Skies Discrowned and An Epitaph in Rust Read online

  “This kid’s okay,” came a loud, gravelly voice. “Throw him over there with that clown who set his bed on fire.”

  Frank had groggily assumed that the voice was speaking figuratively when it said “throw,” but now unseen hands clamped on his ankles and wrists. “Wait, wait—” Frank began mumbling. “Heave ho!” called someone cheerily, and Frank found himself lifted from whatever he’d been lying on and tossed sprawling into the air. His eyes sprang open wide and he grabbed convulsively at nothing. He saw the concrete floor rushing up at him and he managed to twist around in midair so that he landed on his hip instead of his head. The sharp, aching pain of the impact was his first clear sensation of the morning.

  Laughter rang loud in the room, and Frank looked up from where he lay to see what sort of people were amused by this. A Transport captain and four guards returned his gaze with a mixture of humor and scornful contempt in their eyes. All of them wore pistols, and two of the guards held coils of rope.

  “Take these two jerks first,” said the captain, pointing in Frank’s direction. “And tie their hands.” The man exited and the four guards walked over to Frank and rolled him over onto his face, then quickly and securely tied his wrists together behind him. They left him lying there and moved on to someone behind him.

  “Get up now,” one of the guards said. Frank struggled to his knees and then stood up. His stomach was a collage of pain and numbness, and he sagged when he straightened up; the colors of unconsciousness began to glitter before his eyes. He lowered his head and breathed deeply, and the weakness passed. He heard a sigh behind him and turned to see a tall, thin man with graying hair. It must be the guy who set fire to his bed, Frank realized.

  “All right, you two, get moving,” a guard said. “Out that door.”

  Frank and his sad-eyed companion shambled out of the little room and, escorted by the guards, made their way down a corridor to an open doorway. Morning sunlight glared on wet asphalt outside, and the air was cold.

  Somehow Frank was not very depressed. The light of day had dispelled the fears the night had given him, and his system was buoyed up by the adventurous realization that he was embarking on a perilous journey. Anything can happen, he thought.

  The guards prodded the two blinking prisoners outside. Five hundred yards away the silver needle of a Transport ship stood up against the sky, gleaming in the sun like a polished sword. Even though it was the vehicle that was to carry him to Orestes, Frank was overcome with the beauty of the thing.

  “Are these our two escapees?” asked a Transport officer who had walked up while Frank was staring at the rocket. He carried in his hand an object that looked like a rubber stamp or a wax seal.

  “Yes, sir,” answered one of the guards.

  “Open their shirts,” the officer said. A guard took hold of Frank’s shirt-collar ends and yanked them apart. Three buttons clicked on the asphalt. I’m glad this is just an old painting shirt, Frank thought automatically. He heard his companion’s shirt being dealt with in the same way.

  “Now, boys, this won’t hurt a bit,” said the officer with a cold smile as he pressed the seal onto Frank’s chest and the other man’s. The metal felt warm and itched a little, but was not uncomfortable. “There,” the officer said. “Now everyone will know at a glance who you are.”

  Frank looked down past his chin and saw a mark on his chest. It was a circle with a capital E inside it. “Escapee,” the officer explained. He turned to the guards. “Get these monkeys aboard. We lift at nine-seventeen.” He strode off without another word.

  “You heard the man, lads,” grinned a guard. “Start walking. Your friends will be coming along as soon as you two maniacs are aboard.” Flanked by the arrogant guards, Frank and the bed-burner set off across the tarmac toward the ship. Frank’s eyes were becoming accustomed to the daylight and he looked around as he walked. To his right, a hundred yards away, was a chain-link fence topped with strands of barbed wire. Half-a-dozen big tractor motors were stacked against it at one point. Beyond the fence, he knew, was the channel in which the Malachi River surged its way to the distant sea. At his left was visible a cluster of undistinguished gray buildings. Not a really fine view, Frank thought, considering it’s probably the last time I’ll see this planet. The thought raised a clamoring flock of emotions in him, which he determinedly strangled and put away. It simply would not do, he told himself, to burst into tears out here.

  The gray-haired prisoner who paced along beside Frank was acting oddly. He was whimpering, and his wide-open eyes flicked around as if he were watching the quick, erratic course of a wasp. “Are you okay?” asked Frank quietly.

  “There’s no way,” the man said.

  “What’s that?” asked a guard.

  “There’s no way!” the man shouted. The guards, sensing a dangerous frenzy, backed away a pace. Frank did, too. The guards were all concentrating their attention on the crazed bed-burner, and it occurred to Frank that since Francisco Rovzar was already branded as an escapee he had nothing to lose by trying it again. He took another step back, so that the guards were all in front of him.

  “Oh my God, there’s no way!” shrieked the gray-haired man, who now took off at a dead run toward the buildings. At the same moment Frank turned and sprinted, as quietly as he could, toward the chain-link fence and the tractor motors. He heard, without thinking about it, angry calls behind him. Forget it, he thought, they’re after that old guy. Keep running.

  “Hey, you!” sounded an exasperated shout. That’s probably me he’s yelling at; well, I have to play out the hand now, he thought. He wrung the highest degree of speed out of his pounding legs, ignoring the shortness of his breath and the pain in his stomach. The fence seemed to slowly jerk closer. Vividly, he could picture the guard unsnapping the flap on his holster, lifting out the pistol, and raising it to eye level. Should I weave right and left to spoil their aim? No, that’d slow me down, he thought.

  “Hold it right there, kid, or I’ll shoot,” called one of the guards. Frank covered the last ten feet and leaped, arms still bound, to the oily top of one of the tractor motors; without stopping he sprang up the stairs they formed, and then jumped with all his strength to clear the barbed wire. A gunshot cracked and his body jerked as it fell away, awkwardly, on the other side of the fence.

  “You get him?” asked one of the guards.

  “Sure I got him,” the other guard replied, holstering his gun.

  “A lucky shot at this range. You must have aimed high,” commented another. “I’ll send the grounds patrol to pick up the body. Come on, help me get this guy stowed.” The guards picked up the unconscious, bleeding form of the unfortunate bed-burner and strode off toward the ship.

  CHAPTER 3

  FRANK’S FLYING LEAP ENDED in a ragged slide down a dirt embankment to a service road below. The breath was knocked out of him, and the side of his head stung where the bullet had creased him. He lay still for a minute or two to get his breath back, but he knew he couldn’t rest yet. He struggled to his skinned knees and spit dirt out of his mouth. I’ve got to untie my hands, he realized, looking around desperately for some object with a sharp edge. He saw nothing but the hill and the road.

  He got shakily to his feet, but didn’t feel able to walk. Blood from his right ear ran down his neck and stained his ruined shirt. I can’t take a whole lot more of this, he thought. Looking south, away from the slope, he could see the steep banks of the Malachi. That’s where I want to go, he told himself. The Malachi flows right into Munson, and that ancient metropolis has been harboring fugitives for five hundred years.

  The grating roar of a jeep interrupted his thoughts. He knew there was no nearby place to hide, so he flopped down on his stomach beside the road, lying on his good ear. A few moments later the jeep rounded the corner and bore down on his lifeless-looking body. It squealed to a halt beside him, its motor still chugging. Frank held his breath.

  “Look at him,” remarked the driver. “The bullet went righ
t through his head.”

  “Lemme see,” spoke up his partner. “Wow. I wish they’d issue guns to us.”

  “Hah,” replied the driver. “Like to see you try to handle a gun.”

  “I could do it.”

  “Yeah, sure. Throw our friend here into the back, will you?”

  “Aren’t you gonna give me a hand?”

  “No, I’ve got to stay here and keep my foot on the clutch. Hurry up.”

  “Oh, man,” whined the other, climbing out of the vehicle. Frank heard his boots crunch in the dirt as the man walked over to his prostrate form. Rough hands grabbed his shoulders and pulled. I can’t keep playing dead, Frank thought, terrified; I can’t. Any second now they’re going to notice.

  “This guy’s heavy,” the man complained.

  “For God’s sake, Howard, he’s skinny. Now stop bitching and toss him in here.”

  Howard lifted Frank by the belt and slipped an arm under his stomach. Then with an exaggerated groan he heaved the limp body up onto his shoulder. Frank managed to keep from tensing any muscles during the maneuver, but couldn’t help opening his eyes as Howard flung him into the back of the jeep. There was a spare tire, and he bent a little to let his head land on the rubber; a jack jabbed painfully into his shoulder, but he found himself basically uninjured. He was very tempted to give himself up. I’ve taken as much as anyone could have expected of me, he thought. All I want is a rest.

  With the lurching rattle of engaging gears the jeep got underway. Frank lay face up on the spare tire, his right foot only a short distance from the back of the driver’s head. The machine picked up speed, and the driver clanked the stick shift into second gear; after a couple of minutes he pushed it up into third.

  Frank risked raising his head. The road took a sharp curve to the left in front of them, and the driver’s hand reached out to downshift. Without stopping to think, Frank drew his right leg all the way back and slammed his foot like a piston into the base of the driver’s skull. The man’s head bounced off the steering wheel and the jeep spun to the right in a bucking dry skid. Off balance from his kick, Frank was pitched over the jeep’s side panel; he hit the dirt in a sitting position and slid, taking most of the abrasion on his left thigh and shoulder. When he found himself motionless at last, he decided to die there, right there in the road. I should have died a long time ago, he thought.

  He cautiously opened his eyes. The jeep lay on its side a hundred feet away—the tires on the top side were still spinning, and the motor was ticking in a staccato rattle. Frank was about to close his eyes again when he noticed a jagged strip of the hood protruding like a knife. Squinting against dizziness, he got to his feet after overcoming a short spasm in one knee that had him genuflecting like a madman. He limped across the road to the jeep, and backed up against the torn piece of metal, rocking back and forth to saw through the rope binding him. The rhythm of the motion brought to his dazed mind the memory of a song his father used to sing, and after a brief time of rocking in the morning sun he began to sing it:

  ldquo;I open my study window

  And into the twilight peer,

  And my anxious eyes are watching

  For the man with my evening beer.”

  The rope frayed, then snapped, and Frank’s hands were free at last. He flexed them to get the blood circulating.

  “Who’s singing?” came an angry voice. Howard, his shirt torn, lurched around the corner of the upended jeep. His service sword, a short rapier, was drawn. Frank ran around the other side, and saw the driver’s body lifeless in the road, face down with his knees drawn up like a supplicant in church. Frank hobbled over to the body and drew the sword from the scabbard on the dead man’s belt. Its hilt was a right-handed one, but Frank, being left-handed, held it in his left, trying to grip it with his skinned thumb and forefinger as Mr. Strand had taught him. Awkward, he thought. How good is Howard?

  Howard came out from behind the barrier of the jeep; he was running at Frank, his sword held straight out before him like the horn of a charging rhinoceros. Frank parried it, but Howard had lumbered past before Frank could riposte. The big guard turned and aimed a slash at his young opponent’s head; Frank ducked the blow and jabbed Howard in the right elbow.

  “Damn!” Howard exploded. “Want to mess around, eh? Swallow this!” He jumped forward, thrusting at Frank’s stomach. The apprentice painter, who had been through this move a hundred times in the fencing academy, instinctively parried the sword down and outward in seconde, flipped his own sword back in line and lunged at Howard’s chest. The point entered just beneath the breastbone, and Howard’s forward impetus drove the blade into the heart. Frank watched, both horrified and fascinated, as Howard sagged at the knees and slid away from the streaked blade that had transfixed him. His body went to its knees and then fell forward into the dust of the road.

  Frank backed away. Mr. Strand was right, he realized; hardly anybody can really fence. Since guns were rapidly becoming unavailable, the sword was coming back into fashion, but there had not yet been time for fencing strategy to become widely known. Mr. Strand was one of less than five hundred swordsmen in the Dominion who had really made a science of swordplay. Maybe, mused Frank, I was luckier than I knew when I practiced so many hours with Mr. Strand and his son in the academy.

  A breath of wind stirred Frank’s hair. I can’t rest quite yet, he realized. I’ve got to get down to the Malachi, find something to float on and then just relax while the old river carries me into Munson’s antique tangle of canals and alleys.

  He half-climbed, half-slid down the embankment on the south side of the road. His ear had stopped bleeding and only throbbed now, but his scraped knees and legs shot pain at him every time he bent them. It was an annoying pain, and it roused in him a powerful anger against the self-righteous Transports who had done this to him. And who killed your father, he reminded himself.

  He swore that if the opportunity ever presented itself, he would take some measure of revenge against the Transport and Duke Costa.

  He soon came to level ground—an expanse of slick clay soil, littered with rocks and thriving shrubs. He crossed this quickly and found himself standing at the top of a forty-foot cliff; below him, through a bed of white sand, flowed the green water of the Malachi. During the summer the river was a leisurely, curling stream, knotted with oxbows, but it was a spring breeze that now plucked at Frank’s tattered clothes, and the river was young and quick.

  The painstaking labor of ten minutes got him to the bottom of the cliff. After diving into the cool water and incautiously drinking a quantity of it, he set about looking for objects on which to float downstream. He found two warped wooden doors dumped behind a clump of bushes and decided to use these, one on top of the other, as a raft. If he sat up on it, he discovered, his raft had a tendency to flip over; but a passenger lying down had no difficulties. He tore a wide frond from one of the dwarf palm trees that abounded and used it to shade his face from the midmorning sun. Soon he was moving along with the current, and when he remembered Howard’s rapier it was too late to turn back to retrieve the weapon. He shrugged at the loss and drifted on, warmed by the sun above him, cooled by the water below, shaded by his palm frond, sleeping the sleep of exhaustion.

  Thus he drifted east, through the Madstone Marshes, under the towering marble spans of the Cromlech Bridge, and through the forests where the Goudy bandits reigned unquestioned. Any eyes that may have spied the makeshift raft felt that neither it nor its passenger looked worth bothering. By mid-afternoon the walls and towers of Munson rose massive ahead.

  At the western boundary of Munson, the Malachi divided in two; the first channel, its natural one, took it under the carved bridges and around the gondola docks, across the sandy delta to the Deptford Sea, sometimes called the Eastern Sea. The other channel, built two centuries previously by Duke Giroud, entered a great arched tunnel and passed underground, beneath the southern section of the city, to facilitate the disposal of sewage. The
city had declined since Giroud’s day, and most of the sewers were no longer in use, but the southern branch of the Malachi River, the branch called the Leethee by the citizens, still flowed under Munson’s streets.

  Frank was still asleep when he drifted near the ancient gothic masonry of Munson’s high walls. Two arches loomed before him, foam splashing between them where the waters parted. The great walls with their flying buttresses dwarfed even the couriers’ carracks that sometimes passed this way, and none of the river scavengers of the west end noticed as an unwieldy bit of rectangular debris hesitated, rocked in the swirl, and then drifted through the Leethee arch and slid down into the darkness beyond.

  Beardo Jackson tamped his clay pipe and sucked at it with relish, blowing clouds of smoke up at the stones of the ceiling. Below him in the darkness the waters of one of the many branches of the Leethee could be heard gargling and slapping against the brickwork, washing in a dark tide below the cellars of the city.

  He struck another match and held it to the wick of a rusty lantern beside him. A bright yellow flame sprang up, illuminating the cavern-like chamber in which Beardo sat perched on a swaying bridge. The light flickered over the walls whose tight-fitted stones were reinforced with timber in many places; the arched tunnel-openings that gaped at either end of the bridge remained in deep shadow.

  “Morgan!” Beardo called. “Come along, the tide’s high!” His voice echoed weirdly, receding up the watercourse until it reverberated like a distant chorus of operatic frogs.

  A woman appeared at the opening on Beardo’s right. She carried a coil of fifty-pound fishing line; before stepping out onto the bridge, she looped one end of it around an iron hook imbedded in the wall.

  “Don’t yell like that,” she said. “You never know who might be around.”

  “Oh, to hell with that,” he sneered. “Everybody within a cubic mile of here is scared stiff of me.” He slapped the sheathed knife at his belt and laughed in what he believed was a sinister fashion. The woman spat over the rope rail and stepped out onto the bridge. She was sloppily fat, and the bridge creaked and quivered as it took her weight.