The Ringworld Throne r-3 Read online

  Silence.

  One might consider that distance means nothing to a wayspirit. Or that a madman’s imagination is as quick as thought. Or if Gleaners run faster than Reds, faster than Tegger at a dead scared run, then something else might run faster than Gleaners.

  But Ghouls could not. Whatever else he was, though Ghouls were as elusive as Whisper, Whisper was not a Ghoul.

  The mist drifted, revealed and concealed. It was full dark, or very near. Through gaps in the clouds Tegger could catch an occasional vertical blue-white glare, the Arch still unchanged, whatever happened to his universe.

  The activity beneath the floating mass was increasing, Tegger thought. It was certainly growing darker. Vampires would be waking. Tegger said, “We should hide.”

  “I see a place, but it might not help you.”

  “Why not?” Tegger asked, and was instantly aware of the sweat running freely down his arms. Much of that was rain; still, his own smell would attract vampires for a daywalk’s distance.

  He waited while the mist closed in—and heard no more from Whisper. On hands and toes, then, he moved down to the river. He drew his sword before he waded in. No telling what lived in the brown water. If a fish brushed him, he might find his dinner.

  He stopped as water brushed his kilt. Valavirgillin’s rag, should he get it wet?

  He pulled it free of his kilt. It was filmy stuff, very finely woven, very strong. He’d seen his hand through it earlier, though it was too dark now. He’d noticed it because it was cold; but it wasn’t cold at all an instant after he stuffed it in his kilt. During a halfday of running he’d forgotten all about it.

  He let a corner dip into the river.

  It wasn’t dissolving. Good. But the upper corner in his fingers was as cold, instantly, as the river washing past his legs.

  He submerged himself. Rubbed himself with moss, climbed out fast, dried himself fast. Running had kept him warm in the wind and rain, but he wasn’t running now. There was a poncho in his pack, and the firestarter.

  Vala’s cloth was like a pipe for heat and cold. What would happen—“Whisper, what if I put a corner of Valavirgillin’s cloth in a fire? Would it burn? Would it be too hot to hold?”

  There was nowhere Whisper might be on this bare mud.

  His own mind told him he’d be crazy to build a fire. Hominids used fire. Vampires, no matter how stupid, would learn to seek fire. Still, he couldn’t help but wonder.

  He toweled his face, and pulled the towel away in time to see six vampires running at him across the mud.

  They didn’t sing. They didn’t posture, didn’t implore with their bodies. They came fast. Tegger snatched up his sword.

  A sword didn’t frighten them. They were pacing each other; spreading out a little, attacking as a pack. Tegger ran to the left and slashed, slashed. Two fell back with haphazard wounds, enough to put them out, Tegger thought, but he was too busy to look. The other four had him encircled.

  He half rested, turning in a step-stop motion, his sword held vertical, reversing himself, reversing. He and his friends had played this game with sticks when they were children. Their elders had fought Grass Giants this way.

  Two wounded were crawling away, uphill toward the shadow. The remaining three men and one woman circled him.

  He hadn’t known—none of the vampire hunters had known—that when vampires outnumbered their prey six to one, they didn’t bother with lures or song or even scent. They just attacked.

  He must reach the cruisers, if he lived. Tell them. Even if he must face Warvia again. Warvia.

  The vampires didn’t seem to be in any hurry. No reason why they should be. More were trickling down from the Shadow Nest. More yet would be returning from the lands beyond the mountains. Darkness was falling.

  “Whisper!” he screamed. “Hide me!”

  Nothing. The rain had stopped. He was on a wide mud flat. This time there really was no place for a wayspirit to hide.

  The scent. It wasn’t strong, but it was getting into his head and it wasn’t coming out. He remembered the other vampire, remembered killing her, killing her for not being Warvia. His mind was going, and there was no reason why he should wait.

  And the woman spread her arms for him, imploring.

  Tegger jumped backward, turning, sword swinging. Yes! The men were coming at his back, converging while she held his mind prisoner. His blade swiped across their eyes—he missed the second clean—came back and stabbed economically into that one’s throat. He jabbed back blindly at where the woman should be. She slammed into him with his sword through her to the hilt, knocking him off balance, her teeth slashing at his biceps. He curled her away one-handed. He could hear himself screaming.

  One man was crawling backward, leaving his life’s blood behind. One seemed blinded. The third brushed blood from his eyes and saw Tegger as Tegger reached for him. Then Tegger’s hands were on his throat and Tegger’s weight was driving him into the mud.

  The rest was a fog. The man gripped Tegger’s shoulders and tried to pull Tegger close to his teeth. Tegger shook him like a rat while he strangled him. The woman had almost reached the river when Tegger reached her and took back his sword. He stepped too close to one who should have been dead, felt teeth close in his ankle, stabbed down and kept walking. The blinded one came toward him, sniffing. Tegger took three swings with a blade dulled as blunt as a club, before the head came off. He could hear himself snuffling like a sick herdbeast.

  In the shifting fog he could see shapes moving down from the Shadow Nest.

  The pack, don’t forget the backpack. Good. Where now?

  “Whisper! Hide me!”

  Whisper spoke, but not in a whisper. “Run toward me!” The voice was a whipcrack command with just a trace of speech impediment, coming from far downstream, straight toward the Shadow Nest.

  Tegger ran. He was a hundred paces along when the voice spoke again, much closer now. “Out into the river!”

  Tegger veered left, into the water, toward the voice of Whisper. Was there something out there? In the rain and the dark was a shadow on the fog, a shadow too big to be solid. And a strip of darkness … an island?

  Vampires couldn’t swim, or the Water Folk would have known it. Tegger was a plains dweller; he had never tried to swim.

  It was ankle deep, knee deep … Pause a moment to get his pack on his back. No kilt. He’d left it. Sword: into the sheath on his back. He’d need his arms to swim, if hominids swam like Rooballabl, if Reds could swim at all. And he ran on. Knee deep, knee deep … and out.

  “Here,” said Whisper, from far away. “Go to the downstream end.”

  He’d crossed thirty paces of knee-deep river to reach a shallow bulge of dark mud that did not really deserve the name of island. Vampires were piling up on shore. One, then another, stepped into the water and came toward him.

  Downstream he went, running over mud, beneath a shadow too big to be anything but fog patterns. Wondering if vampires could fight while water impeded their feet. This might really be the best place for a final stand.

  He did not shy from dying. I killed a vampire woman for not being Warvia, he’d told himself. But when he killed the six, it felt like he was killing Warvia over and over, killing her for what she’d done in the night, and he gloried in it.

  If he killed more vampires, he would lose Warvia even in his mind.

  As his feet pounded across the mud, the monstrous shadow shifted. It was too rigid. Was solid, suddenly, and alongside him. He lashed out at it with his sword, and whacked something. He rapped it with his fist.

  Not a fog pattern. It was flaky and a bit springy, like layers of hammered metal.

  He’d seen this thing from much farther away. It was a tilted plate with square corners, obtrusively artificial, fifteen paces by fifteen paces if half of it was under the mud. It stood out of the mud at an angle of forty degrees. The mud had piled up against it.

  There were notches along the rim, big enough to attach cables. A th
ick post stuck up from the center. At one of the visible corners was what looked like a pulley. If there had been a cable, it was gone.

  The highest corner bulged.

  (Whisper was silent. Whisper spoke rarely. It might be Whisper expected him to work things out on his own, Tegger thought. But why?)

  There was no smell of vampires here.

  At the fall of the cities, hundreds of falans ago, vehicles were said to have rained out of the sky. Most of those were gone, buried or corroded out of existence. Sometimes you could find the shell of a floating car, and curved sheets of stuff as transparent as water, usually broken: windows. Sometimes something bigger.

  Like a big plate for carrying cargoes too big to fit into a car.

  The fog concealed, revealed. The plate’s highest corner bulged like soap bubbles stuck together—faceted—and as with soap bubbles, you could see in. One facet was crazed as if crawlerwebs covered it. Others were clear.

  When Tegger tried to climb, the plate was too smooth and too slippery with rain and mud.

  He’d better do something. He didn’t doubt he had outrun this latest wave of vampires, but even wading, they’d catch up. Tegger backed up several paces, then ran at the plate.

  Halfway up he ran out of momentum. He dropped, arms and legs spread wide. The mud didn’t reach this high. It wasn’t metal, or it was covered metal: a gritty surface, offering traction even under a rain slick. He crawled.

  The bulb was a single bubble, part windows, part painted metal. What was clearly a door hung by one hinge. Tegger’s fingers found an edge of the opening and pulled himself up and in.

  He looked down to see a vampire below him. She looked back, watching him.

  Now two. Now four.

  Tegger reached down for the hanging door. His thrashing foot went through something crunchy. He ignored that. He lifted the door—it wasn’t heavy—pulled it into place and looked for a way to lock it. There was clearly a lock, but he couldn’t make it work.

  Now the vampires began to climb, and slip, and climb again.

  The door wouldn’t stop them. The slope might. Otherwise this bulb would become their larder.

  “Whisper? What next?” he asked, expecting nothing.

  Nothing. He must have left Whisper down there. With the vampires. Funny, but he couldn’t make himself worry for Whisper’s safety.

  Tegger took off his pack. He wanted light, and there was no harm now in setting a fire. He struck his firestarter until he had a blaze.

  He studied the crunchy stuff for a moment. He’d seen the bones of prey and of cattle, and he knew the feel of his own bone structures. His foot had punched through some ribs, it seemed.

  The pilot had been of an unknown species, bigger than a Red, burly, with long arms. Its clothing was mere shreds of no particular color. The skull had fallen too easily, as if its neck was broken when the carrier hit the mud. It had the massive jaw of an herbivore.

  A hominid skeleton. Imagine that. The Ghouls had never come for it.

  At the fall of the cities the Night People must have been gorged and busy beyond imagination. When they found they couldn’t climb this wreck to reach the corpse in the control bubble, they’d given up. Nothing else would be climbing up here—they must have reasoned—to find an abandoned corpse and upbraid the untidy Ghouls.

  In the dazzle of the firelight he couldn’t see the vampires below. The shell glowed around him. One curved window was not covered with webs, as he’d thought, but shattered; the pieces still stuck together. Others were intact.

  Before him were toggles just big enough for his fingertips, that slid horizontally or vertically. There was a little door as big as his two spread hands, and another twice that size, but neither would open. There was a wheel on a post that Tegger found he could push in all six directions, though that took both hands and all of his strength. He moved all of the toggles, right or left or up or down, whichever way they’d move. None of them did anything.

  His tinder was running out, and there was nothing here to burn.

  If Warvia were here. She’d figure this out.

  If Warvia were here. He’d tell her he never doubted her. She hadn’t chosen to break their marriage, she’d been overwhelmed by a smell that entered below her mind and clamped down on the soul. How long had he been hearing that vampire song? The light was going, and now he could see a triangular face peering longingly in at him.

  Animal. Brain half the size of his. If she ever realized what the door was, he was dead. But the real danger, Tegger knew, was a scent that would have him tearing it free himself. He shouted, “Whisper!”

  She shied from his scream, just for a moment, then answered with her song.

  He drove his fist into one of the little doors with all his strength.

  It popped open. The compartment behind it wasn’t large, but he found what he needed: a thick book full of dry sheets of thin stuff that would burn.

  The vampire woman—women–shied back from the light. Two women now, and a man, too, all trying to balance above him on the shell. Waiting.

  He held a burning sheet above the compartment. There was the book—he was tearing up a thick book of maps—and a paper bag filled with dry mold, and a peculiar dagger which he took, and nothing else.

  So he smashed the other door. It hurt, but the door popped open.

  This recess was no deeper than one joint of a finger. What showed was entirely cryptic, a maze of toy knob. The gun of a City Builder machine, Tegger thought, and he looked for silver threads linking the little knobs. He had been told that they were what carried power. He was disappointed not to find them.

  He touched two of the points with his fingertips.

  The muscles in his arms spasmed hard and threw him back in the seat. For a long moment he couldn’t remember how to breathe.

  Was this what lightning felt like? Power! But it would kill him.

  He lit another paper and held it above the recess.

  Some of the little knobs were linked by slender lines of dust. His own touch had disturbed the rest.

  It was as if something linked in his mind. Tegger pulled out Valavirgillin’s cloth. The peculiar dagger didn’t have an edge, only a flattened point. He used his badly blunted sword’s edge to cut a narrow strip from the cloth.

  He should lay it along one of those lines of dust.

  He brushed it, the little strip of Vala’s cloth, quickly across the knobs. Lightning flashed up his arm, jolting him just for an instant.

  The smell … he couldn’t fight it forever … but he’d fight it for now, the vampire that sang in his mind. He glared at them and tried to think.

  Glove? He pulled his towel out and tried gripping the strip through that. No good. He could grip the peculiar dagger through it, though. He could drop the strip of Vala’s cloth into the recess, and push it around with the point of the dagger until it mated two knobs.

  He couldn’t see what suddenly glowed; it was outside the cabin. Three vampires suddenly lit up like suns. They yelped and tried to leap away from the light. Two slid away down the plate; the man dropped off the edge.

  Reflected light was still pouring in. He didn’t need the fire anymore.

  He left the first strip in place. He cut another strip from Valavirgillin’s cloth and began testing that. His teeth hurt from being clenched. He could hear his whimpering, and know how badly he wanted to throw himself out that door and follow two vampire women down to the mud. But Warvia, Warvia, I did it! I made the lightning flow!

  Now, why didn’t he have anything but light?

  It might be, he thought, that light was only the easiest part of City Builder tech, the part that lasted the longest. Or the part that used the least power, and too little power remained for any of these other unnamed wonders … But Tegger didn’t believe that. He’d felt the shock. Wherever it came from, there was power. And it was driving the vampires back.

  The old skull was so clean. Something had claimed the meat. If not Ghouls, then birds? The
big empty sockets seemed to be looking at him.

  He set it in the larger compartment, but changed his mind about closing it. He said to the ancient pilot, “You think you had a bad day? I had a day nobody would want to live through. You had maybe a hundred breaths …”

  But it must have felt like forever to the pilot, he thought. Falling out of the sky, maybe in a cloud of smaller vehicles, maybe screaming for help through a voice-sender that didn’t work anymore, as every part of his wonderful flying hauler went dark and dead.

  Ah!

  Tegger began sliding every toggle that would move. When the lights died, he slid that one back.

  Yes! Every sliding thing was on full power when this thing fell, and in his experimenting he had turned each of them off. Everything but the lights! The hauler must have fallen in daylight!

  And the next thing Tegger caused to happen was a sputtering, and a smell of something burned. He feared he had destroyed something.

  But the next was a wind in the control bubble, which carried the vampire scent out and away and left his head clear and cold. And then he screamed in triumph.

  He twisted himself around to look down the length of the cargo plate. It was hard to pick out the vampires. The lights seemed to be to either side of his bubble; they cast shadows, and vampires like shadows. He thought he saw five, and guessed at twice that. But they would come no closer.

  Time, now, to remember hunger; to wonder if anything nested in here. The outside was too bare. He’d have to wait for full day and catch a fish. It seemed he would live through the night.

  Where was the power, the lightning, coming from? He couldn’t guess.

  He cut another finger-length strip and began trying that.

  Chapter 9

  Familiar Faces

  WEAVER TOWN, A.D. 2892

  Through the window in the cliff, Louis studied the weathered woman in weathered clothing. She was steering a steam-powered vehicle downslope, with a similar man beside her and a small red man perched above her head. “Three days ago?”

  “Ninety hours exactly.”