cultist flicked gobbets of snow from his cape and entered the bar. Only Barsac looked up unafraid, and drew out the chair next to his in open invitation.
CHAPTER V
THE CULTIST paused just beyond the door, surveying the room with the ash-gray eyes that lay just above the rim of his mask. Then, calmly, he strode down the aisle between the clustered tables and took the seat Barsac offered.
“Order two drinks,” the Cultist said in a low voice.
Barsac signalled to the barkeep for two more bowls of the mulled wine he had been drinking. Timorously the bartender advanced with them, laid them down, and retreated from the Cultist’s presence without even bothering to ask for his money.
Barsac studied the other. The mask ran from ear to ear and from the bridge of the nose to the upper lip; all that was visible of the Cultist’s face were the gray, piercing eyes, the broad furrowed forehead, and cold downslanting lips.
“Well,” Barsac said, “drink hearty.” He raised the bowl, expecting to clink it against the Cultist’s, but the other merely grunted and took a deep drink.
When he was through he peered at Marsac and said, “You are Barsac the Earther, lackey to the circus proprietor Erpad Ystilog.”
“I am. How did you know?”
“I know. Do you love your master?”
Barsac laughed harshly. “Do you think I do?”
“What I think is irrelevant at this time. You have been watched, Barsac. Ystilog was directed to you. We believe suffering is beneficial to the soul, as we understand the soul.”
“In that case you’ve done a good job. I’ve suffered.”
“We know that too. Why haven’t you killed Ystilog?”
“Because—because—” Barsac strove to explain the compulsion Ystilog had laid on him, but the very compulsion kept him from framing the words. “I—I—can’t say it.”
“A tongue-block? Ystilog is good at such things. Would you like to kill Ystilog?”
“Of course.”
“But you can’t. Ystilog has laid a command across your mind. Yes?”
Stiffly, Barsac nodded.
The Cultist’s thin lips curled upward. “Would you approve if someone else killed Ystilog for you?”
Beads of sweat broke out on Barsac’s forehead. The conversation was skirting the borders of the compulsion-area in his mind; it was only with difficulty that he was forcing through his responses.
“Yes,” he said heavily.
The Cultist touched the tips of his fingers together. “In one hour Ystilog will die, if we so decide it. You will be free from your compulsion. Azonda waits.”
“Azonda?”
“Where else could you go? What else is left, Barsac? Driven downward, cut off from the life you knew, an outcast on Glaurus—take the way of Azonda. We will free you from Ystilog. Come, then, with us.”
Barsac struggled to get out a reply. Finally he said, “I . . . accede.”
The Cultist rose. “Within an hour Ystilog dies. We will be waiting for you, Barsac.”
And then he was alone.
HE SAT QUIETLY, nursing his warm drink, staring through the leaded window at the great heavy soft flakes of snow drifting downward. The Cult, he thought. Why not? What else is there? Better the Cult than endless years of Ystilog, and they will free me from—
No!
Ystilog’s compunction gripped him, sent him running out of the tavern into the chill winter bleakness. By acceding to the Cultist’s request he was allowing the death of Ystilog, and that ran counter to his instilled conditioning. He had to prevent the murder. He had to save Ystilog. He had to get back in time.
He ran down the empty snow-choked streets. Within an hour, the Cultist had said. Burning conflict raged inside Barsac; he fought to hold his body back, to still his legs, to give the Cultists a chance to do their work, while at the same time the demon riding his mind spurred him forward to reach Ystilog and protect him.
At the corner he waited impatiently for an airbus. It came, finally, crusted over with snow, and he took it to the Street of Liars. From the terminal it was a five-block walk to Ystilog’s flat; Barsac took it at a trot, stumbling in the snow every time his mind managed to reassert control over his rebellious body.
But as he drew near the flat, Ystilog’s compulsion overmastered him, and uppermost in his mind was the thought that he must reach his master in time, save him from the knives of the Cultists—
Up the stairs. Down the hall. There was the door. Barsac gasped for breath; his lungs were icy, his nose and ears numb with cold.
“Ystilog! Hold on! I’m coming!”
A scream. Another, drawn-out, a ghastly bubbling wail that echoed down the corridor of the old flat and sent a different sort of chill through Barsac.
He slumped against the door like a cast-off doll. Ystilog’s hold on him was broken. I was too late after all, he thought in relief. They got him.
The door opened. On nerveless feet Barsac entered. Four Cultists stood within.
Ystilog lay naked on his bed, in a pool of blood. The double-barred cross stood out in red clarity against the paleness of his skin. Two silver-masked figures stood above the body, holding a keen-bladed instrument with two handles over his face, slicing down—
Barsac looked away.
“It’s over,” said a familiar voice—the voice of the Cultist who had entered the tavern. “He died quickly. It was a pity.”
“I wish I could have done it,” Barsac murmured. “But the devil had me bound. Now I’m free, though. Free! Only—”
“Yes,” the Cultist said. “Free. But you know the price of your freedom.”
A THIRD TIME he saw Lord Carnothute, and for the first time there was no conflict between them. Barsac, weary, drained of fury and of passion, sat tiredly in an overstuffed chair high in Carnothute’s palace, listening to the huge man speak.
“You will leave for Azonda tomorrow,” he said. “There are seventeen of you in this current group of initiates. The initiation period is one year. After that—well, after that you will know which roads are open for you and which are not.”
“Will Zigmunn be there?” Carnothute whirled and looked down at Barsac. “His year still has some months to run. He will be there. But if you have any idea—”
“You know I have none. I’ve lost all desire to reclaim him—or myself.” Barsac listened to his own voice, heavy, toneless, and wondered fragmentedly how he had changed so much in these seven months on Glaurus. It was as if his experiences had tarnished his soul, rusted it, corroded it, oxidized it finally to a heap of dust, and there was nothing left for him but to accept the uncertain mercies of the Cult.
“Will you have a drink?” Carnothute asked.
“I’m not thirsty.”
“Good. Loss of physical desires is essential to one entering upon his novitiate. The desires return or not, as you choose, after you receive the mask.”
Barsac shut his eyes a moment. “Did you kill the girl Kassa?”
“Yes. She had put me in a compromising position, and I either would have to kill her or do away with myself. I’ve grown fond of life, Barsac. You know the rest.”
“I see.” Oddly, he did not care. Nothing seemed to matter, any more.
“Come,” Carnothute said. “Meet your fellow initiates. The ship leaves for Azonda tomorrow.”
He allowed himself to be taken by the hand and led into an adjoining room. There, sixteen others sat on plurofoam couches ringing the wall, and three silver-masked Cultists stood as if on guard at the entrance.
Barsac studied the sixteen. He counted five women, eleven men, all of them humanoid by designation. They slouched wearily against the wall, not speaking to one another, some of them virtually withdrawn from the universe to some private many-colored inner world. One expression was common to their faces: the expression Barsac knew must be on his own as well. They were people who had lost all traces of hope.
One of the women still wore the revealing costume of a party-girl, but it was frayed and tattered, and so was she. She seemed to be about forty. Her face was lined and unpretty, her eyes bleak, her mouth drooping. Next to her sat a boy of seventeen, his arms grotesquely puffed and purpled with the tell-tale stigmata of the sammthor-addict. As Barsac looked the boy quivered suddenly and emitted a cascade of tears.
Still further on was a man of thirty-five whose face was a mass of scars; one eye was gone, the other askew, and his nose sprawled crazily over his face. One lip and had been slashed; green jagged tattoo-marks marred his cheeks. He was one who would do well to take the mask, Barsac thought.
He took a seat on an unoccupied couch. He told himself: These are people who have given up. I’m not quite like them. I’m still above water. These people have all let themselves drown.
But with a faint petulant bitterness he admitted to himself that he was wrong, that he too belonged here among these walking dead. The Cult was a dead-end pickup. To it came human refuse, people who could not sink lower, and the Cult raised them up.
The Cult had had its eyes on him from the start. They had spotted him as a likely prospect from the moment of his landing on Glaurus, and they had followed him through each succeeding adventure, as he slipped lower and lower, as more and more of the old Barsac crumbled and dropped away, until the time had come when he could go no lower, and they had stepped in to free him from Ystilog and welcome him to their midst.
He thought of Zigmunn, like him a spacer stranded in a hostile city, and how Zigmunn must have slowly descended to whatever pit served as the entrance requirements for the Cult.
But Zigmunn had been tougher, Barsac reflected. It had taken the Luasparru eight years of life on Glaurus before he entered the Cult; Barsac had achieved the same destination in less than eight months. Zigmunn had always been the shrewd one, though, and Barsac the stolid wellmuscled one who depended on the manipulations of his blood-brother to see him through a time of trouble.
He was in trouble now. But there would be no help for him from Zigmunn, for Zigmunn had gone through the trap ahead of him and waited on Azonda now.
THE SEVENTEEN were given rooms in Carnothute’s palace. Cult members moved among them, speaking encouragingly to them, promising the rehabilitation the Cult held for them. Barsac barely listened. He dwelt almost entirely in an inner world where there were no betraying Sporeffiens, no lying Ystilogs, no Kassas of easy virtue, no Cult.
The night passed slowly; Barsac half-slept, half-woke, with little awareness of his surroundings. In the morning a Cultist brought him a meager breakfast, a dry bun and a sea-apple, and Barsac ate dispiritedly.
Carnothute called them all together once more to wish them well. Barsac stood, a half-corpse among sixteen other half-corpses, and half-listened. Part of his mind wondered where the Dywain was, now. More than half a year had gone by since its departure from Glaurus. Captain Jaspell had been bound for the Rim.
Probably they had already touched the worlds of purple-hued Venn and golden Paaiiad, and were moving onward toward Lorrimok and the double sun Thoptor. Doubtless the vacancies in the crew had been filled by now, and the angular man named Barsac had long since faded from the minds of the men of the Dywain.
Sleepily he stroked the scars about his lips, and realized he would be seeing Zigmunn soon. Nearly eleven years had slipped by since his last meeting with his blood-brother, but Barsac had not expected the reunion to come about on Azonda.
Cultists shepherded them through a door and down into a liftshaft. There were several moments of free fall while they sank into the recesses of Carnothute’s vaults. Five glistening little cars waited for them there, and the candidates entered, three in the first, four in the second, three in the third, four in the fourth, three in the fifth. A faceless Cultist sat behind the steering-panel of each car.
At a signal the lead car shot off down the dark tunnel ahead of them. Barsac, who rode in the second car, peered into the darkness, but saw nothing.
The trip took perhaps a five-minute span, perhaps an hour; in the darkness Barsac was unable to account for the passage of the moments. They emerged into light, eventually, and he saw he was at the spacefield outside the city of Millyaurr.
They quitted the cars and stood in an uncertain clump on the bare brown soil of the spacefield. Barsac saw the shining blue-white sweep of a giant starship’s fins, and wildly thought it was the Dywain, till he saw the name stencilled on the vessel’s landing buttresses: MmuvvioL He felt no temptation to break away, run to the strange ship, inquire if there were a vacancy on board for a skilled fuelsman; he knew he belonged with the group of Cult-candidates, and made no attempt to move.
A lesser ship stood further along the landing-strip, small and slight, with a golden-green hull that bore no name. Cultists led Barsac and the other sixteen out across the field toward the nameless ship, and Barsac saw others at the field, oilers, repairmen, crewmen, passengers, draw back and stare as the procession of silver masks and shuffling zombies headed out over the field.
One by one they entered the ship. Cultists guided them to individual blast-hammocks and strapped them in; Barsac, for all his twenty years as a spaceman, made no move to draw the rig about him, but waited passively until his turn came to be strapped in.
A warning signal flashed through the ship. Barsac closed his eyes and waited. The moment came that he thought would never come for him again: the faint anticipatory quiver as the drive compartment of a starship bursts into life, readying itself.
Lights flashed, bells rang—the old standard routine for a lifting spaceship. Something deep in Barsac’s numbed mind longed to respond, to perform the actions that those signals demanded, but he remembered that on this ship he was passenger and not crewman, and he relaxed.
Later came the moment of blast-off as the drive translated matter to energy and pushed Glaurus away from the ship. Barsac felt a sickening moment of no-grav; then the vessel began to spin, and weight returned.
Through a port near his face he saw the cluttered globe of Glaurus spinning slowly against a black backdrop. The ship had spaced.
Its destination was Azonda.
CHAPTER VI
THE NAMELESS SHIP hung on a tongue of fire over the dark world Azonda; then it dropped suddenly downward, and the landing buttresses sprang out at acute angles to support it.
Twenty-six spacesuit-clad figures, Barsac among them, emerged from the hatch of the ship—seventeen Cult candidates, nine watchful members. Even through the thick folds of his spacesuit, even despite the protective warmth of his suit’s energons, Barsac shivered. Azonda was a dead world.
The golden sun that warmed Glaurus was only a perfunctory dab of light out here, eleven billion miles further spaceward. At this distance, the sun was hardly a sun—more like a particularly brilliant star.
Drifts of banked snow lay everywhere, glittering faintly in the eternal dusk—Azonda’s atmosphere, congealed by cold. Gaunt bare cliffs glinted redly in the distance. All was silent, silent and dead. Life had never come to Azonda.
The Witch—?
Barsac wondered. He moved along in single file, lifting one spacebooted foot and putting it down, lifting the other. It seemed to him a wind whistled against his body, though he knew that was impossible on airless Azonda, an illusion, a phantasm. He kept walking.
The impassive guides led them along. A well-worn path was cut in the ice, and they followed this.
They came, finally, to a sort of natural amphitheater, a half-bowl scooped out of the rock by a giant’s hand. Barsac was unable to see into the amphitheater; a gray cloud hung obscuringly over it.
“We have come to the Hall of the Witch,” the leading Cultist said quietly via suitphones. “Beyond the curtain of gray lies the place you have journeyed toward all your days of life.”
Barsac narrowed his eyes and tried with no success to see through the curtain, hoping for some glimmer of that which lay within.
“When you pass through the curtain,” came the even admonitory voice, “you will divest yourselves of your spacesuits. You will stand without clothing in the presence of the Witch.”
But that’s impossible, Barsac’s space-trained mind protested instantly. The cold, the vacuum, the pressure—we’d be dead in a minute.
