The Pharoah Contract

Sweat streamed down Brinslevos’s face, and he muttered inaudibly. Then the Lord said, in a stronger voice, “I hear the grinding of machinery in the darkness — first the rasp and rattle of tiny cogs and then the pumping of many small pistons. The sound grows and changes, until it becomes a steel music, and I know that a great machine, unseen in the night, rises on all sides of me, up to the stars and beyond. I seem to float, light as smoke, in the center of this machine, which now seems so huge that no world could support it. I can see nothing but the flicker of starlight through the girders and levers and wheels.

“At first I thought myself at the center of the machine, but now I understand that I am trapped in one tiny pocket of it, and that a million others float here, too, each in his own separate cage. It is a cage; I feel that now, and I wonder why I am being kept.”

Brinslevos moaned, a sound of puzzled agony that threatened to pull Ruiz into the Lord’s vision. Ruiz damped his reaction to the drug and swam up from the depths.

Brinslevos spoke urgently, in a rising panic. “Why? Why! The gears grind faster and faster, until the darkness shudders with the motion, and I can hear nothing else, not even my thoughts. I grow heavier, I start to sink, toward the danger below, a gnashing beast of metal, with cogs for jaws and rods for muscles. It’s hungry and I carry no weapon, I am naked and cold and weak.” Brinslevos twisted and flung out his arms. “Something’s gone wrong…. “He screamed, a sound that completely sobered Ruiz. The Lord’s face was suddenly distended with terror, as if some awful creature had forced its way under his skin and was trying to push out. His eyes bulged with insupportable horror, his mouth strained to wring the last bit of sound from his scream — he seemed to be unable to draw his next breath.

Any moment, servants or guards would come running, and what would Ruiz Aw tell them? “I’m sorry; I seem to have poisoned your Lord, excuse me now.”

Ruiz leaned forward and pressed his left pinky ring against the Lord’s corded neck. A full-spectrum antidote and strong sedative jetted into the Lord’s carotid, and the Lord fell back unconscious, face relaxing.

An instant later, something exploded against the back of Ruiz’s head, and he knew nothing for a while.

Chapter 11

Ruiz woke slowly to the sensation of heat and confinement, and the bitter smell of rust. His head thumped with a regular rhythm, a stabbing pain behind the eyes. He groaned and sat up in semidarkness, to discover that he was naked.

His senses swam for a moment, and he touched the back of his head gingerly. Blood was crusted on a split in his scalp, but his probing fingers found no evidence that his skull was cracked.

Where was he?

Beams of hot light penetrated his prison through chinks in the welded iron that surrounded him. Carefully, he rose to hands and knees and put his eye to one of these cracks. His heart sank. He was in the Place of Artful Anguish.

One of the other iron huts was visible through his chink, and above it flew a black pennon, indicating that it also contained a condemned criminal. Ruiz wondered who the other was, and why that unfortunate had been selected to share Ruiz’s punishment.

Useless to think about it.

His immediate concern was escape, which must come soon, before the performance in which he would Expiate his sin against Lord Brinslevos. Already he could feel the uneasiness of the death net, tugging against its anchorages in the depth of his mind. He would live only until the situation was irretrievably hopeless; then he would die, and the uninformative circumstances of his death would be transmitted to the League. Ruiz shook his head. Bad enough to die painfully, worse still to die pointlessly. He knew nothing, except that a conspiracy of some sort flourished on the orbital platform, a datum that the League might logically have assumed without the event of his death.

He shifted his thoughts from the gloomy avenue they had begun to follow. The situation was far from hopeless; surely when Denklar heard of his predicament, the innkeeper would communicate with him, and then it would be a simple matter of the innkeeper fetching the packet of pangalac devices hidden in his room. Ruiz had only to exercise patience, and to survive his time in the iron hut. It would grow hot, no doubt, but surely the Lord’s executioner preferred lively victims to ones already half-cooked.

As if in answer to his surmise, a pair of stout women came into view, laboring under shoulder yokes and large buckets. They set the buckets down next to the other occupied cage with theatrical sighs of exertion, and presently began to pour water into the pan-shaped roof of the cage.

“Air-conditioning,” Ruiz muttered, and shortly he heard the trickle of water on his own roof.

“Hey,” he shouted. “What foolishness is this? I’ve done no wrong. Call the Lord, tell him I’m innocent.”