THEY CAME howling over the rail out of the darkness, reeking steam, with machine oil splashing from them. They were all a shade larger than the biggest of men and they swung cutlasses and fired pistols. The bright metal of their weapons caught the flickering glow of their eyes. There were two dozen of them, all wearing bright clothes, sharply crimson sashes and fierce yellow head rags. They were rich with gold earrings and sooty eyepatches and crinkly black beards.
"Pirates," said the only female passenger on the small square-sailed merchant ship.
John Wesley Sand, who had been standing with the fair young girl near the cabin, said, "Just who I'm looking for."
Three of the raiding pirates came clattering toward Sand. The largest of the three, dressed in black pantaloons and gold-buckled boots and leaking glistening machine oil, knocked aside the gray-cloaked master of the small vessel and then jumped for Sand.
Sand, a tall lanky young man, pivoted and ducked. He avoided the lunge of the pirate, but the other two both fell upon him.
"Please don't cut him," cried the girl, one slender hand pressed to her breasts. "Please don't shoot him."
"Not at all," roared the oil-spattered one. He brought both heavy fists down on Sand's blond head.
The three pirates then yanked Sand up from the deck and heaved him over the side. This assignment was not getting off to a smooth start, thought Sand as he hit the sharp cold night water and lost consciousness.
The job had commenced two days before.
He was wandering through the bright grassy field, curious about a dark-haired girl. He'd lost track of her about the time the music had started on the hillside in the vineyards. John Wesley Sand shrugged, refastened his new doublet, and walked on downhill toward the quiet creek. When he got to the water he noticed a secret agent sitting on a rock soaking his bare feet. "Hello, Ralph," said Sand.
The chubby man jumped up, splashing in the pebbled water. "John, I've been looking for you. They told me at the inn in Sarjeta you'd come out here for the wine festival." He frowned, studying Sand. "You've got a lot of straw and burs on you."
"Yes," agreed Sand. "Does the Political Espionage Office want to hire me again?"
The agent's voice shifted to a deeper tone. "Let me do the talking," he said in the new voice. "Fatso won't ever come to the point."
"Hello, Mort," said Sand. "How are you?"
"How would you be if you were part of a fat nitwit?"
Sand's left eye seemed always about to wink. He looked at the Political Espionage agent for awhile, then up at the noon sun. "Well, if it was either that or being dead, I'd pick that."
"You never saw me before the accident," said the agent in his Mort voice. "I was a tall good-looking young guy."
"As to working for PEO." Sand came down close to the slow flowing water. "I'm out here on this planet to relax for awhile."
The Ralph voice returned. "Be thankful you can still relax. For me, being part of a freak of science, there's never a moment's rest."
"I thought," said Sand, "you were calling yourself a miracle of science the last time you hired me for a Political Espionage job?"
"Okay, admittedly there wasn't much left of either of us after that cruiser explosion three years ago," said Ralph. "Not enough for two complete PEO agents anymore. But more than enough for one good agent." His voice turned to Mort's. "Enough for half a good agent and half a dumpy nitwit."
Sand crouched at the water's edge and selected a flat red stone. "Just recently," he said, "I was asleep in a haystack. That's about what I had in mind when I left Barnum and came out here to Esmeralda."
"No wonder you're all tacky with cockleburs," said the Ralph voice.
"I'd just as soon go back to that haystack," said Sand. "Unless you come to the proposition and the fee you have in mind."
"You don't seem as enthusiastic about the free-lance espionage business as you used to be, John."
"Name a fee." Sand skimmed the stone across the water.
"Well, John," said the PEO agent in his deeper voice, "don't get the notion we've got a whole lot of easy money to spend on supplementary agents. You were on Barnum recently enough to know there's a slight inflationary trend. Everybody in PEO has pledged to tighten the budget."
Sand threw another pebble.
"We even had to come out here tourist class," said the secret agent.
Sand nodded and stood up, jiggling a handful of bright pebbles. "No, you came out to Esmeralda on a special chartered space craft," he said. "You came because you've lost two full-time Political Espionage agents on Esmeralda in the past six and a half weeks and so far nobody's found enough of any one of them to get even half way started on a composite."
"Now, John, don't make fun of our being a comp," said the higher voice. "How do you know about our troubles?"
"Even when I'm resting," said the lanky young man, "I listen."
"What else have you heard?"
"One of the charms of this planet, so Barnum thinks, is its backward status. All of its territories, including this one, are restricted, under Barnum's controlled development laws, from progressing beyond a certain point in any given time period. One of the things controlled development means, besides a slower and quieter way of life, is a very limited technology." Sand's left eye almost closed for a long second. "I'd guess Bamum, who runs most of the governments of most of the planets in our Barnum System, is worried about the reports."
"Which reports?"
"The reports that tell how the only daughter of the governor of this territory was carried off last week. By robots." Sand dropped all the pebbles into the water.
"Robots may not be the best or most accurate term," said the PEO agent. "Some kind of mechanical men, yes."
"Robot pirates," said Sand. "They took her off a vessel that was carrying her to a vacation spa near the port town of Delfin. About a dozen of them did it, big clanking guys. How much?"
"How much what?"
"Will PEO pay me for finding out who's behind these mechanical pirates?"
The chubby agent shook his head. "We've got two other agents working on that, John. The thing we want you to handle first is getting that girl back."
"You say first?"
"After you locate her, if you can then find out who's making these illegal and illicit machineries, that'd be worth a bonus."
"The governor has already paid a ransom, I hear."
"Yes, five days ago. The girl has not been returned." The Political Espionage Office agent squinted up at the bright sun. "I can't go into all the intricacies of this, John, but we've been asked by certain Barnum Embassy people to find this girl. Find her quickly, safe and unmolested."
"Robots don't molest young girls." Sand scratched at the hair over his left ear. "It might take me a week or so to find her or what's left of her."
"Don't talk as though she's dead."
Sand's left eye almost closed. "You know, one of the things about keeping a planet backward, it doesn't improve the way they treat nineteen-year-old golden-haired virgins. She could be dead by now, or sold to some slave trader."
The Ralph voice cautioned, "Don't go saying anything negative like that in front of the governor, John." The deeper Mort voice took over. "You're only trying to scare us into a higher fee."
Sand shrugged. "One of the advantages of being a successful free lance, besides all the fresh air and sunshine, is that you don't have to take every job offered." He turned away from the composite. "Ten thousand dollars."
"What?"
Sand faced him again. "Ten thousand dollars deposited in my account back on Barnum. Plus fifteen hundred in local currency to finance the immediate part of this job."
"You're asking for way too much, John."
"This is a wild planet, off in the places the tourists don't go," Sand told him. "And you've got two agents less than you did. One of them got picked off even before the governor's bright-haired daughter was carried off by mechanical pirates."
"How about six thousand?"
"Ten thousand in the bank," repeated Sand. "Fifteen hundred here and now."
The PEO man sighed resignedly in both his voices. "Very well. Come back to town and we'll brief you. Then we'll call on the governor for more details."
"At sundown."
"Why not now? You're going to stay here in the vineyards?"
"I'm looking for somebody." Sand moved away and uphill.
The secret agent sat down again and tugged on his thonged shoes.
GOVERNOR PEAQUILL rubbed the yellow apple delicately along the fur trim of his cloak. He inclined his round pink head to the left, indicating an oil painting hanging on the stone wall. "I weep when I look too long at her likeness," he said and walked away from the picture of his pale blonde daughter.
"She's fond of birds?" asked Sand, who was slouched in an ornate chair in the governor's private chamber.
"Why do you ask that?" said the puffy pink governor of Calandara Territory.
"They're sitting all over her in the painting. Birds," replied Sand. "And she's got a kerchief in her hand with a bird pattern woven into it."
The Political Espionage Office composite agent, who'd brought him here, frowned at Sand. "It's conventional to put doves in paintings. They do a lot of that here in Calandara."
"Symbolizing purity," said the lean young man who stood in the most shadowy corner of the large domed chamber. "She is very fond of that dove design."
"Don't speak of her virtue." The governor started to take a bite from the polished apple, but then began to cry instead. "I pray to Zumba she still has her purity."
"Zumba is one of the local deities," said the chubby PEO agent. Then he made a downward motion with his hand. "John, you'll scrape the jewels off the chair with your boot, sitting that way."
"They are but paste," said the lean young man. He wore a pale blue doublet over a stiff linen shirt, dark hose, and gilt shoes. In his knobby fingers he held a cap decorated with four white plumes.
"And who are you?" asked Sand.
"This is Peter Pembrose," said the governor. "He is my minister of affairs and trusted friend."
"A friend of poor Jenna's as well, since childhood," added Pembrose, still striped with shadows.
Sand said, "Okay, Jenna set sail from here in Sarjeta eight days ago, bound for Delfin, about sixty miles up the coast."
"Intent on nothing more than a few weeks of country pleasures," said Pembrose sadly.
"Peter has been fond of Jenna since they rolled hoops together in their youth." The governor sniffed and bit hard into the apple.
"And these mechanical pirates really grabbed her off the barque?"
The governor said, "I've told this to all your other Political Espionage Office minions, Ralph. Not to mention the innumerable others in our local law establishment."
"I wanted," replied the PEO man in his Ralph voice, "John to talk directly to you. He works differently than our more formal agents."
"Not that we don't appreciate the aid Barnum gives to us of the lesser planets," said Governor Peaquill. "I am sorry, by the way, about your other agents disappearing like that, Ralph. This is a restless age we are living through on Esmeralda and our own Calandara Territory is one of the most rough and tumble of the territories." He gestured with the apple core. "Granted we have lovely idyllic places within our borders, pleasant customs which attract a modest tourist trade, crafts and products which have an export appeal. Alas, there is still much too much wilderness, too much..."
"Terra incognita," supplied Pembrose.
"Hundreds of miles of that, yes," agreed the governor. "There are areas filled with wild men and desperate men. There are strange enclaves, obscure cults, sinister warlocks who practice Zumba-knows-what crazed sorceries. We even have—"
"Leodoro," said Pembrose.
"Yes, Leodoro. It's some kind of strange city, no one is sure quite where. They say the inhabitants are animal men. We do have some of those here and there elsewhere." He sighed. "This is really no planet to try and bring up a daughter."
"Tell me," put in Sand, "about paying the ransom."
The governor waved a puffy pink hand at his minister of affairs.
The lean Pembrose said, "We received a note a day after poor Jenna was seized. It was tossed through a window of the scullery, wrapped around a cog wheel. Ten thousand dollars was demanded."
"A reasonable price," said the governor.
"Yes," agreed Sand. "You kept the note?"
Pembrose shook his head negatively. "We were instructed to wrap the money in it."
The governor held his hands wide apart. "It was a fairly large note."
"I, after getting the money from Hoffning, all in bills of high denomination, placed the packet in the leather sack as called for," continued Pembrose.
"Delivered it where?"
"I was supposed to leave it near a certain deserted shack in the vicinity of the fishing village of Pobreza, some thirty miles to our north. However, as old Hoffning and I rode there on the specified midnight we were jumped and the ransom taken."
"Who is Hoffning?"
"Our lord treasurer," said the governor. "The old fellow insisted on going along with the money."
"Okay. Who jumped you?"
"I am not sure. They dropped from above, quickly hooded us and then knocked us insensible," said Pembrose. "Active searching and the usual questioning and tortures applied to the residents of the area have provided us with no clues at all."
Sand slouched further down into the chair. "Could it have been the mechanical pirates who jumped you? Or real men?"
"I can't say. But then I have had no experience with these robots—androids as you call them on your sophisticated and not restricted planet."
"You don't have any idea who's built these robot pirates, who controls them?"
"The ransom note," said Pembrose, "was signed Master Clockwork."
"Master Clockwork," repeated Sand.
"An alias," said the Political Espionage agent.
"Where," asked Sand, "was Jenna's ship stopped and boarded?"
"Off the coast some twenty-five miles or so north of here," said Pembrose. "In the vicinity of that same fishing village I was instructed to go to with the ransom."
"Have you investigated the village of Pobreza, too?" Sand asked the PEO man.
"Yes." The chubby agent shrugged "Nothing was learned."
Sand stood, wandered over and looked up at the painting of Jenna Peaquill. She was a pretty, faintly plump girl. "When did the pirates promise they'd return her?" He glanced from the picture to one of the room's arched, drapery covered doorways.
"Within a day of the paying of the ransom," said Governor Peaquill. He looked over at the picture and began to weep once more. "She has not been returned in all these long days. There has been no further word from Master Clockwork or anyone else."
Sand jogged to the doorway he'd been watching. He parted the draperies and his left eye narrowed at the tall and frail young man, standing, lopsided, behind them. "Now who is this?"
Pembrose said, "Only Priceless Rorollo, one of our under treasurers and assistant to old Hoffning."
"He takes a long time getting across a threshold."
The tall and frail young man had red hair and splotch-shaped freckles. "Don't you, now-now, go criticizing me, too, sir," he said to Sand. "That's all I hear from doddering old Hoffning and he ought to know I can't help being clumsy a little and also easily distracted. I was only, now-now, bringing these starvation reports to the, now-now, governor there and I hit my elbow a fearful crack on the topmost gargoyle of the stair rail and the reports went skittering. These reports, now-now, were finished days ago and would have been delivered long ago had not old Hoffning insisted on having all the dollar signs illuminated." He showed Sand the loose sheets of ledger paper held tight against his chest.
"Place them on the marble table nearest you," instructed Pembrose. "Thank you, Priceless."
The thin and freckled young man dropped the ledger pages before he reached the claw-footed table. "Don't any of you, now-now, point out I've spewed them all over again. I can't, now-now, do everything perfectly, even though my mother had such great expectations, now-now, and named me Priceless. A burden rather than an inspiration my name has been." He clutched the reports together and dropped them on the marble table-top, then stumbled out through the draperies.
After he was definitely gone, Sand said, "He's not a spy? For you or somebody?"
Governor Peaquill smiled, chuckled. "Priceless? He's much too clumsy to work at intrigue."
"Can you return to the subject?" Pembrose said.
"Sure," replied Sand. "I'd like to travel the route Jenna took. By sea first."
Pembrose said, "There is a merchant craft sailing tomorrow. It will also be carrying, secretly, a small amount of municipal money old Hoffning is sending to Delfin. I can easily arrange your passage. It will cause no suspicion since the ship usually carries a few passengers."
Sand crossed to another of the arched doorways. "When does the ship sail?"
"Midafternoon."
"I'll be there." Sand left them and descended out and into the early twilight. There was a grove of apple trees within tha walls of the governor's palace. Sand strolled there until darkness came on.
The following day he had sailed on the merchant ship and thereafter encountered Clockwork's pirates.
A DEAD MAN pulled him out of the surf.
John Wesley Sand had come to bobbing in the dark sea and with the merchant vessel he'd been thrown from a horizon away from him. He saw it in the misting night because the wooden ship was afire, sending bright flames crackling straight up. Sand had attempted to swim back in that direction, to try for a look at the pirates' own ship and to try to get himself back aboard something. But a dark current pulled at him and spun him and he drifted away from the flaming ship.
He swam and fought the night sea, passing out at least twice, dropping deep under the biting waters at least once. Finally, as dawn began to gray the sky and the water, Sand found himself in sight of a misty island. He strained and swam for it, making for the wide white-sanded beach.
He was coming out of the pull of the sea and its foam when he saw the dead men. They were standing at the far edge of the quiet beach, in among forest brush and thick mist. Each wore a brightly yellow tunic and rough scarlet hose with thick leather soles. Each had a wide-brimmed straw hat and two carried hoes and one a scythe.
They came single file down across the dawn sand, the one with the scythe in the lead. Sand knew they were dead even fifty yards away from them. They walked with a sad slowness and there was a cold blank look to their pale faces.
The man with the scythe reached for him and bent, grabbed at the wet collar of Sand's tunic and pulled hard. Sand came to his feet, free of the sea and he and the dead man danced unavoidably in the chill fog until Sand got his balance. "Thanks," he said.
The dead man touched the brim of his hat with a stiff white hand. Then he pointed to the forest above the beach. He made a writhing shrug.
Hanging from the branches of a great oak, fastened with thick iron rings, was a board sign. Like those of the inns in the port of Sarjeta. This sign read: ESPADA ISLAND FARMS! NO TRESPASSING! NO STRANGERS WANTED! BEGONE!
After Sand had walked up close enough to read the sign, he said to the three farmhands, "Well, I'm not inclined to stay on your island. I'd like to comply with the rules that are posted." He scratched at his tangled gritty hair. "Just how can I get off of here?" While he was speaking Sand began to notice the fragrance of fresh ground coffee. He turned away from the three dead men and sniffed.
Up the beach some thousand yards was a stone hut. Its roof was thatch and its chimney fragments of brick and stone. One crippled gull was balancing on the peak of the shabby roof. Fresh coffee was being brewed in the hut.
"Who lives there?" Sand gestured with a thumb at the ramshackle little house.
The dead man with the scythe again gave a shrug, another of his sad twisting shrugs. A dead man with a hoe tapped Sand's arm. He caught Sand's hand with his cold stiff fingers and turned it palm up. Then he made a scribbling motion across it with his white forefinger.
"A clerk? No. A writer?"
The three dead men nodded.
"Well, I'll go talk to him." The farmhands did not try to stop Sand as he walked away from them. When he neared the hut's slat door he called out, "Hello."
A chair fell over inside. Boards creaked and Sand became aware of an eye at a knothole in a window shutter. "Everyone in here has the plague," said a deep burred voice. "Didn't you see the sign on the door?"
"There's no sign."
"Everybody's too sick even to post a sign. Go away before you catch it."
"I don't even know what it is," said Sand. "I probably don't want it, but the problem is I'm what you might call shipwrecked."
"Step a little closer."
"Not exactly shipwrecked," said Sand, walking nearer the window. "Whatever it is you call being thrown overboard by robots."
"Hold up your hands."
"You mean as in a robbery?"
"No, I want to see if you have pen calluses."
Sand put his two hands near the shutter. "You can't catch calluses."
"You don't look to be a magistrate's clerk or really any sort of bill collector."
"I'm John Wesley Sand from the planet Barnum."
The eye left the peephole. The front door of the hut swung open inward. "Then you are obviously civilized. Come in and have some breakfast."
Sand moved to the doorway. "I thought you had the plague?"
"I exaggerated," said the large middle-aged man on the threshold. He was big and round with a balding head and a second chin. His lips were thick and faintly purple and his cheeks and flat nose had tiny red veins showing in snowflake patterns. "You see I am a freelance author by trade and this requires me to be cautious about who comes calling. Come in, come in."
The walls of the one room hut were whitewashed. An earthenware coffeepot hung over the small fireplace and on a grate over the coals sat a cast iron frying pan. "Is this your island?" asked Sand. He crossed the plank flooring to stand near the fire.
"Oh, my," said the big man. "No. I was looking for a new economical place to live and old Espada agreed to rent me this hovel cheaply. He claims it's an honor for me as well as a bargain, since all the scraps of furniture here are Espada family heirlooms. Espada is grudgingly acquainted with some fishermen and chandlers I know back on the mainland. My name is Anthony Dehner."
"I'm not familiar with your writing, being from off-planet."
"Oh, my," said Dehner. "No one, save my creditors and the magistrates, knows my name even here in Calandara Territory. You see, the author's trade is not as advanced here as it is on your home planet. I earn my living by being what is known as a hack. I write whatever is wanted at the moment and under whatever name is suitable." He reached up to a stalk of half-ripe bananas hanging from a ceiling beam, broke a handful free. "At the moment, and during the month I've been author in residence here, I'm writing as Major General Oliver Carelton-Brown. Producing a series of what we call novels about a bandit named Evil-Eye Jack."
Sand watched the author peel the bananas and slice them into the skillet. "I'm John Wesley Sand," he repeated.
"Yes, how do you do. I trust you like bananas for breakfast. Espada's island is semitropical, once the mist goes away. He grows bananas, pineapples, passion fruit, coffee and a bit of rubber."
"Bananas are fine." Sand found an empty tin cup on the table Dehner wasn't using as a desk. He poured himself some coffee. "How come all the fellows working here are dead?"
"It's an economy measure. No wages this way," explained Dehner. "Old Espada is something of a wizard, besides being something of what might be called an agricultural robber baron." Dehner took his own mug from his desk and filled it. "This whole planet is very odd. It's not at all like my home planet of Murdstone. There is a great deal of magic and sorcery floating around, like soot in the air. Old Espada knows an ancient method of reviving the dead. As you've apparently seen, they are not fully alive. They are alive enough to work. The bodies are bought by Espada from pauper cemeteries and from relatives. Some people would rather have their dead here than in the poor hole. Espada has about two hundred of them, what some planets call zombies. Espada's zombies last five years usually, then die for good."
Sand nodded. "How far from the port of Delfin are we?"
"Forty or more miles."
"How about a fishing village called Pobreza?" This was the village where the ransom was to have been left.
Dehner said, "Not more than ten. Our island here is roughly seven miles off shore. Pobreza is up the coast three or four miles. I have friends there." He swung the frying pan off the grate. "You alluded to robots a bit ago."
"That's right. I tangled with Master Clockwork's pirates," said Sand. "I'm a free lance myself, in a different field. I've been hired to find the governor's kidnapped daughter."
"Oh, my," said Dehner.
The hut door was kicked open and a gaunt old man with a pistol appeared there. "This will never do," he announced.
THE GAUNT old man swayed in the doorway, back-dropped by two large young men with week-old beards. "I see it is exactly as my first-born grandson warned me," he said. His breath smelled of age and the honey and toasted bread he had recently eaten. "You're violating your agreement with me, Dehner." He poked the pistol in Sand's direction. "You have obviously taken in new tenants behind my back."
"Let us bruise and pummel him, grandfather," said the elder of the two dark boys.
"Stay back," said the old man. "This humble hut is already too crowded. Its fine antique flooring, made of planks hand-hewn in the Boneca Woods by one of our craftsmen ancestors, cannot stand the extra strain. Against my better judgment I allowed this overweight jackanapes to use this relic of a hut as his studio. He spends the whole day here, abusing the privilege. When he's not gorging himself on pilfered bananas, he's pacing."
"He ought not to wear out a floor for which you have such a sentimental attachment, grandfather," spoke the other large grandchild. "Let us rain a shower of harsh blows upon him by way of a lesson."
"Oh, my," sighed Dehner. "They've picked up their vocabulary, and their notions of justice, from one of my Evil-Eye Jack novels I'm afraid."
Sand's left eye closed down toward a wink and he eased closer to the armed old man. "You must be Mr. Espada himself."
"Look at his footgear, grandfather," said the oldest grandson. "All sandy and muddy, getting grit and kelp strewn all over your nice antique hovel."
Sand grinned. "Mr. Espada, let me tell you that I've come all the way from the planet Barnum to shake your hand and congratulate you on being one of your planet's leading and wisest patrons of the arts."
"You've got seaweed on your fingers." The old man slowly recoiled from Sand's extending right hand.
"He's likely to have all manner of malign and sophisticated diseases and maladies," observed a grandson, "being offplanet. He looks to be in possession of no very clean habits of person or behavior."
"I'll admit," said Sand as he edged closer still to the fillagreed pistol, "I'm perhaps too casual in appearance for such an important occasion. The reason for that is transportation."
Dehner was at his writing table now, unobtrusively side-handing manuscripts and notes into one large bundle. "Espada, this young man is an important art world figure. He is not moving in on me, but has merely dropped by to exchange literary gossip."
Sand said, "Unfortunately I couldn't hire a boat that would come closer than five miles to your celebrated island, Mr. Espada. Which accounts for my having had to swim ashore."
Old Espada stroked at the velvet collar of his mantle and the pistol barrel pointed away from Sand. "You say I'm known outside this territory, beyond this planet even?"
"Not only for the excellence of your produce," Sand told him, "but for the fact you are the benefactor of a writer of the quality of Anthony Dehner here."
Espada tugged off his velvet bonnet with his free hand and rubbed its gold brocade trim across his dry rutted scalp. "He, I've always maintained, does write a very readable prose. Some of these dandies, who lay claim to being authors, think only of frills and fancies. While good Dehner here is a man who writes like a simple meal, like meat and potatoes."
The eldest grandson said, "He is but making sport of you, sir. This story he now weaves is not at all like that I overheard him telling the farmhands who fetched him from the grip of the sea."
"You can't get too literary with zombies," said Sand, watching the old man's pistol swing back to aim at him.
"This will never do," said Espada. "Edmundo, throw this newest one out first, for trying to confuse me. Then evict that fat hack. Do not tread too heavily on the lovely patina of this flooring. Do not knock either of these deceptive rogues into the furniture."
"You're particularly fond of that escritoire," said Edmundo, the oldest grandson. "I'll keep an especial eye out for that."
Dehner whipped his papers into an open knapsack, stuffed a cluster of bananas on top and trussed up the sack. "I didn't expect we could talk them completely out of violence," he said. "Oh, my, it was worth trying." He swung the pack to his back, picked up the writing table and threw it straight at the farm owner. The pistol went off and a bullet thunked into the underside of the wood.
"You've gone and made me shoot an heirloom," gasped old Espada. His cloak ballooned out as he back-hopped out through the doorway and into his two large grandsons. The pistol fell out of sight toward a clump of weeds.
Sand turned toward Dehner for a second and saw the almost afterimage of a girl's face at the small window behind the author. "Shall we leave?"
Dehner said in a low voice, nodding at the window where the girl's face had briefly flashed. "The window is a fake."
"Oh, so?"
Edmundo came tiptoeing into the hut. "Don't cause any more ruin, you two varlets." He swung a heavy fist at Sand.
Sand avoided the blow and counter-punched two into Edmundo's left temple as he tiptoed by. "Difficult to get the proper leverage walking like that," he pointed out. He jumped and caught the still stumbling Edmundo under the arms. Stomping down hard with his heels, Sand pivoted and spun the big boy off and away.
"Oh, my." Dehner had caught up the skillet and he gonged it down on Edmundo as the grandson staggered, still attempting caution, near him.
"They're splashing banana oil all over your nice hut," said the remaining grandson.
Old Espada was sitting, wide-legged, out in the weeds and sponging at his rippled bare head with his crumpled up velvet hat. "Put a stop to it, Marco."
"With your permission, grandfather." Young Marco came into the hut flat-footed. He jumped toward Sand, but dodged before he reached him.
Sand had been aiming a punch based on Marco's original trajectory and his punch failed now to connect. "Oops," he said.
"Have at you, outlander." Marco batted Sand over the top of the skull with a cudgel he seemed suddenly to have.
"Don't damage those tablelegs, you young nitwit," called out his grandfather.
"Have at you once more." Marco whacked Sand again.
Dehner circled the big boy and then knocked him over with a brick plucked from the fireplace. Marco dropped flat and still.
"Some of those stones have relics in them," said the fallen Espada. "Have pity on an old man's sentimentality."
"Let me thank you for your patronage," Dehner said to him. "I believe it is now once more time to relocate."
Espada had found his pistol again and was bringing it up to load. "Dull proser."
The heavy-set author caught Sand by the arm and stopped his wobbling. "Secret exit I fashioned. I always have one, no matter where I'm residing." He pulled the dizzy Sand with him to the window and then pushed his weight against the wall. It swung out and he and Sand were on scrub grass.
Espada's pistol went off and then glass splattered. "My sacred imported cathedral glass."
"I'm reviving some," muttered Sand.
"Up this way." Dehner ran them both up toward the woods.
When they were among the trees a tall dark-haired girl stepped out of a jigsaw of shade and brush and took hold of Sand. "I'll help, Tony."
"John Wesley Sand, Francesca Landolfi," explained Dehner as they ran. "Her family is in the chandler line, selling supplies to our recent host."
"How do you do," said Sand vaguely. They were two miles into the woods and an hour off trail before his head completely cleared and he realized how pretty the long dark girl was.
On his stomach, Sand was watching the cove some three hundred feet below. He was stretched on a cliff edge, screened by a thicket of green bamboo. Dehner was seated nearby, eating a banana.
The water in the small harbor was a thin fluttering blue in the midday sun. The beach here was a pale yellow and was thick with colored pebbles and small white shells. A short dock of fresh buff-colored wood had been built out into the water and at its end the Landolfis' thirty-foot trading ketch was unloading the last sacks of animal feed and farm supplies. The ketch was painted a soft blue, two masted with its sails striped black and white.
Francesca jumped from the port bow of the ketch to the boards of the pier. Walking tall and straight, she moved toward the beach. She passed her father, her uncle and a younger brother. And four of Espada's zombie workmen, who were carrying the supplies to a wood-wheeled horse cart at the edge of the thick forest. Only one of Espada's live overseers was on this job, a fat man in faded brown tights and a frayed straw hat.
"My last banana for awhile probably," said the author, flicking the peel into a tangle of passion vines. "Francesca usually visited me when her family docks here. I knew them all on the mainland."
"Will old Espada try to stop us from getting off his island?" asked Sand, watching the girl stroll along the yellow beach.
"No, but he might have a few more of his grandsons or his cousins or his overseers rough us up," replied Dehner. "My policy, after many years in the free-lance life, is to avoid beatings and brawls whenever you can. There's a certain exhilaration to be derived from a good fight, but even when you win you can require days to recuperate. Safer to write about such things."
Sand turned over on his back. "So it's no doubt wise for us to stay ducked down here until the Landolfi boat leaves and then run and get on board."
"Exactly," said Dehner. "Espada's spells of vindictiveness usually wear off and by lying low for a time we give him the opportunity to forget us and grow angry about something brand new."
"If he does mellow toward you again, you don't want to move back into your studio hut?"
"Oh, my, no," began Dehner.
"Hey, are you really looking for those mechanical pirates?" asked Francesca, who had come up through the bushy hillside.
"Yes," answered Sand, still on his back. "But what did your father say about smuggling us out of here?"
"It's my uncle who runs the business."
"What did he say?"
The tall pretty girl answered, "He will always do a favor for Tony."
"And me?"
"Friend of Tony's is a friend of ours and so on." Francesca was wearing only a fisherman's tunic, tied at the waist. Her long tan legs were bare. She crossed them under her now and sat beside Sand. "Are you only interested in those metal monsters or do you want to locate the girl, that dim-witted Jenna Peaquill?"
"Both," said Sand. "If they're still together. Otherwise either."
"Sit up and I'll tell you something."
Sand stretched and his toes made crackling sounds. "Tell me while I'm in this position."
Francesca bent down a little closer and focused on his slightly winking left eye. "You're not tired, out from that small scuffle with the Espada boys?"
"Yes." He steepled his fingers on his stomach. "Tell me."
"Uncle knows someone who may have seen Governor Peaquill's daughter after she was kidnapped," the girl explained. "When Tony said that's what you were up to, I remembered uncle mentioning this a few days ago. I asked him just now. Are you doing this for the love of the missing girl or some motive like that?"
"No. I'm being paid to find her and the pirates."
Francesca shrugged. "It takes all kinds, as we say here."
"Where did your uncle's friend see Jenna Peaquill?"
The dark girl turned to Dehner. "It was in the hill country above Pobreza, Tony. You know, where Marcus has his small inn."
Dehner was starting on a new banana. "Marcus? Is he involved?"
"A friend of my uncle's was through there by night. He says he saw strange things, only for an instant, as he passed near Marcus's inn. A small fair girl ran from the place and then two men caught her and dragged her back inside. One held a lantern and the light illuminated the girl's face and her fine clothes. My uncle's friend believes it well might have been Jenna Peaquill. He has seen her twice in processions in Sarjeta."
"Why didn't he tell the law?" asked Sand.
"And have himself tortured as a possible suspect?"
Sand sat up. "Okay, who exactly is this Marcus?"
"Besides being an innkeeper," said Dehner, "Marcus is a smuggler and a retired highwayman. His wife's a poisoner."
"Wouldn't the local authorities have questioned him then?"
"Perhaps not," said Dehner. "His inn is a good twenty miles from the place where the ransom was delivered, from what you've told me. They can't question every scoundrel in the territory. Even using torture, which is sometimes quicker, there's not time."
"Can you tell me how to get there to his inn?"
Francesca said, "Tony can guide you. He's a very good traveling companion and guide and he'll talk about the countryside as you pass through. He's written several travel books."
Sand asked, "Can I hire you for a modest fee, Tony?"
"Almost anything pays better than free-lance writing," said Dehner. "I've been growing restless here among the growing things. My quota of Evil-Eye Jack novels is nearly filled. Yes, I'd like to return to the mainland. And, if we're careful, I can avoid my major creditors this visit."
"We're in business then." Sand offered his hand.
Shaking it, the author asked Francesca, "How long before we embark?"
"An hour more."
"I'll stroll nearby and leave you two to chat." Dehner rose and moved away into the brush and out of sight.
The girl looked across at Sand. "I suppose there are worse things you could be than a mercenary."
Sand agreed.
The Landolfis' ketch was ready to sail when the sun was just past its highest. Francesca had drifted away again and now she came walking down the ketch's gangway and along the pier. She stopped near the fat overseer and then did a toe-touching bend for an object on the sunbright planking. Francesca stumbled against the man and managed to hook a hand around his right ankle. He was somersaulted off the dock and into the sea. After doing this to him, Francesca stood for a moment waving at him and calling apologies.
"The prearranged signal," said Sand.
He and Dehner went straight down the steep hillside, rolling and tumbling through the brush and flowers. They galloped across the fine sand. They came clomping onto the pier and ran for its end. The dead men were slowly turning their attention to the splashing overseer and gave Sand and Dehner little notice.
Sand took Francesca's hand and the three of them hurried across the gangway and over the bulwark and onto the deck. The loading planks were withdrawn and the moorings cast off. In a few minutes the two-masted ship was sailing away from the island, running with the wind.
THE MEDALLION swung free, hopped over her left breast, and ticked against Sand's nose. Sand turned the gold talisman in his fingers like a coin and it flashed, brighter than the declining sunlight in the ruined lighthouse. He could not read its inscription nor interpret its symbols.
"Curious?" Francesca leaned back from him and the medallion slid out of his grasp.
"I am not," said Sand, who was stretched out on a pallet of soft straw, "particularly curious about anything much at the moment."
The dark girl let one bare shoulder rest against the stone wall. "You spend a good deal of time stretched out with a quizzical look on your face."
"Compensation."
"For what?"
"I moved around a lot as a boy."
"Where were you?" began the girl.
"Tell me, after all, about your medallion."
She rose up and walked barefoot to the tumbled down wall that masked them from the fishing village far down hill. "I found it in the sea. Near the shore, a year ago, tangled in some tatters of galleon sail. Down among the rocks and the shoreline weed. I'm sure it's magic some way. Here." She smiled and came back to kneel beside him. She unlooped the chain and hung the golden medal around his neck while he was still trying to sit up and stop her. "A memento."
"I don't need," said Sand, "any charms or souvenirs." He reached for the medallion, hesitated, stopped.
"Yes, keep it," said Francesca. She touched at his chest. "It doesn't have to be sentimental. Think of it as part of the new outfit my uncle and I gathered together for you." She inclined her head toward the pile of fresh clothes nearby.
"Okay, all right." Sand stretched himself, watching her return to the wall.
Francesca bunched up her hair around her left ear, leaned on her left fist in the hollow in the fallen lighthouse wall that had once been a window. "That's as far as we've come, John. My family."
He joined her, rested a hand on her bare shoulder. "Which?"
She let her hair fall free again and nodded. Through the wild brush the village where they'd landed earlier showed. To the right were a few blocks of white-washed stone cottages, tile roofed. Some with careful low stone walls around them. Dwarf cypresses and flowering bushes. As the village slanted to the left and down toward the ocean the houses grew smaller and meaner. Just at the edge of vision sprawled shacks and huts of scrap-wood and drift. Dirt and fog had worked at the huts and they were smeared with dark and warped.
"My father was raised down there," said the tall pretty girl. "Not actually in those huts, since they don't last a long time. And now, after considerable, as he often reminds us, help from my uncle we have that large house over there and the warehouse further along and three citrus trees and an arbor where you can rest in the shade. I come up to this old lighthouse alone, to get away from the smell."
"Of the shack town?"
"Of it all." She was smiling tightly when she turned to him.
Sand looked beyond her for a moment. "Horsemen coming down there."
In the village four dark horses were trotting into view, single-filing through the narrow cobblestone streets.
There were three crossbowmen and a clerk on the mounts. They had apparently come up along the seaside roadway and into Pobreza. They rode slowly, the hooves drumming on the stones and then the planking and then only on dirt. In among the huts the horsemen stopped and the man in the yellow cloak of a territorial clerk stood up in his stirrups. "Nothing to do with you," the girl told Sand. "Don't worry."
"Tony Dehner's still down there," said Sand. "At the tavern with your people."
She tossed her head. "That's way over there. Those men are only tax collectors. They visit the hut people now and then."
The tax clerk was reading something. Two gulls stretched up off a shack roof and floated into the air to fly for the ocean. The clerk rolled up his scroll and patted his face with something. The crossbowmen, tiny from the lighthouse view, now loaded bolts into their weapons. From somewhere the clerk produced a burning torch. He waited a moment and then threw the torch into the nearest hut.
"Why?" asked Sand.
"They give you a chance to pay up, then burn your house. It's a penalty. Don't concern yourself." She left the window, catching his hand.
Sand stayed watching. The hut was burning. Roaring silently down there, spearing bright flame and sooty smoke straight up into the twilight. "Why the crossbows?"
"When you run out of your house, which they let you do, you might try to carry some valuable object with you. The bowmen make sure anything of worth goes straight to the tax collector."
A woman was coming out of the burning hut, pushing two children before her. Sand inhaled sharply.
"It's no problem of yours," said Francesca. "You're from offplanet, remember?"
Sand backed away from the window as a bowman raised up taut in his saddle. "Yes, that's right."
"Passing through," said Francesca. She walked in and out of shadow and sat again beside the far wall.
Sand grimaced, moved then toward her. Finally he said, "That's right. Passing through. Here today, gone tomorrow."
"Transient."
"Temporary."
At moonrise that night Sand met Dehner in a walnut grove in the nearby hills as they had arranged earlier.
DEHNER SLOWED his pace and pointed. "Yonder," he said. "And it might be best to stop and eat our lunch first."
"Not at the inn?" Sand was ahead of the heavy-set author on the dusty roadway, the late morning sunlight hot and yellow on him. A quarter mile below, beyond the twisted wood they were traveling through, the Inn of the Fat Dolphin showed now in a weedy clearing. It was a low brown wood building, shaped not like one L but like a Jumble of Ls. Its slanting roofs were of mossed-over tile and strayed seabirds roosted on its tilted chimneys.
"Oh, my, no." Dehner wiped his lips on the back of his hand. "While Marcus, the innkeeper, has some reknown as a gourmet his wife has an equal reputation as an accomplished poisoner."
Rubbing absently at the new medallion hung around his neck and then at the hilt of his new short sword, Sand asked, "Who'll be the easiest to bribe information out of, Marcus or his wife?"
"I'd try Marcus first. Since in—"
"Poderoso forever!" bellowed a voice from the immediate tree tops.
Before Sand could touch his short sword again a giant shaggy man dropped down from above and landed three feet in front of him, spattering dust, twigs, leaves and small green tree leeches. "Oops," said Sand.
"Poderoso forever!" the giant yelled once more. He was a good seven feet high, full bearded and brown. A steel bowl helmet, with three slightly askew bull's horns attached, rested on his head and he gripped a three-foot-long, double-edged, black steel sword. His only garment was a furry-looking thing wrapped around his middle.
"Beg pardon?"
"Don't you know a battle cry when you hear one?" demanded the giant. "You people surely are provincial in these parts. Where I come from, the cry 'Poderoso forever!' is an awesome thing to hear. Echoing from snowy peak to snowy peak, striking fear."
"Some battle cries don't travel well," observed Dehner. "Who might you be, sir?"
The giant let his free hand slap his broad brown thigh. "By Zumba, I really am out in the sticks. Why, I'm Jackdaw the Barbarian."
"I'm John Wesley Sand," said Sand. "And this is Anthony Dehner, the noted author. Did you fall out of the tree or jump?"
"I flung myself," roared Jackdaw. "Clutching Teeny-Weeny."
"Clutching Teeny-Weeny?"
"By Soglow, don't you even know the name of my famed fighting sword?"
Sand said, "That's not much of a sword name."
The barbarian said, "You may be right, Sand. I dubbed it when I was but a raw youth of seven, crouching in a cave in the wild snowy mountains of home."
From the inn now the sound of a flute and a mandolin drifted. "Are you guarding the inn?" Sand asked.
"Yes, exactly," shouted the giant barbarian. "The wife and I and our two youngest cubs trekked here out of the furious mountains wherein lies our barbarian commune, fought across the fevered desert of Forcada, braved the stormy waters of the Sea of Somora and here we are. Fit as a fiddle and ready for the wedding." He bent toward Sand and his sword tip rose up and came between their converging noses. "I grow restless lolling around the inn, with that one-time glutton Marcus and his effete cronies twittering around. So I come out into the woods to stalk game and scare off trespassers. We want no strangers about the inn today. The wedding is for family only."
"While we are not exactly family," said Dehner, "we are long time friends of Marcus and his wife."
"That shrew," yelled Jackdaw. "Tried to drug my hogshead of nut brown ale. I pray to Soglow she can be restrained from doctoring the wedding punch."
"Not only are we friends of Marcus," said Sand, quietly turning the giant's blade aside, "we are business associates of his."
"Scoundrels, too? I swear there is nothing in these outlands but effete twitterers and blackhearted thieves."
Sand asked, "What would be your fee for climbing back up into the tree, Jackdaw?"
"Poderoso!" roared Jackdaw, jumping a pace back and swinging the black sword through the air at his side. "No one can bribe a barbarian. Nay, to reach the Inn of the Fat Dolphin now, Sand, there is but one way. You must first best me in manly combat."
"Okay," said Sand. He stepped suddenly forward, punched the barbarian twice in his furred stomach and then gave him three jabs in his lowering jaw.
"Soglow." The giant dropped knees first into the dust, dropping his sword.
"You felled him quite easily," remarked Dehner.
"You usually can, guys who spend so much time yelling and brandishing."
The fallen Jackdaw shouted, "You've beaten me, Sand, and I am obliged to be your friend and champion for life and for eternity."
"We'll only need you for the next half hour or so."
The barbarian grunted up, dusting his shaggy garment with broad hands. "Does this fur look convincing?"
"No."
"I feared as much," shouted Jackdaw, retrieving his sword. "Two years ago I took, after being goaded by my wife, a vow to slay no more fur-bearing animals. When my old skins wore out she fashioned me this out of roots and fragments of cloth, shaped it and dyed it to resemble a bear skin. I fear, by Soglow, it has somewhat of a fraudulent appearance."
"It does."
"I've half a mind to take Teeny-Weeny in hand and go slay me a new wardrobe."
"First," suggested Sand, "let's go to the inn."
Someone jumped out a window as Sand came through the doorway at the inn. Sand turned back to Dehner and said, "I think that was someone I've met before."
"Do you wish to pursue?"
"No, let's talk to Marcus first."
The wedding had not yet taken place and the dozen people in the low white-walled room were still at work on preparations. By a new platform against one wall, a flutist and a mandolin player were practicing wedding airs. An enormous girl in a white gown was standing on a low pedestal next to a long serving table and two thin women were tying flowers and ribbons to her.
A small bald man in a blue doublet stopped in front of Sand. "You must be friends of the groom perhaps, since I've never laid eyes on you before. Or have I? That's my daughter on the pedestal. Her name is Trombetty and she's quite lovely for one so chubby, don't you think? Where's the best man gotten to?" He asked this last question of a lean man in a leather tunic who had come over.
"On an errand," said the lean man. He had a sucked-in look and was fifty-two years old. His hair was shoulder-length and he had a wide moustache. "Can this be my old brawling mate, Anthony Dehner?"
The bald man said, "This is what comes of consenting to your chubby daughter's marrying a bearded arcanumist with a multitude of swainish friends. I don't consider it proper for the best man to leap from the window not an hour prior to the ceremony."
Dehner moved from behind Sand and around the bald father of the bride. He caught hold of the lean man. "Yes, it is, Marcus. We've come a fair distance to see you."
"I rejoice in your visit," replied Marcus. "Yet, as you can well see, I'm busy in the midst of a happy combination of familial duty and business enterprise. My cousin here is giving his lovely daughter Trombetty in marriage to a rising young arcanumist from Sarjeta. This very afternoon. We're awaiting the arrival of the local low priest of Zumba. Since you've had, by the look of you, a dusty journey, I can offer you a drink of punch before you go, Tony."
"There's hardly enough punch for the invited guests," put in the bald man. "Excuse me. I must go shoo your wife away from the sweetmeats."
Marcus said, "Should you return this way in a week's time or so, Tony, I'll be free to devote to you the time I can't now. Things have been frantic here for a good fortnight."
Sand said, "Since before the kidnapping?"
The innkeeper pulled Dehner and Sand into an alcove near the musicians. "I don't know who your young companion is, Tony, but he must have me confused with my youthful self." He patted Sand's shoulder with a thin hand. "Yes, when I was no older than you, young man, I was quite a rogue. Highwayman, poacher, kidnapper and all around rakehell. All this was before my marriage." He inclined his head in the direction of the plump pink woman by the food table. "It's not all joy for a gourmet such as myself to marry a poisoner, my friends. Once she only used her gifts to help us in our trade of waylaying travelers, but now she can't help herself and poisons with abandon. In my other and younger days I was something of a glutton I must admit. I hung out not only in low dives and fetid bordellos but in small cafes and floury pastry shops as well. I remember a shop in the town of Pobreza run nearly two decades ago by a man named Gross Edward, formerly official creampuff and eclair maker to three governors. On one particular balmy evening I was arrested by the bowmen for taking part in an insignificant scuffle with some whalers. When we were brought before a magistrate the old fellow was quite puzzled to note that while the other brawlers were smeared with cheap wine and gutter dirt, I was covered with powdered sugar. Ah, the sweetness of the past, eh, Tony? Call again in a week, won't you."
Sand said, "One further reminiscence before you go, Marcus. Tell us about Jenna Peaquill's stay here."
Marcus's moustache fluttered. "The governor's daughter? Poor lost child, she never honored us with her presence. This is an essentially humble place."
"She was seen here," said Sand. "After she was kidnapped."
Marcus said, "Perhaps, young man, your witness saw young Trombetty, who has been in and out for fittings, rehearsals, and feminine advice from my dear wife, who is quite knowledgeable if you can steer her off the topic of poisons."
Sand said, "Rather than turn you into Governor Peaquill; Marcus, I'd like to know where the girl was taken." He paused. "I don't imagine she's still here, but we'll check that out, too. You don't look to be the master plotter in this business. As a hireling, you can accept an alternate employer. I'll pay you one hundred dollars for information."
Marcus's tongue reached up and touched along his moustache: "One hundred dollars?" He frowned at the musicians. "Bracy, what is that you're fluting?"
"I'm the Jurist not the flutist," corrected the round-headed middle-aged Bracy, "And first mandolinist. Alas, in a world so sad and rundown, one has to expect confusion. Sorrow and confusion."
"You were playing a dirge just then," said the inn-keeper. "Not fitting to the occasion."
"I got ahead of myself," said the round-headed Bracy. "Well, we're soon enough out of the wedding bed and into the grave."
Marcus motioned to Sand. "Let us talk outside, away from all the gaiety."
"I'll look about inside," said Dehner, "and join you."
"Did he take the ring when he bolted?" called the father of the bride to Marcus. "Your bearded window-leaping arcanumist."
"He doesn't have a beard," said Tromberry. "It's my darling Avak who has the beard, father."
Out at the rear of the Ls was a weed-clogged stone courtyard. Along a low stretch of stone wall sat a row of foul dovecotes and pigeon hutches. The cooing and twilling blending badly with the wedding airs from inside the inn. "Who are you, young man?" asked Marcus in the sunlight.
"I'm John Wesley Sand," Sand told him. "A free lance. I'm hired to find Jenna Peaquill and the mechanical pirates."
"I know nothing of them."
"The pirates?"
"Yes, no automatons have ever set foot on my premises. That is Zumba's own truth."
"But Jenna?"
"You'll pay me a full hundred now?"
"Yes. And a bonus of fifty dollars if you prove truthful."
Marcus sighed. "Now and again I slip away at night. I slip away and saddle my best grout. You look off-planet and may not know a grout is something like a horse and something like a cow and has six legs. I saddle my grout and hie me to some harbor town and visit a bakery." He studied Sand. "A hundred dollars will buy a good deal of pastry."
"One fifty all together."
"Yes, one hundred and fifty rather." Marcus hid his moustache with one lean hand for several seconds.
Dehner came out into the sunlight, shaking his head negatively.
Marcus took away his hand and said, "Tony, I never should have allowed myself to get involved in so grand a scheme. You both have my word I had no notion this poor fair girl was the very daughter, the only and maiden child, of so powerful and vindictive man as Governor Peaquill. Once I saw the truth and was overwhelmed with the folly of it I wished I had kept unentangled."
Sand said, "Wait now, Marcus, who took Jenna Peaquill from the robots?"
"The what?"
"The tin pirates."
"That I don't know," said the lean innkeeper. "I was asked to board a girl and her companions for a day and a night for a specified and quite liberal fee. The girl was supposedly, as I foolishly believed, being somewhat forcibly separated from what her family felt was an undesirable suitor. She was to be transported to a convent far off in the wilderness. Now perhaps that is contrary to the wishes of the gods of love, but there is nothing crooked in it. Nothing actually against the law."
"How many companions?" asked Sand.
"Three or four," answered Marcus. "I anticipate you may ask for descriptions. Unfortunately most of their stay occurred during the night and part of a foggy day. Some of the rogues stayed outside all that time, lurking around on guard I suppose. Their mounts, which I did notice, were all horses. If that's any help in your work."
Sand nodded. "Who set this up?"
"Who hired my inn to use as a way station?"
"Right."
Marcus lowered his lean head and his voice. "This is the part that's worth the hundred. The hundred and fifty I mean. The name of the man who tried to make me the goat in this web of duplicity. Is that not worth the price?"
"Yes." Sand drew out his pouch and took from it a hundred dollars in bills. "Here."
The lean innkeeper dropped his slightly arched hand over the money. "Tony, do you know how to reach the winery of Alexander Torbush?"
"He's in the hills above you, isn't he?" said the author. "Some ten miles or so."
The innkeeper said, "You can travel the same road that brought you here and long before nightfall you'll be at the forlorn place."
"Torbush arranged for you to keep the girl here?" asked Sand.
Marcus plucked the money away and thrust it in a pocket. "I doubt Torbush can be the chief plotter behind this scheme, Tony. Yet he has played a part in it, a much larger part than mine. Talk to him and, with either money or force, you will learn much more of what you want to know."
"They want," roared Jackdaw the Barbarian as he leaped out into the courtyard, "that twittering best man, cousin."
"I hoped allowing them to stage this ill-matched uniting here would divert any unfortunate suspicions that cunning Torbush put me in line for," said the innkeeper.
From behind the stone wall a scrambling began and then a red-haired young man in a white and gold doublet and hose popped briefly into view and went running toward the surrounding and shadowed woods.
"Hold there," shouted the barbarian. "By Soglow, my might and the cunning and brave steel of Teeny-Weeny will bring back that twittering rogue and the wedding band as well." He bounded over the low wall and went bellowing after the elusive best man.
"I must return inside," said Marcus, backing and shuffling. "May Zumba guide your steps." He hurried away.
"I would not quite trust Marcus," said Dehner, watching the running barbarian careen into the forest.
"I don't."
"What do you intend to do?"
"Visit Torbush and find out why Marcus is anxious to send us there." Sand cocked his head toward the woods that now hid the two runners. "The best man didn't want me to see him."
"I assumed as much. You recognize him?"
"His name is Priceless Rorollo."
"How did that come about?"
"His name?"
"Your knowing him."
"I met him in Sarjeta, behind a tapestry at the governor's," said Sand. "He works for the treasurer, old Hoffning."
"Looks a trifle effeminate. Or is that merely the way he runs?"
"His mother's naming him Priceless has had several basically unhappy effects on him." Sand went over the courtyard wall and headed again for the roadway.
THE APE beckoned to them from beneath the apple tree. He lowered a paw into a pocket of his striped apron and keys rattled. "Do I have the pleasure of addressing a pair of gentlemen as have made the pilgrimage to our once-proud vineyards?" he asked.
Twilight was spreading all around them and the roadway had leveled out. Knee-high brush and tough sinewy ferns framed the rutted road and then lumpy fields of rough grass and tiny yellow wild flowers spread up toward a small grove of apple trees. The apples were large and red and the ape reached up and plucked one and buffed it on the sleeve of his work tunic. "Are you with the Torbush Winery?" called Sand.
"That I am, sir," replied the mansized ape. "My name is Hankwin and I suppose I may well strike you as something of an oddity. I wager you've met few articulate apes in your time, gentlemen. We're a rare, more's the pity, and fading breed. Residing now only in one or two remote spots out beyond .. ."
"The Edgewise Plains," put in Dehner, who'd got his wind back enough to speak. "I wrote a book about your area once."
"No doubt sensationalized, sir," said the ape, coming bowleggedly toward them. "Most of what has been written about my people has tended to be on the sensational side. What was your book entitled, if I may ask?"
"Oh, my," said Dehner. "It was called Fur-Suited Dan in the Valley of the Killer Apes."
"Just so," said the ape man. "I haven't read that particular book, but I hazard the guess it was in the sensational category. But I imagine you didn't travel all this way to talk about the fair literary representation of a vanishing breed."
Sand said, "We've come to talk to Torbush."
"He'll be happy at that," said Hankwin, biting at the apple. "Though I'm ever on the lookout for visitors, I must admit the tourist trade is falling off hereabouts. Indeed, you may notice our winery is not in the immaculate shape it once was noted for. Nonetheless, come along, gentlemen. Our establishment lies only beyond yonder hill."
Sand and Dehner joined the ape man in the slowly darkening field and followed him upwards. After the apple trees came a wall of oaks and then they were at the gates of the Torbush Mountain Winery. A high, mixed-stone wall circled the place's ten acres. Here and there some of the smaller stones had fallen down and many of the iron spear points that topped the wall were rusted and bent.
The gate itself was twice their height and its ornamental iron was twisted to represent vines and grape leaves. The ape's paw got oranged with rust when he pushed the gate open. As the gate swung in a white dove fluttered up from somewhere inside and spiraled into the oncoming night. Sand glanced sideways out of his narrowed left eye and made out a cluster of wicker pigeon holes back in the shadow of a storage shed.
Some twenty yards straight ahead of them a large curly-headed man was leaning with both fists on a long outdoor table. Ten wine glasses were lined along the table and five half-gallon bottles of wine. "Blah," the blond man said, spirting.
"He never gives up hope," explained the ape man quietly.
Torbush poured white wine into a fresh glass, took a tasting sip. Held it in his mouth for several seconds and then he spit the wine out. "Blah," he said. "I thought our new batch of coconut chablis might be palatable. No such luck. Blah."
"I found the banana burgundy quite charming," said Hankwin. "It has a fruity little bouquet that titilates the—"
"What does a gorilla know about fine wine," interrupted Torbush. "Blah." He hesitated, his hand on the cork of another bottle of wine. "If it hadn't been mother's deathbed wish that I keep you on here, Hankwin, I'd replace you with somebody of more refined taste. As a matter of fact, I'm not completely sure it was your name she gasped at the end."
"It most certainly was, sir," said the ape man. "But don't dwell so on the unpleasantness of the past. Look here, I've brought two affable gentlemen to tour the premises. That will surely, if I may hazard a guess, cheer you up."
Torbush lifted his thick hand from the bottle and wiped at his eyes. "I'll just never be able to make wine like mother did. Why do I keep at it, Hankwin?"
"The family tradition, sir," offered the ape. "And it was your mother's last wish."
"She did a hell of a lot of talking there at the end, didn't she?" Torbush took his hand from his eyes and reached over the table. "Pleased to meet you."
"This is Mr. Anthony Dehner, the noted novelist," said the ape man.
Sand studied the ape man while he shook hands. "I'm John Wesley Sand," he said. "I've come to make you a business proposition."
"Don't ask to buy me out," said Torbush. "I promised mother on the day she died that I would never sell this winery."
"This is smaller scale business. Worth about two hundred to you. Let's talk."
Torbush nodded at the ape man. "Hankwin, show Dehner our indoor tavern and tasting room. Keep away from the storage sauterne, too, you hear." After the ape had led the heavy-set author into the nearest of five towerlike stone buildings, Torbush asked, "What do you want to buy from me, Sand?"
Resting his right buttock on the wooden table, Sand said, "The location of Jenna Peaquill."
Torbush uncorked a jug of wine. "Jenna Peaquill?"
"Daughter of Governor Peaquill. Small girl, blonde, fond of birds." Behind him in the shadows the doves were cooing. "She seems to be the victim of two separate bands of kidnappers."
Torbush poured a new glass of wine. "This is a rough planet, Sand. In fact, the extreme harshness of existence here contributed to hastening mother's end. She implied as much as she lay dying. But that's the past. Jenna Peaquill, you say?"
"Yes. Two hundred dollars."
"Even if I had information, Sand," said Torbush, sipping, "selling out a gang of marauders would be dangerous, fatal. Blah."
"This gang will be caught," said Sand. "They won't get a chance to try for revenge."
Torbush said, "Imagine your thinking I'm in league with a group of ravishers or worse." He left the table and strolled through the twilight toward another of the stone towers. "I really fear my personal reputation is at its nadir, along with the reputation of my vineyards and fruit orchards."
Sand followed him. "Two hundred."
Torbush turned in the doorway of the tower. "I have to climb up and take a look at a sampling of the lemon-lime tawny port. Come along and keep me company while I contemplate your offer. You see, mother made me promise never to betray a confidence."
"She must have had some thoughts about protecting young maidens." Sand went up the spiral wood and iron staircase after the large vintner.
"Yes, many," admitted Torbush. He was climbing rapidly, a new lit lantern in his big right hand.
There were three two-story-high oaken vats in this tower. The smells of fermentation and fruit sweetness pulsed in here. "Who highjacked the original kidnappers?"
Torbush was on a swaying metal catwalk, which paralleled the rim of an open vat. "Blah," he said, a dipper in his other hand. "That's awfully skunky. The whole batch may he beyond saving. Here, what do you think?" He dipped again and held out the laddie.
Sand took two steps ahead and then dived to his left.
Torbush had made his lunge for him, but he missed. "Going to have to drown you. Can't be helped." He swung the metal dipper and it caught Sand across the cheek.
"I figured," said Sand. "Marcus sent you a warning by dove, to do us in."
"Pigeon."
The catwalk jittered and rattled. The big Torbush shifted the lantern to his left hand and from between the leather laces of his dark tunic drew a curve-bladed dagger. Sand dropped his hand to the hilt of his short sword.
Torbush said, "This is more than money to me. It's politics, too, Sand. So I wouldn't sell out for two hundred."
"No, that's a pretty low price for a political sell-out." Sand crouched, pulling in as the knife blade swooped at him. He hit against the frail railing and then threw himself carefully at the big vintner.
Torbush hopped out of reach. His right boot suddenly slipped on a fallen tatter of paper. The scrap fluttered up into Sand's face as Torbush flapped for balance.
Sand absently slapped the piece of paper to him, then slid it into a pocket of his tunic. He stepped in closer to the off-balance Torbush.
Torbush's balance left him and he toppled over. The lantern snapped away, spinning. It hit the wine, splashing light and wine, and then sputtered out. In the new darkness there was a second, larger splash.
Sand waited. Thrashing sounded in the vat and Torbush muttered, "Blah." Sand took a flint from his pack and lit a small taper. There were bubbles on the surface of the fruit wine, but no sign of Torbush. The bubbles popped, one by one, and there was stillness.
Holding the taper carefully, Sand left the catwalk and went down the spiral stairs. It was night now. He saw the light of candles glowing in the tavern tower and skulked in that direction. Ten feet from an open-shuttered window he heard the ape man singing.
When the song was ended, Hankwin said, "If I may say so, Tony, this is quite enjoyable. I hadn't guessed you knew so many ape ballads and chanties. It's just as well we decided to sample the mango sauterne first, before I assassinated you."
"Oh, my, yes," agreed Dehner. "Now, Hankwin, if you will sit like that for a moment I'll step outside and fetch my lute so we can add a new dimension to our song fest."
"I hadn't realized, do you know, that you played the lute, Tony," said the ape man. "Here's a toast to your lute, wherever it may be."
Sand caught Dehner as he came hurrying out of the tasting rooms. "I'm okay," he said quietly.
Dehner said, "I had to consume nearly a gallon of banana chablis before that ape loosened up. You knew Torbush was planning to do away with us, I take it."
Sand said, "Yes, I noticed the doves. The pigeons. Here and at Marcus's. And Hankwin called you by your real name. There's no other staff here?"
"Only Torbush and Hankwin," said Dehner. "Where is Torbush, by the way?"
"He sank in the tawny port." Sand's left eye closed completely. "I walked into this trap of theirs in order to catch Torbush off guard and then question the truth out of him. I hadn't anticipated his getting killed."
"They can't always be counted on, anticipations," said the older man. "For instance, Torbush was anticipating a new government for the Calandara Territory and a more prestigious place in life for himself, from what Hankwin says."
"What else have you found out?"
"The girl is not here and indeed she and the kidnappers were never here at the winery at all, though they stayed at the Inn of the Fat Dolphin somewhat longer than Marcus indicated."
"Let's see if Hankwin can tell us anything about who's behind this and where the girl has been taken," said Sand. "Then we may have to go back and talk to Marcus a little more thoroughly."
"I doubt Hankwin knows much else. Torbush did not confide too much in him," said Dehner. "We're likely to get no more than another cycle of ape ballads."
Which is what happened.
Sand and Dehner found the innkeeper late in the night. Marcus was in the courtyard where they'd talked to him that afternoon. He had been strangled.
"An hour or two ago," said Sand, looking at the dead man by lantern light.
"Tortured first," said Dehner and turned away. They had already been through the inn and found no one else there. Of the wedding party there was no sign and only a scatter of flower petals and the now bare serving table indicated anyone had been celebrating that day.
Sand slowly swung his lantern, close to the ground. "Footprints here in the weeds, boots. Two different guys at least and not the wedding guests I don't think." He stood and looked up at the stars in the clear night. "I doubt we can follow the trail of these assassins at night. I think we ought to track them, though."
"Best wait until dawn," agreed Dehner. "Oh, my, if only a young lad I know were here. He has an uncanny knack for trailing. Does it by scent and possibly something slightly magic."
"We may need him eventually." Sand touched his pocket and then withdrew the scrap of paper that had tripped up Torbush the vintner. The fragment was about three inches square, torn from a larger sheet of ledger paper. On one side were written the words: "Third shack from the walnut grove outside Pobreza towards midnight." On the other side: "48 packets #2 incense @ $8.75/doz."
Dehner examined the slip after Sand. "It's the wholesale price of ceremonial incense."
"Huh?"
"Eight seventy-five a dozen packets is the wholesale not the retail price. So somebody was buying for a business or some civic establishment."
Sand took back the scrap of paper. "The guy who wrote this knew where the original ransom was to be paid to Clockwork's pirates. That shack we took a look at on the way out of Pobreza." He folded the paper away again, nodding to himself.
THE DAWN chill was all around when the first birds commenced singing. Sand, crouched at the side of a downhill path, glanced up. The broad spiked leaves of the trees rattled and fluttered and in among the green somewhere the birds continued to sing. "They passed this way," he said. "Last night and heading down the slopes."
"I regret," said Dehner, exhaling mist, "that when I wrote the dozen novels in the then popular Exploits of Fur-Suited Dan series I didn't assimilate more of the woodlore."
"We could all use a little woodlore," said Sand. "I can usually follow a plain trail but this kind of tracking is not a specialty of mine either." He rose and his knee made a cracking sound.
As they walked along the narrow mossed path Dehner said, "Let me apologize for the breakfast."
"It was okay."
"I suppose when you take into consideration the condition of poor Marcus's larders," said Dehner, "and the fact I didn't want to use anything his vanished wife may have poisoned, I did well enough. The griddle cakes weren't bad."
"No."
"I was once Aunt Tilda for an entire year."
"Who?"
"I was once employed as Aunt Tilda, author of 'Aunt Tilda's Country Kitchen Cooking Corner.' A feature appearing in some of our prominent weeklies of a few years ago," explained Dehner. "The thing is, I didn't have time for much research and so I made up the recipes usually. Plotted them like short stories. I simply made up an interesting list of ingredients and put them together in what seemed to me an exciting situation. I am probably one of the few authors in our planet system who wrote recipes with a beginning, middle, and end and a strong suspense element."
Small orange caterpillars were lowering themselves from the still damp branches of the trees, dozens of them, on fine silvery threads. Sand dodged them. "No complaints? From the people who tried your recipes."
"That was during a period when I changed lodgings a good deal. Some of my mail may have been lost. No complaints ever reached me."
The forest thinned and they emerged on a great rolling hillside. High grass and jagged rocks shared the slopes. Sand stopped again, bent low. His pack slid ahead on his back and tapped him at the back of the neck. "This path here I think. Down through the grass and over that way."
"You definitely believe these men who killed Marcus are affiliated with the kidnappers."
Sand stood and the new morning sun flashed on his face when he grinned. "There are so many kidnappers involved in this business that I don't see how anybody we run into can miss being tied in with one batch or another."
The mist was gone now and the sloping hills grew bright green in the warming sun. Dust-colored rabbits hopped among distant scatters of rock and wild brush. The path brought Sand and Dehner finally to a dirt road that twisted to the left and right of them.
"Which way?" asked Dehner. He swung his pack in front of him and rested his hands, folded, on top of it.
Sand gave off crouching and sat. He then stretched out, sending up a faint swirl of dust, on the roadway. He locked his palms behind his blond head, narrowed his left eye, and puckered his mouth. Tiny blue flies swirled around his head. After a moment he brushed them away, then scratched at a raveled spot in his left legging. "I lost the trail a good half hour ago, Tony. I've been operating on the assumption that the fellows who murdered Marcus must have continued on down. From here, though, I don't get anything. Not even a hunch." He sat up. "I'd guess they worked hard at covering their tracks."
"And succeeded."
From down the road to the right crows began to caw. Soon the cawing was mixed with muttering and wheezing and crisp rattling. "I slept on a cornhusk mattress once that sounded like that." Sand was on his feet again, striding toward the noise.
Beyond a turn in the road, behind a house-sized mound of gray boulders was a rippled field of stunted tumble-down corn. A bright scarecrow seemed to be hovering above the corn and diving into a spiral of angry crows.
"Perhaps the manipulator of that bugbear," suggested Dehner, "noticed our illusive slaughterers."
Sand's left eye closed completely. "See what that thing's wearing?"
"Nothing very fashionable."
"Around its neck," said Sand. "A scarf quite a bit like the one I saw Jenna Peaquill wearing in her father's painting of her. She's supposed to favor that bird design." He moved to the old rail fence around the cornfield and put his hand on the top rail. Sand started to leap over the waist-high fence and the rail snapped. A long section of the fence collapsed and Sand fell over on the owner's side of it. A pole mounted with a weathered sign toppled next and the sign flapped and knocked the side of his head as it fell. "We've lost our murderers, but maybe we can pick up the trail of the kidnappers."
" 'Maizfield Acres, Young Zubin, Prop.' " Dehner read the sign as he helped Sand out from under it.
The crows were all flying up and off now and the scarecrow was clattering through the sad com. An old man was gripping its pole with both his lumpy freckled hands. "Hold this for a moment," he said to the author. Dehner took the proffered scarecrow and asked, "Do you work for Young Zubin?"
"I am Young Zubin." The old man's rough tunic had been relaced with strong twine and he undid some of the knots now and scratched at his dry brown chest. "May bugs."
"This time of year?"
"They wait till they can't get anybody better before they come to feed on me," he said. "Can you mend that fence, do you think?"
"No." Sand was dusting himself.
"Like everything around here. Beyond mending." Zubin bent and unrolled his right legging. He scratched at his knee. "I'm expecting the seven-year locusts any time now. They're two years late as it is. Could one of you straighten me up? My back isn't quite right anymore."
Sand took hold of the old farmer and got him straight. "Have you seen anyone pass by here in the last dozen hours or heard them?"
"Crows." The old man was looking up at the morning sky. "All you hear around here is the crows. Sometimes the bugs and flies." He reached over and tapped Sand. "I think you straightened me up too much. I don't want to spend the remainder of my days looking skywards."
Sand fisted the old man on the back of his skull lightly twice. "Where'd you get the neckerchief for your scarecrow?"
The blow put the old man's head back in its natural position and propelled him into Dehner and the scarecrow. "The vandals that was."
Dehner retreated a few steps and disentangled Zubin. He unwound the missing girl's scarf and flung it to Sand.
"Vandals?" asked Sand.
"Wait a moment." Old Zubin scratched at his chest again. "It was three or four days ago. There was four or five of them come riding through my other field over there. They were nondescript louts, even for vandals, and they rode great lumpish mounts, horses and grouts."
"What did they do here?"
"Made a mess. I reckon as how they were using my poor fields for a shortcut. When I heard them I hurried out of my cottage, hurried as best I could since my leg was paralyzed that day due to the thunderstorms, and asked what business they had trampling my corn. Couldn't get a civil answer. Of course the girl was screaming so loud they may not even have heard my feeble queries."
Sand wound the bird-patterned scarf around one fist. "Girl? They did have a small blonde girl with them?"
"She could certainly scream for so small a thing," said Zubin. "That piece of cloth there is what one of them was intending to use as a gag. But she bit his hand and he dropped it. Drew blood, she did."
"Not Clockwork's then," said Dehner.
Sand stuffed the scarf into his pack. "What is this a shortcut to?" He guided the old man to the field the second band of kidnappers had passed through.
The corn-stalks were less than knee-high and small black mites were nibbling at the drooping tassels. "Listen to them munching away at my livelihood. That I can hear all day, too." He bent and pointed. "See here."
A wide swath had been trampled diagonally through the field, aimed downhill. "They look to have headed across that hillside and then through that gulley," said Sand.
"There's an old broken-down roadway there," said old Zubin. "When I say broken down I mean that even in this broken-down countryside it stands out."
"Where does the road lead?"
"Over the hills and far away."
Dehner came crackling into the corn field. "It's an old cotters' road," he said. "There was once, I'm told, a sizable farm settlement in the hills above Delfin. Now you might take the road anywhere."
"Not too specific."
"Staying on the road till its end would bring you out near the Boneca Woods."
"A fearful place," said old Zubin, who was still in his bent over position. "A thieves' den and a haunt of imps and fiends and the blackest of sorcerers. I've never actually visited there but I've heard many strange tales."
Sand asked, "Do you need straightening up again?"
"If you wouldn't mind, yes."
Sand obliged, gave the old farmer ten dollars and he and Dehner took to the trail again.
By midafternoon they had lost track of the kidnappers as they had the murderers. In the shade of a roadside oak Dehner sat down to rest on a smooth gray boulder. "The fair Jenna is not in the clutches of the mechanical buccaneers then, is she?"
"No," said Sand. "It looks like she was taken from the original kidnappers. They must be the ones who swiped the ransom, too. Where could they be taking her?"
"There are, as Zubin mentioned, several enclaves of thieves in the Boneca Woods. Though I'd think it more likely they'll pass through the woods, a journey of perhaps fifty miles. And then make for one of the seedy port towns up the coast."
"They might sail from there to the desert country on the other side of the Sea of Sombra, to the slave markets."
"Oh, my," said Dehner. "I do have the fear they may indeed intend to sell the girl. Unless one of them has taken a personal liking to the girl and means to keep her for himself."
Sand said, "I'd like to find her. And the mechanical pirates."
"That now seems to be two separate quests."
"We'll try to stay with Jenna and bring her in first." Sand took a seat on a stone further back in the shade of the oaks. "We could use some help in tracking and we may even need a strong-arm man for the Boneca Woods. You mentioned some friends."
"We can delay our journey long enough to stop in Delfin," said Dehner. "We should pass above the town by sundown. I know of at least two good people you might hire."
"We'll do that." Sand stretched up and stepped back to the sunny road.
"Who do you think is behind all this?" asked Dehner, following.
"Just about everybody."
THE MAN in the cowl was selling torches. They encountered him on the ocean side of the town, his bent back toward the darkening water. The docks here were of black stone, inset with square ornamental tiles. There were black stone stairways leading up and down and around, mingling in the fog and nickering in and out of focus like the steps in an optical illusion puzzle. "Now these in this bin are blessed," the hooded man was explaining to Sand and Dehner. "Ah, but these in the Other bin, they are twice blessed. Yet they don't, as you might conclude, cost twice as much as the others. No, only half again as much." He had only part of his left hand and he ran two fingers of it around the rim of the better bin. "As this is a most sacred and holy night it would be worth a man's immortal soul to lie and misrepresent his wares. And since this is indeed the Eve of Zumba all visitors to the port of Delfin should be carrying torches and participating in the various processions to and from the Temple of Zumba and to the fairgrounds."
"Jorge," said Dehner as the cowled man's face passed nearer the glowing brazier he used to light his torches. "That is you in there, isn't it?"
The man unbent slightly and his eyes widened. "Anthony Dehner. Have you settled your debts then?"
"No. Oh, my, no. So I ask you to refrain from shouting my name about."
"How's the free-lance life otherwise, Tony?"
"Can't complain. You?"
"Things are not too very good for Jorge right now," said Jorge. "When you were here in Delfin last and before the magistrate's clerk came looking for you, I was doing quite well. I attribute the hard times lately to inflation and a growing agnosticism."
"Jorge sometimes writes religious works."
"My specialty is first-hand accounts of miracles." He snapped his two fingers together. "I can think up those things one right after another."
Sand said, "We're looking for a couple of friends." Dehner said, "Lemkerr and Hubley. Do you know where they might be?"
Jorge pushed back his cowl and rubbed at his perspiring head. "I had myself tonsoried for this job but it's still too hot inside this outfit. Why don't you try at the fairgrounds? Ask our old friend, Matcha. He's at the fair posing as a low priest of Zumba."
"We'll attend the fair then," said Dehner.
Jorge selected a twice blessed torch, lit its end in the copper brazier. "Take this and you'll look more like a pilgrim."
Sand gave him a coin and took the burning torch. It was completely night now and the ocean was as black as the stones of the ancient piers. The few anchored fishing boats creaked in the gentle night wind. The feel of salt was in the air. Dehner turned and began climbing across the yellow gravel beyond the docks. The buildings near the sea were low and weathered.
"Are you sure you're safe in Delfin?" Sand asked the author. "It sounds like they're still looking for you, with unpaid bills."
"I'm heavier and less hairy than when I last resided in Delfin," said Dehner. "Besides, since we've had the good fortune to arrive during these festivities, the crowds will provide good cover. Nothing to fear."
The lanes leading uphill were narrow and had several troughs rutting along their left side. Only a few pilgrims were in this part of the town. In the doorway of a soap-colored house a dead man was slumped, sitting stiff and two days dead. His boots had been stolen and the trim from his surcoat and the ring from his left hand as well as the finger it had encircled.
"You don't," remarked Dehner, "leave them lying around so long on your home planet."
"Not usually."
"Slops," cried a raspy-voiced woman from above.
"Oh, my," observed Dehner. He caught Sand and pulled him out of the way as a wooden bucket was emptied from a top window. The torch sputtered but they were not splashed.
"May Zumba forgive me," called down the old woman. "I didn't mean to throw my slops on pilgrims. Not tonight of all nights." Her warped window shutters slammed shut.
"You can understand why the public for good books here on Esmeralda is not what it is on Barnum," said the author.
As they emerged into a small marshy square six young boys pushed by and ducked into the lane. They were lugging a silver-plated statue of a military man with his legs spread wide. "Hanging offense," remarked Sand. "Stealing public statues."
"Not for the general," said the tail-end boy. "You have to steal him and his horse to get hanged."
The silver-plated horse was still in the center of the square, rearing on a man-high pedestal from which all the commemorative tablets had long since been wrenched.
Dehner suddenly changed their direction. "Nearest lane instead," he cautioned. "Quickly but don't run."
Sand now heard the metal-soled boots coming. "Police?"
"Municipal bowmen. Someone's reported the theft already," said Dehner. They were in the lane and moving away. "That was General Furtado. I wrote his memoirs once."
"In collaboration?"
"General Furtado died two centuries ago. But now and then the public makes a fad of him. He didn't spend all his time on horseback."
The commander of mounted archers had lost his horse. He was standing at the wooden gate to the fairgrounds, shaking a fist at a scarlet-cloaked priest. The commander was apparently left-handed and he wore his silver mounted bracer on his right wrist. The petals of the silver flowers in the decorations got tangled in the raised Zumba signs on the priest's cloak. When the angry commander gestured again the priest was pulled into him. The priest's bald head butted against the commander's chain mail and the archer went hopping backward. Disentangled when he hit against a crippled charm seller, the commander stood up straight and reached toward his quiver.
"Bad luck," said Sand, stepping toward the commander. "It's considered bad luck to kill a priest of Zumba on the very Eve of Zumba."
The left-handed commander had the ability to speak without ever quite closing his beard-fringed mouth. "What do you say?"
Sand put the two admission tokens he'd just purchased into a tunic pocket. He zigzagged through the scatter of people at the fairground gates, his narrowed left eye watching Dehner slip over to the fallen priest. "What is more, sir, this is all as my vision foretold," he extemporized in a loud voice.
The archer's brows made a swooping gull movement and he said to Sand, "What vision?"
"A vision from, I assume, Zumba himself. He told me to hasten here and be ready to do Zumba's work," said Sand. Dehner had the priest on his feet and he was moving him quietly away.
The commander slowly let go the nock of an arrow. "These religious festivals bring out all sorts of weird things," he said to Sand. "It makes you feel creepy." He studied Sand. "Did you see me in this vision of yours?"
"It must have been you, sir. Except you look much younger and agile now I see you in the flesh. You know how visions are, fuzzy."
The commander nodded. "Actually I've never had a first rate vision myself. Once in awhile, when I'm in my cups, I do see a little kitty cat. A cute little black and white kitty cat. You couldn't really class that as a mystical experience, though."
Dehner had finished talking with the priest and the man ran off toward a large tent just inside the gates of the large fairgrounds. Dehner stayed back in the shadows near the wooden fence.
The commander asked Sand, "Could you see what's become of my horse? I originally had the notion that scurvy priest had taken it and sold it to a band of nomads who quit our area but an hour ago."
"Big horse?"
"Large chestnut stallion."
"Now you must realize visions aren't always completely accurate as to location," said Sand. "However, in my vision I did see a horse very much like yours. I saw him nibbling furze on a hillside above the sea. Near a fallen down cider mill."
"I know where that is. You pass it coming into Delfin," said the commander. "It's about ten miles from here. I'll send some of my men there. Zumba bless you, young man." He shifted his quiver and marched away.
Sand joined Dehner. "That was your friend the fake priest?"
"Yes." They waited until the crowd hid the commander and then walked through the wooden gates, dropping the admission tokens in a wicker basket. "He did steal the horse, by the way."
"What about your two friends we want to recruit?"
"He tells me they're both here. Hubley, the young fellow who's so good at following a trail, is working in a booth with his mother. She is operating under the name of Gerta the Fey. My good friend, Lemkerr, is participating, hooded, in illegal tests of strength in a cavern beneath the morality play theater."
The fairgrounds made a great grassy circle. To their right were small quick-built booths selling relics. At a shop labeled The Reliquary Man, a bearded old man in a much-patched fur cloak was crying, "Martyrs' bones. Martyrs' bones. Ancient and modern. None better." After the relic sellers came a cluster of larger sheds given over to food selling and in the center of the sheds was a larger building looking something like a wooden tent. A sign designated it the Pavillion of Gluttony and dozens of the five hundred or more visitors to the Eve of Zumba fair were strolling into it. A red-cheeked woman stood at its narrow entrance, ringing a hand bell and shouting the menu. "Capon with oysters, minced sheeps' feet in hot sauce, carbonade of grout, cotelettes of double-thick veal, roast birds, buttered shrimp, fillet of flounder in orange champagne, sauteed dove in cream sauce ..."
"They eat better uphill than down," said Sand.
"In all times and places," said Dehner.
There were three large tents given over to the Conjurers' Guild, and at the entrance flaps of the first a thin, large-headed man was vanishing intermittently as he cried the playbill. There was much yellow smoke attendant to his vanishments and the fifty or so people watching couldn't get close enough to buy admissions.
"I've warned him about the smoke," said Dehner. "He doesn't need it, since he can really materialize at will. I'm afraid he's too anxious to please the crowds."
"They like colored smoke?"
"Especially red or yellow."
A small platform with a striped canopy over it was set up next to one of the magician tents and a wooden sign promised Benzino the Fire-Eater. The platform was unoccupied, except for a dropped coat, child-sized and fronted with many bright buttons.
Sand noticed the small one-banner tent of Gerta the Fey down a lane between pie and magical instrument booths. "There's Hubley's mother."
Sewn into the soft fabric sides of the tent were slogans and promises: Second Sight Our Specialty; Gerta the Fey, Dream Reader. A tall big-boned woman stepped from the tent on their approach. She had one arm around the shoulders of a frail shopkeeper. "So you see your dream is a good omen, not a bad one. You will break a leg, yes, but it will be while stumbling over a cask of buried gems. So all you need worry about now is the falling boulders."
"Falling boulders, Gerta? You mentioned those not."
"It will require another reading, Brother Anmar," said the big woman. "Return in an hour."
"I'm not likely to break the leg before then?"
"I do not foresee your doing that, no. If you should, however, have someone carry you here in an hour." The man walked cautiously, looking downward, away. "I'm always getting pains through here now, whenever I look into the future. I don't suppose I'll get any sympathy from you, Tony."
"Oh, my," said Dehner. "Don't shout my name about or we'll have a easily foreseeable problem. Where is your fine son?"
"Who? That gangling cutpurse Hubley?" She doubled slightly, pressing her hands to her large breasts. "What is this? Some new pain is visiting me." One hand jerked out and touched Sand's chest. "Ah, no wonder. Stand back with that."
Sand drew out the medallion that Francesca Landolfi had found at the edge of the sea and given to him. "You know what this is?"
"Tony, fetch me an ottoman from within my tent. I'm faint."
"Standing up is the best cure for that," said Dehner. "Or you might try a little stationary running. What fraud are you trying to pull my friend into now, Mrs. Hubley?"
"Gerta the Fey is the name I'm using here." The large dream reader nodded at Sand's medallion, "Put it back in your tunic."
"What is this talisman? Do you know?"
"Real magic," said Gerta. "Don't either of you recognize the markings? That central one is the sign of—well, no, never mind. Keep it. I can't yet see whether it will eventually save your life or lead you to ruin. None of my affair at any rate. I have trouble enough without worrying about a young brigand who gives me pains in the heart."
"He's not a brigand, Gerta," said Dehner. "He's simply a tourist. We're interested in exploring the Boneca Woods."
"You want to hire my dumbwit of a son to act as guide?"
"His uncanny abilities in the wild would be of use to us."
"His uncanny abilities in the towns will get him strung to a tree and used as a target by the bowmen or ridden down by the high sheriff's minions," said the boy's mother. "He's now learned to sniff out gold."
"I knew he could do it with silver."
"Silver, gold, jewels, even coins. He's always and forever coming home laden with precious items he's taken from his betters. If the anguish caused by his thievery doesn't lower me into my grave, the sheer noise of him bringing home all that clattering metal in the night will. How much will you pay him?"
"Two hundred dollars," said Sand.
"He'll do it. Give me the money."
"I'd like to talk to your son directly."
"All his business I negotiate," said Gerta. "He's dull-headed and lazy and can do nothing when confronted with figures but suck the feather of his pen." She started to extend her palm to Sand. "No, wait. Give the money to your literary friend and he can hand it to me. I don't want to directly touch you. I have no fondness for real magic. It makes my bones twinge just to think of some of the black arts that are being practiced right here at this fair."
"Good evening," said a thin thirteen-year-old boy. He had come out of the crowd and taken hold of Dehner's arm. "How are you?"
"Partially incognito, Hubley," answered Dehner. "This is my friend, John Wesley Sand."
"I scented you a few minutes ago," said Hubley. "I couldn't, at that moment, leave the Pavillion of Gluttony."
He smiled a thin smile and handed his mother five gold coins.
Gerta sighed heavily. "Each of these drives a shaft of pain in my side. As long as I've already suffered the twinge of guilt we may as well enjoy the money."
Hubley was a light-haired boy, thin. His long narrow hands moved about as he talked, stopping at various places on his body, touching, poking, linking with each other. "Have you come to hire me for some high quest?"
"Some low chicanery," said his mother.
Sand said, "We need a guide for a trip into the Boneca Woods."
Hubley laughed. "Good. I love the scents and smells of that place."
Sand said, "We want Lemkerr, too."
"He's over in the caverns. I'll take you," offered the boy.
"The fee," said Gerta. "What of the fee that was promised?"
Hubley's smile diminished. "Yes, we ought to take care of that. Since I'll be leaving mother alone for awhile. How long is this journey to take, Sand?"
"Let's say a week."
"You can take care of yourself for a week, mother? After this fair you'll return to your shop in town. I should be back in time to help you unpack and get going there again."
"Yes," said Gerta. "And should I die of pains and anguish while you're off sniffing trees, why the fee this young man is going to pay will buy a fine funeral and procession."
Sand said, "I'm offering two hundred, Hubley."
"That's more than ample. Isn't it, mother?"
Gerta said. "Yes, yes. Perhaps I won't die anyway and we can use the money to pay off some of the debts your father left us buried under."
Sand took the amount of money from his pouch. "Here then."
The thin boy caught it and passed it to his mother.
"You see, mother, I can support us all. Let's now get to Lemkerr."
"Before you go and fraternize with grapplers and mountebanks," said Gerta, "go inside and clean up the mess you left in your sleeping quarters."
"We'll find Lemkerr," said Sand. "You can join us there, Hubley."
"Very well." The boy poked at Dehner and then Sand and stepped into the dream reader's tent
BEHIND THE enormous theater tent, a man in a skull mask was apparently sleeping against a pile of rocks, an empty wine flask in his lax right hand. Fanned out in the tough brown grass around him were undistributed handbills announcing: See the reknowned Sanctified Mime Company! Now at the Eve of Zumba Fair! In an awesome performance of "The Midnight Ride Of Pestilence & Death!"
"A classic morality play in this part of Esmeralda," commented Dehner.
The masked man sat up and said, "We've added three more bears and a juggler since you saw the show last, Tony."
"That's fine, Lorenzo," said the author, stooping over the man. "But don't shout my name about."
"And we've changed the pestilence to something even more contagious and fearful," said Lorenzo. "Do you want to go below and witness the illicit combats? That's why I'm dissembling and lying doggo here, guarding the entrance and selling admissions. Since we're old tavernmates, I'll let you and your young friend in for half price."
Sand asked, "Is Lemkerr down there in the caverns?"
The man lifted his death mask up and rested it on the top of his head. He had a small yellow face. Wiping at it with his tunic sleeve, he said, "He was the last time I looked, friend. It's my opinion that Lemkerr is in need of wise counsel."
"I understand he's appearing in a hood," said Dehner.
"Yes," said Lorenzo. "But he insists on billing himself as The Masked Socialist. Every time he bests an opponent in wrestling or boxing—and if you know Lemkerr you'll realize that is often—he insists on delivering a speech on the virtues of some outlandish creed known as socialism." He frowned at Sand. "Perhaps you've heard of it, coming from a distant planet as you look to have, friend."
"Socialism is very big on some of the Earth System planets just now," said Sand. "How much is your admission charge?"
"One dollar each."
"Lorenzo," said Dehner. "You proposed half price, not double."
"Very well, since you've touched my sentimental side. Fifty cents for the both of you. And, Tony, you had best be on guard. I had to let the assistant debt catcher and his assistant in, under threat of exposure. They might recognize you."
"Oh, my." Dehner unfastened the skull mask from Lorenzo's head top. "I'll borrow this and add to my incognito."
"Welcome to it." Lorenzo resumed his sprawl.
Behind the four-foot-high mound of rock was a narrow entrance that led to a musty-smelling tunnel. The tunnel, paved with rough and slimy boards, led down and around some hundred feet below the ground. It brought them into a large cavern of blackish rock. This underground room was filled with some three hundred men and women seated on wood benches and on the bare earth. Three platforms had been set up at the back of the cavern and, lit only by light from wall-mounted torches, three contests of strength were going on at once. The platform at the left held a large, big-muscled man in a scarlet hood and tights. He had an armlock on a wide black man and a leglock around the neck of a red-bearded giant.
"There's Lemkerr with the red hood," said Dehner from behind his newly assumed death mask.
Lemkerr roared once and bounced the red-bearded man on his spine several times. He then propelled the black man forward and off the high platform, sending next the bearded giant after him. Both challengers remained spread-eagle and entwined in the wood shavings that rimmed the wrestling stage. Lemkerr raised his hands above his head in a gesture of triumph. A dozen burly men began flinging leftovers from the Pavillion of Gluttony at him. The entire crowd was focusing on his platform now, ignoring the flails match in the center and the bear baiting to the right.
"As I was saying," announced the large Lemkerr, pulling up his hood so that his prominent chin and wide mouth were visible. "What you have to consider is not whether there will be great changes or not—for changes there will certainly be—but what changes you and your friends think, after consideration and discussion, would make the world a better place to live in, and what changes you ought to resist as disastrous to yourself and everyone else. Every opinion—"
"Enough rhetoric," shouted a fat greengrocer. "Let us have more wrestling."
"Nay, it's more than rhetoric," cried a palsied clerk. "It's blasphemy. Particularly when coming from a masked mountebank."
"Oh, my," said Dehner. "Let me see if I can hire Lemkerr and extricate him. Notice that there's another exit tunnel behind the middle platform, John." Dehner left him at the edge of the seated audience and moved down a stone aisle toward the wrestling stage. "Here's a new champion come to defeat you, Masked Socialist," he called out.
"Death himself," observed the shivering clerk. "A good sign."
As Dehner neared the platform on which Lemkerr stood, Sand noticed two men in yellow cloaks nudge each other. "They must be the debt catchers," thought Sand.
Dehner had leaped up onto the boards and was shaking hands with the hooded Lemkerr. He seemed to be, with his painted death grin near the big wrestler's scarlet-covered ear, whispering to Lemkerr. After a moment Lemkerr nodded slightly and Dehner echoed the nod, aiming it in the direction of Sand.
Lemkerr said loudly, "I'll make quick work of you, Lord Death."
Sand began moving nearer to Dehner and Lemkerr, who were shouting and grunting and starting to fake a wrestling match. Sand kept his narrowed left eye on them, while also watching the now agitated civil debt collectors. Lemkerr was atop Dehner and the author's masked head shot almost off the platform and into a bucket of drinking water in the sawdust below.
In another minute Lemkerr had tossed Dehner completely from the ring and was raising his hands again in the victory gesture. "This will be my last encounter for now," he told the audience. "Before I go, though, I'd like to say a few more words about socialism."
"Oh, my," said Dehner, sitting up, "not now."
"Enough of this blasphemy," shouted many large, harsh-voiced men around the cavern. Benches fell over, leather soles scuffed on stone, and a rush toward Lemkerr got under way. "Silence him. Silence him. Hang him out for the bowmen to finish."
Sand was alongside the cloaked officials now. When one said, "It is Anthony Dehner; I swear to that voice," Sand bent low and tripped the foremost debt catcher. The second man, younger and thinner, attempted to jump across his felled associate and Sand caught him with a jab to the jaw while he was in midair.
He ran next and pulled Dehner off the sawdust. "You faked it too good."
"I'm as dizzy as you were after our exchange with old Espada," admitted the wobbly author.
"You hired Lemkerr?"
"Yes."
"Can you get those two wall torches nearest our exit tunnel out of their brackets and into this water bucket?"
"I'm steady enough for that, yes." Dehner grasped the handle of the bucket and departed.
"I'll grab the masked marvel." Sand hit the platform at the end of a long leap and swung a fist into the first complainer to reach Lemkerr. "Get out the back tunnel," he ordered the big socialist.
"I must defend my views."
"We've got debt catchers after Tony, too. Let's go."
"If we had a socialist society in the Calandara Territory," said Lemkerr, butting two new men off the boards, "Tony wouldn't have to live in fear of such parasites."
Sand grabbed Lemkerr's huge right arm. "Exit." Reluctantly Lemkerr left the stand. Dehner had got the two torches extinguished and the rear middle section of the cavern was dark and shadowy. "This is why the orderly spread of socialism is taking so long. We run too much."
One of the yellow-cloaked debt catchers was up and pursuing them as they made for the exit. Sand said, "Take off that hood."
The crowd was rallying at the vacant platform and now came stalking toward the dark exit.
Stopping in the darkness, with the debt catcher close on him, Sand suddenly stepped out and caught the man. He knocked him out with three chops to the side of the head, tore off his cloak and jerked Lemkerr's hood onto the man's head. "Yell that you're going to stay and debate."
"Halt, friends," shouted Lemkerr from the dark at the tunnel mouth. "I've decided to stay and explain the virtues of socialism to you."
Sand heaved the hooded debt catcher into the oncoming mob and then he and Lemkerr and Dehner raced into the dark passway out.
In five minutes the three of them were outside and in a wood above and behind the bright fairgrounds. "Up through here," said Lemkerr. "And we'll throw off pursuit."
They ran on, quiet, up into the tree-thick hills. A half hour later there was no further sign of pursuers and Dehner suggested a halt. "Oh, my," he said, catching his breath.
"As I predicted," said Lemkerr, "we've thrown off all pursuit."
The brush rattled and Hubley stepped out to join them. "I thought you were going to wait for me at the caverns," said the thin boy, grinning.
Lemkerr frowned at him, then smiled. He turned to Sand and held out his hand. "I'm pleased to join you on your quest."
Sand shook his hand.
HUBLEY HELD the vanished girl's scarf balled tight in one thin hand. He rubbed the hand along his side, punched himself with it as he loped along the marshy valley trail. Billows of hot steamy fog were rolling through the mossy oaks and willows. The boy licked his lips, tapped his hand twice on his chest, grinned. "She was taken this way for sure, Sand," he said over his shoulder. "Four days ago. There are three men with her now. They have four mounts and a pack grout."
"Heading into the Boneca Woods?"
Hubley answered, "Yes. Once we leave this valley we're in the Woods. Yes, they rode in there with the governor's daughter."
Rubbing at his forehead with the sleeve of his tunic, Sand said, "Okay, we'll continue."
The sticky fog filled in the empty spaces behind them and hid Dehner and the big Lemkerr. Lemkerr's voice got through. He was saying, "... is that none of these plans will work well, and that the only satisfactory plan is to give everybody equal share no matter what sort of person he is, or how old he is, or what sort of work he does, or who or what his father was."
"Oh, my."
The fog clung warm and thick around them the rest of the morning and the valley gradually narrowed. They couldn't see it but they began to feel the trees give way to rocky hillside and then hard high rock walls.
"Slime bugs," said Hubley when they were climbing through the sharp thin gorge.
There was a faint persistent slithering sound nearby, hidden in fog. "That noise?"
"Yes, they climb the rocks, back and forth and up and down," said the thin boy. "To no real purpose."
Something slapped against Sand's cheek and a gluey slime was trailed across his face. He picked at the thick two-inch-long bug, a musty-brown thing with pointed pink eyes. Slime squirted down his sleeve and he shook the bug from him. "I've been going up and down a lot of hillsides myself lately."
Hubley said, "But you have a purpose, Sand. You're working at something you believe in. Isn't that so?"
Another slime bug landed on him and Sand watched it crawl halfway up his arm before he flicked it away. "I have a job I'm working at."
"You chose to do it, though," said the boy. "You're not ordered about by anyone, boss or relatives. Parents."
Sand said, "That's more or less true."
The fog was thinning now, lifting. They were free of the valley and entering the Boneca Woods. The mist was colder here; shredded. The trees were great black oaks. By noon they had reached a small clearing and decided to stop for a rest and food.
Dehner and Lemkerr came into view, with the big warrior saying, "This difficulty can be got around to some extent by give and take between the people who want different things. For instance, there are some people who care for flowers and do not care for music, and others who care for games and boating and care neither for flowers nor music. But these differently-minded people do not object to paying rates for the upkeep of a public park with flower beds. Do you see?"
"We have no public parks on Esmeralda," said Dehner, shrugging out of his pack.
Lemkerr dropped the double pack he was carrying. "That is a problem, Tony. Though you can't expect to achieve every aspect of socialism overnight. We could wait a bit on the flower beds, for instance." He frowned suddenly at the trees, the thick twisting branches that hung over the rough clearing.
Hubley wrinkled his nose and looked up. "Delusion worms," he warned and dived for his knapsack.
"Torches," shouted Lemkerr, ripping into his gear and yanking out a bundle of torch sticks. Hubley had gotten his flint and was striking a spark.
Sand stood still, watching. He noticed now dozens of hard-back insects inching out along the dark oak branches. "What are they?"
"Their bite is not fatal but it causes hallucinations and delusions," explained Dehner as he helped light the torches. "Fire and smoke usually keep them off."
Sand caught up a torch. When he swung his hand up toward the black branches he felt a slight twinge in the soft flesh between his thumb and forefinger. He looked at the spot and saw nothing. "How long do the effects last if you do get stung?"
"Forever," said Dehner. "Forever."
"I can't," began Sand. When he turned to Dehner he saw the author had fallen to the ground and died. The clothes were already rotted to tatters and the last shreds unraveling away into the hot sooty wind blowing across the clearing. Dehner's flesh was bloating now, swelling up and then bursting. The flesh dropped way and only bones were left. The skeleton fell in on itself as the skull said, "Forever."
Lemkerr was amused by all this. He laughed, clapping big hands together. Then his flesh began to fall away and the wind blew his skeleton down and the bones separated and flew upward, spinning and clattering in the warm air.
Sand found that his own skin was not actually gone but only transparent. He watched his lungs for a while and found he'd stopped breathing. From off to his right young Hubley insisted, "We'll have to burn. We'll have to burn." The boy was all bloody now, crawling along the dry ground, trailing red and a yellow slime. He was trying to throw the torch he held.
The air between them caught fire and the boy exploded, spattering Sand. Sand tried to clutch at himself and hold himself together but the impulse to fragment was too great and he yielded. Flashing pain ripped him apart and the wind intruded and spun and scattered him about.
"Oh, my," said Dehner. "It seems to be passing." With a harsh snap the day changed to late afternoon and the oaks became pines. Sand no longer held a torch and he was sitting on a long mossed-over log.
"The major effects," said the big Lemkerr, "usually only last a few hours. Though there can be small recurrences and sometime's you find your judgments and your coordination slightly off for a day or so. You seem to know us all again."
Hubley reached out and poked at Sand. "We've kept moving, with Lemkerr helping you walk. Time seems to he the only cure for such a sting."
"One of them," said Sand, "did get me, huh? Delusion worm."
"Yes," said Dehner. "Before we could smoke them off."
"I should have scented them much sooner," apologized the boy.
"You were concentrating on Jenna Peaquill," Sand told him. "It's okay."
The forest suddenly rumbled and seemed to jump, yellow light crackled through the pine branches. "A real thunderstorm is starting up," said Lemkerr.
Sand said, "Good. I thought it was an illusion. How far have we come since midday?"
"Near fifteen miles," said the big warrior. "And we're still on the right trail," the thin boy said.
"Good," said Sand, trying a grin.
Hubley crouched beside him, frowning. "Sand, I'm noticing something. Just now."
"What?"
Thunder bowled by again. Lightning sizzled and more thunder shook the ground. "I think there is someone, possibly even two or three people, quite near us."
"Oh, my. Thieves of the woods?" asked Dehner.
Hubley shook his head. "They don't seem to be native to this place, but strangers like ourselves."
"Following us?" asked Sand.
"Here before us. Not too long before us, though."
Lightning knifed nearer and rain began. Big drops, falling hard and flat. The thick branches kept most of the rain from them. A large jay came to perch on a branch above Sand. When thunder again shook the trees the bird fell, plummetlike, straight into his lap. Sand touched the bird, lifted it. Feathers burst from its side and then bright gold-colored cog wheels popped out and a heavy coil spring. Sand flung the bird far from him, then watched his three companions. "You're seeing this, too?"
"A mechanical bird," said Dehner. "Could it be a bomb or some other sort of fiendish engine?"
The mechanism had landed on a stump a hundred feet away. Sand watched the hard rain hit it. "It might be. Whatever it is, I take it the Boneca Woods is not noted for mechanized wildlife."
Lemkerr said, "No. As you well know, it is forbidden to build any such complex device as that on the whole of this planet. I've not heard of that repressive rule being defied hereabouts. Have you, Tony?"
"I haven't. Could this, John, be the creation of Master Clockwork?"
The branches above swayed, dripping water and pine needles, and another jay alighted. It was identical to the fallen bird. Its beak flapped open with a wrenching and it said, "Birdsmith. Birdsmith." Then it flew up and headed off to the northwest.
Hubley poked himself and then Sand. "The strangers. The newcomers. That creature is theirs. Both of them are." He pointed at fhe silent dead mechanism.
"They'd like us to follow," said Sand. "Follow the other one." The talking jay had stopped five hundred feet away, on another low branch.
"A trap," said Dehner. "Like the one they tried to spring at the vineyards, John."
"But this one is set by someone else, Tony," said Sand. "Hubley, you can track these guys without our following that gadget up there. Can you get us near them without their knowing it?"
"Certainly, Sand."
"Okay, we'll do that."
Lemkerr said, "You and Hubley slip away. Tony and I will come behind, pretending to stalk that bird thing. To make it look as though we've fallen for'their stratagem."
"Good," said Sand.
"Birdsmith," called the mechanical bird, flying away.
The pond was small and dark and two intensely white swans glided on it, gracefully avoiding the scum and the blighted lily pads and soggy toads. By the edge of the pond was a low swaybacked cottage, all fat shingles and ancient thatch. A single clay chimney was giving off white smoke. Over the double door swung a worn sign announcing: Birdsmith, Gadget-Maker To Royalty. In a thicket above the cottage Sand and Hubley knelt. "There," whispered the boy. "The house is old but the people are new."
"They're not the kidnappers of Jenna."
"No, those people have not been anywhere near the girl. The girl who wore the scarf is not in that cottage either. Though I think some woman is."
The top half of the cottage door swung inward and a bearded old man looked out. "Cheep, cheep," he called and held out one lean black-sleeved arm in a perch position. "Come to Birdsmith."
A blackbird flapped down out of the surrounding forest and landed on the beckoning arm. "I think," said Sand, "I'll go browse in Birdsmith's shop."
Hubley pulled at him. "You mustn't go in there alone, Sand."
"It's a habit of mine. I'm impatient."
"You're not fully recovered from your encounter, is my guess. Some further symptoms may recur and leave you helpless."
"You and the others, when they arrive, can pull me out if anything goes wrong." Sand moved into the brush and emerged several yards from their watching place. He paused beside the stagnant pond and studied the mechanical swans.
"Those are very hard to come by," said the bearded old man. The other half of the door opened and he came out of the cottage.
The swans were swimming nearer to Sand. "Also illegal."
"I'll have to ask you not to touch them," said the bearded man. "These are the last pair I have in stock. Yesterday I had a dozen but a man came by and bought ten just like that. He paid one hundred dollars for each swan. Would you believe it?"
"No," said Sand. "Are you Birdsmith?"
The old man wore round spectacles and he slid these roughly up and down his sharp nose, trying to get Sand in focus. "I am a birdsmith. It's a profession, not a name exactly. Please, I warned you before, don't touch the swans."
"They're touching me."
"What sort of birds, exactly, did you want to buy, young man? I don't like to encourage hanging around."
"You make all your own birds?"
"Right in my work shop," said the old man. "You can't possibly see it. My equipment is rare, expensive, and fragile. I shouldn't even be allowing you to handle the swans."
Sand asked, "Ever tried anything larger?"
"How large?" The old man was still having trouble seeing Sand. "Never mind, I have no more time to waste on you." He turned and headed for the cottage.
"Large as, let's say, a pirate." Sand followed.
"Birds only," replied the birdsmith,
"Decoys," said Sand. The old man stepped inside, leaving both halves of the door open. Sand remained outside, waiting for the next move.
The door began to burn. The cottage crumbled next, burning away to black and falling away. From out of the wreckage skeleton hands grabbed for Sand, pulling him hard into the dark ruins.
Standing in the middle of the charred wood and ashes were three women. Big and muscular, wearing tunics and leggings and carrying long bows.
Sand murmured, "Are you part of the hallucination, ladies?" They laughed and knocked him out.
SAND SMELLED musky perfume and rotten vegetables. He opened his eyes, the right one fully and the left one halfway. Hanging down from above him were intricately twined vines, heavy with overripe tomatoes. About three feet directly in front of him was the backside of a young woman. The young woman was wearing a rough brown leotard and a short leather jerkin. She had one hand in each of Sand's knee cavities. The tomatoes ended and wild beans surrounded him next, large spade-shaped green leaves and tightly curling vines hung with foot long pods. Glancing backward, Sand discovered a heavy blonde woman, dressed similarly to the girl who had hold of his front end, was carrying him by the armpits. His wrists were tied behind him.
"Where . . ." began Sand, addressing himself to the younger girl to the front of him.
"Deal with me," cut in the blonde. "I'm the leader of the band."
Bean pods rattled and sharp fuzzy leaves buffed at his face. "Where are you lugging me to?"
"Our enclave on the lake," said the heavy blonde. She wore a bow and a quiver slung to her wide back.
"You bandits?"
"Women of the wood. We do a variety of things. Any kind of foul crime a man can pull off, we can pull off. Highway robbery, kidnapping, terror, raids, slave trading. You name it and Patsy Raposa and her band can do it."
"You're Patsy?"
"Yes. I'm not surprised you haven't heard of me. The male outlaws always get all the notoriety."
"Which category do I come under—kidnapping, slave trading, or what?"
"Fortunately," said Patsy, "some men are perceptive enough to look beyond our sex and at the actual quality of our work. A certain group of these more advanced-thinking individuals have hired us, paying as much as they'd pay the best of male outlaws, to waylay you and keep you out of sight for awhile."
"How long?"
"That depends."
"Could I pay you a fair price to let me go?"
"We already took your purse and all that's in it," replied Patsy, ducking to avoid a peavine. "All you have left is that nasty medallion or whatever it is. When I attempted to snatch it I got a shock. I venture to say it's tainted with some land of magic. We've enough of that in these parts. You can keep your medallion. Men seem to need talismans. Patsy Raposa needs only her good long bow and a gray goose shaft and she's anyone's equal."
Sand asked, "Who hired you to grab me?"
"Don't try to sweet-talk me, Sand. You can't seduce information out of me, though men always think they can."
Sand said, "It must be somebody who works with Master Clockwork though, because of the robot birds."
"I shall not say."
"You don't have Jenna Peaquill either," said Sand. "No, somebody working against Clockwork took her from his pirates."
"It's a male failing," said Patsy, "to wax inquisitive, to talk away always."
"Home," announced the girl who had his front end.
They'd come clear of the wild vegetable acres and were descending a gritty beach. Three other women, younger than Patsy, were with them. This was the shore of a small lake.
"Across there is where we live," said Patsy. "Now it may be feminine to settle down in a snug cottage and if so you can score us for that. We feel we can afford the luxury of a permanent encampment because we keep ourselves much better guarded than your run-of-the-mill male cutthroat and bandit. I have my lady archers posted all around the shore and at all possible trails in. None of your clumsy male friends can win you away from us, Sand."
He was dumped in a canoe and taken across the lake to be locked up in a pleasant cottage.
The sorcerer's daughter was dark and slender, wearing a simple dark velvet gown and her black hair long and free. Sand ignored her at first. He stayed slightly hunched at the cloth-covered table in his cell and poked a fork into the meat pie on his plate. It was night outside and beyond the iron-grilled windows the stars showed, misted slightly by the light fog rising off the lake. Sand poked the stuffed tomato next and then the candied potatoes. His dinner had been brought a few minutes before by Patsy Raposa herself. After the leader of the two-dozen female bandits had left him, the pretty dark girl had appeared. She had appeared all at once in the corner next to the flower pots and Sand assumed she was the tag end of his hallucination symptoms.
"I can help you," said the girl, "if you like. You're close enough now that I can do more than watch." She had a soft, careful voice. A shy, down-looking way of smiling.
Sand decided his meal wasn't poisoned or drugged and began eating. "You're the best looking hallucination I've had so far," he remarked finally.
The girl said, "I'm not part of your unfortunate encounter in the forest. Though I can surely see, considering how I materialized, why you might think I am. Besides which, I'm not actually here."
"Exactly."
"Your food isn't poisoned, by the way. I watched them prepare your meal. You can eat and talk to me at the same time. My father often does. As a matter of fact, I'm dining with him at this moment in our castle."
Sand ate two more bites of the meat pie. "Your father."
"He is a sorcerer," explained the girl. "I've learned many things from him, as you might imagine. Living as I do, isolated in the mountains and a mile below the ground, there is ample time to study and learn. I do hope, however, that my father will eventually overcome the other sorcerers he is in conflict with at the moment. Then perhaps we can leave our stronghold now and again."
"You're a sorcerer's daughter, you live a mile underground, you're not really here. Is that about right?"
"Yes. I am able to watch various events in the outside by means of magic crystals and the like. I have acquired, after much patient teaching from my father, the ability to project an image of myself. I have become so adept at projection that I can do it now without his knowing," said the lovely girl. "My name is Bethanne. You're John Leslie Sand."
"John Wesley Sand."
"It's often difficult to hear sharply. I am pleased to meet you, John Wesley Sand."
Sand said, "You're not behaving like the other delusions, Bethanne." He noticed now the medallion felt hot against his chest. "Wait. You belong to this medallion."
"Yes," said the girl. "I fashioned the talisman myself and gave it to someone, that was once, some time ago. He was lost, beyond where I could help him. Had I had my father's help I might have . . . but that's of no matter now."
"Who is your father?"
"He is called Milagroso. He is a great sorcerer and a most gifted magic worker."
"What sort of magic?"
"Not black, if that's what you mean." She moved a few steps nearer to him and her image lightened and grew less substantial. Then it returned to its original intensity and she seemed nearly real again. "My father is a complex and intricate man, however. The things he does and the uses he puts his magic to might not all seem noble and honorable to you. I know better, having lived down there with him so long."
"Where is down there?"
"We inhabit a castle of sorts, in the Moranga Mountains. A mile beneath the ground, all caverns and caves. I've never been anywhere else, really."
Sand tapped two fingers on the medallion. "How'd you give this away?"
"He was someone I'd rather not talk of."
"Not who you gave it to, but how."
"Oh, I understand. I sent it to him. I can move objects, over reasonable distances."
"Move objects from place to place, by willing it?"
"Yes, exactly, Sand," replied the sorcerer's daughter. "Whoever wears the medallion, even that lewd sea urchin Francesca, I can also keep in touch with. I know what they're doing, even in ruined lighthouses. If I wish, I can appear to them and help them."
"You could help me get out of here," said Sand.
The girl smiled a shy smile. "Yes. There's going to be a time, some day when I no longer owe so much allegiance to my father, when I will leave the castle and come really into the world. At such a time I will need friends. Such as yourself, Sand."
"You can't leave your father now?"
"He would be alone then, still engulfed in work. He's a very fine man, a great man, and I owe him a lot. You wouldn't understand."
"Do you?"
"Yes, of course." The image of Bethanne nodded. "Everyone has an obligation to parents. Particularly in the case of a man such as my father. He has taken such splendid care of me, alone. He's taught me very many exceptional things."
"You never visited Francesca." Sand stood up and left the table.
"I find most girls and most women not very interesting," said the girl. "You I've decided, watching from down here, are an interesting and somewhat appealing person. Not unattractive and probably reasonably intelligent, though you tend to be too often impulsive."
Sand touched the girl's hand. There was nothing there. He cleared his throat, winked his left eye. "Are you able to foretell events, Bethanne? Did you know I'd be pounced on by Patsy Raposa and her band?"
"Yes, of course. I can see ahead into time and I have some knowledge of many things that may happen tomorrow, and after." She smiled straight at him. "But I won't always tell everything I know." She paused. "What I mean to do, Sand. Well, I suppose it's something like teaching a child. If you simply tell a child he may have trouble should he follow a certain course, he'll likely scorn you and go on ahead. I remember that from my own childhood down there. If you wait until he gets in trouble and then offer help, then he will value you and your advice more."
Sand watched the image for a moment. "Could you get me a key to this place? There are two substantial locks on the door."
"Yes. Were you lighter, a child perhaps, I could transport you from here to the forest. By sorcery," she said. "How will you overcome the dowdy female archer who is standing guard?"
"With cunning."
"Would you mind if I interfered to the extent of putting her into a sleeping trance until you're safely away?"
"Can you?"
"Easily," said Bethanne, laughing softly again. "I could tell you a few more things I know, Sand. Not now I think. Perhaps I'll appear again when you are further along on your journey."
Sand kept watching the dark and lovely girl. "Could you get back my money and my weapons without alerting Patsy?"
"Yes, with no trouble. Further, I'll show you one other object." The girl raised her left hand breast-high and a small book materialized beneath her palm. The black-covered book then fell to the floor, slowly and gently.
Sand toed it. "What?"
"Your captor, Patsy Raposa, keeps a private journal. Dull stuff the most of it is, including the lengthy accounts of her lewd conduct with the male rogues of the Boneca Woods. Read page 87, however."
Sand stooped and retrieved the book and read the entry, which was dated the day before. ". . . my garments back on he told me there would be a hundred dollars in the new task. I doubt not that a man could command at least two hundred, but then my passions had betrayed me into . . . Sand they say is still on the trail of those real kidnapping rascals. This fool Marcus told, after hardly any torture at all from the account of it, that he sent Sand and his companion into a trap. Apparently Sand escaped. Subsequently . . . he will be coming into the Boneca Woods. He did not get all the truth from that fool Marcus. For the innkeeper, a whining male braggart if I recall him aright, knew where the girl was to be taken at the end of the first stage of her travels with the real kidnappers. Yes, to that vile town of Port Nariz to wait a ship for Zumba knows where. I'd like to see her . . . Master Clockwork has devised and is sending a special trap to use on this Sand. When it is sprung, we will step in and take him. He is a young fool I hear, though he might be good in ... . I am sure we can do what those mechanical males could not, keep the young fool out of Master Clockwork's business. We'll keep him off the truth. Though, so strong were my passions, I may have missed some of the truth myself.'"
Sand skimmed several pages each way and learned nothing more. "So Jenna Peaquill is being taken to a seaport up the coast. And the same guys who killed Marcus are out for me."
"Do you know who they work for, Sand?"
"I think so."
"I will not tell you as yet," said Bethanne with a smile. "However, I can tell you that your three comrades have quietly and unobservedly followed you here and are in the woods at the far side of the lake at this moment. They are plotting ways to extricate you."
"We'll save them the trouble," said Sand. "The keys?"
Bethanne asked, "Don't you feel angry when I withhold some information and taunt you with it? You can not really be so lacking in curiosity as you pretend."
Sand answered, "I've known quite a few girls, Bethanne, above and below the ground. A good many of them like to play games, but I don't always automatically go along."
"Ah," she said, smiling still. Two brass keys appeared in the air in front of Sand's nose. They dropped slowly toward the floor and when they hit the girl vanished.
Sand took up the keys. Outside thunder rumbled and rain began to fall.
OUT OF THE dripping underbrush Hubley called, "Sand, over here."
Sand left the muddy trail and worked 'in among the vines and thorn bushes. "All three of you in there?"
"Five," replied the thin boy.
Lemkerr was squatting among clumpy patches of fat wild strawberries, eating them one by one, his sword resting across his knees. Tied to the trunk of a small oak behind him was one of Patsy Raposa's archer guards.
"We were on the verge of storming the encampment over there," he said.
"Oh, my." Dehner was knee-deep in huge melon vines and huddled next to him, wound around the middle with rope, was Priceless Rorollo. The assistant treasurer hunched in further on himself when he recognized Sand.
"Where'd you acquire him?" asked Sand.
"Shall we expect pursuit," put in Lemkerr, "as a result of your escape?"
"Not immediately, but it's best to start moving on now."
"How did you effect your escape, by the way?" asked Dehner, shouldering his pack.
"With sorcery," said Sand.
Lemkerr sheathed his sword, grabbed up his double pack and then put the bound Priceless over one wide shoulder. "We'll never achieve a completely socialistic planet until all sorcery is gone."
Leaving the gagged lady bandit at the tree, they moved into the forest. The rain was falling hard, but the thick foliage deflected it and made the drops hit intermittently and at odd angles. Sand asked, "About Priceless?"
"This isn't, now-now, going to gain any of you anything," said the assistant treasurer. "You're practically, now-now, a civic employee yourself, Mr. Sand. Allowing, standing by idle, now-now, while a government—a fellow government employee is carried around the wilds by a gigantic socialist. It's a crime."
Dehner was walking next to Sand. "Hubley sensed that Priceless was on the trail ahead of us while we were tracking you. He apparently had been trying to take a short cut through the Boneca Woods when he was attacked by our friends, the delusion worms."
"It was a highly, now-now, painful experience." Dehner continued, "I recalled our brief interlude with him at the Inn of the Fat Dolphin and his connection with the Calandara Territory treasury. I decided we should add him to our expedition until we regained you. You were rather foolhardy at that Birdsmith place, John."
"Yes," agreed Sand. "What happened to Birdsmith?"
"Got away underground," said Hubley. "Through a tunnel. The lady bandits carried you from the cottage and we chose to follow them and let Birdsmith go."
Sand looked back through the rain and foliage and asked Priceless, "Where are you going?"
"How can I, now-now, tell? I go wherever, now-now, this political wrestler takes me."
"Before you were intercepted, where were you going?"
"We," said Dehner, "know that."
"Oh, so?"
Dehner pressed at his cloak. "Another message on the old ledger paper. He was carrying it concealed in his boot."
"Saying what?"
"He is to avoid Port Nariz and come instead to Lord Muscrow."
Sand said, "Port Nariz is where they've taken Jenna Peaquill. But who is Lord Muscrow?"
"Apparently they've got their wind up," said Dehner. "Those men who killed Marcus the innkeeper and scared off Priceless seem to know the girl's intended for a slave market and due to sail for there from Port Nariz. So our kidnappers have decided to hide out elsewhere."
"Elsewhere where?"
Hubley, poking Sand in the back, said, "Leodoro, at the far side of the Edgewise Plain."
"You can tell that from the message?"
Hubley nodded. "The note was written among the lion men. The only colony of them in Calandara is in Leodoro."
"Could the kidnappers hide there with Jenna?"
"The lion men," said Lemkerr through the hard rain, "have a good many thieves and brigands among their population. I used to wrestle with a couple of roving ones in another territory some years back. They hailed from Leodoro. It's a town of some three or four thousand and lies in a small valley. A few of the lion men have done quite well and live in vast splendor above the town itself. I'll wager Lord Muscrow is one of these wealthy lions."
"They'd take in outlanders?"
"For a huge fee they've been known to harbor thieves and swindlers and political outcasts," said Lemkerr. "Their valley is nigh impossible to storm and they're a violent lot for the most part. If you can afford it, Leodoro makes an excellent hideaway."
Sand said, "So we can't just walk into Leodoro ourselves?"
Lemkerr said, "I do know a couple of lion men. Before we ever reached their residences we might be slaughtered."
"We can use Priceless here as a passport," suggested Dehner.
"I have, now-now, no notion what you're talking about." Sand said, "He's not the kind of cornerstone I like to build on. Still, we may have to."
Hubley suddenly halted, rubbing at his nose. "Sand."
"What?" asked Sand, reaching toward the boy with one shaggy paw.
"Oh, my," said Dehner. "Unless we've all been bitten by delusion worms, Sand, I'd say you've been transformed into a lion man."
Sand felt at his muzzle with both paws, then rugged at his mane with his claws. The medallion was glowing hot against his shaggy chest. He gave a purring, rumbling roar. "Bethanne?" There was no sign of the sorceror's daughter, but he knew this must be her work.
Dehner asked, "Would Bethanne be someone associated with the sorcery you used to get out of the clutches of the lady bandits?"
"Yes." Sand recounted his meeting with the image of the sorcerer's daughter. He concluded, "This is her way of trying to help me further. Do I look convincing?"
Lemkerr said, "A trifle slim for a lion man, but quite authentic to my eyes."
"Hubley?"
The thin boy hugged himself. "Yes, you have the right odor."
Sand's left eye narrowed and his muzzle whiskers stood up some. "How far are we from Leodoro?"
"A half day's journey," Hubley said.
"Okay, I'll walk into the lions' town," Sand told them.
IN THE MEADOW metal clanked. Sand halted in the noon sunlight, rubbing at his mane with his right paw. He was moving through the outskirts of Leodoro, alone, and no one had tried to stop him yet. There were three lion men in the yellow field to his left, pitching grout shoes. Sand rested a big furry bare foot up on the lowest rail of the meadow fence and watched the not too distant game.
"Don't go calling me a bamboozler, you big diddler," shouted a grayish lion man in a bright green tunic and cloak.
"I know a shuffler when I see one," said the largest of the three lion men. He snatched a metal grout shoe from the thatchy ground and waved it. "I say you're a cockatrice and a flimflammer and you don't play fair."
"Don't get upset, Yuba," the third, scarlet-garmented lion said to the largest lion man. "I'm sure Lido doesn't mean it."
"You're both of you fabricators," said Lido, clutching off his green cloak. "I'll be your dupe and gull no longer."
"You're the one who's a diddler," returned Yuba. "Don't try to claptrap and moonshine me." He thwacked the angry Lido on the snout with the grout shoe.
Lido gave a roar and swatted Yuba. Then he ducked down and tugged the pointed game stake out of the earth.
Sand vaulted the fence, announcing, "I'm looking for a couple of guys known as Yuba and Bascofigli." These were the names of the two Leodoro lion men that Lemkerr had once known.
"I'm Yuba," said the largest lion man.
Lido bapped Yuba across the ear with the uprooted stake, swinging it like a cudgel. "Big fat diddler."
"Bascofigli is on a wrestling tour of the barbarian enclaves," said Yuba. He licked at his paw and then rubbed at the spot where he'd been hit. "Where are you from, stranger?"
Sand told him, using a town name Lemkerr had provided. "Though it's been a long time since I was there. I've been traveling with a man named Lemkerr. He told me to seek you out if I was ever in the vicinity of Leodoro."
Yuba picked up the smaller Lido by the armpits and threw him off and away from him. "How is Lemkerr anyway? Still calling himself the Masked Vegetarian?"
"He's the Masked Socialist now."
"What do socialists eat?"
"What they can get," replied Sand. "Can we talk when you're finished here? I have a small business proposition for you."
The third lion man trotted over to where Lido had landed. "Go ahead on with your friend, Yuba. I'll calm Lido." He sat atop the sprawled lion man.
Yuba put an arm around Sand's shoulder. "Would you like to stomp up and down on that scalawag Lido before we talk?"
"I have a deadline to meet, but thanks."
"I sincerely do enjoy trodding on the downfallen myself," confided Yuba, leading Sand back toward the roadway. "Still I respect a man who doesn't let his fun spoil his business."
"It would be worth," said Sand as they climbed over the meadow fence, "fifty dollars to me to know what Lord Muscrow is up to."
"He's trying to get himself married to a rich heiress again," said Yuba. "That's his usual pastime. He owns the vastest estate in Leodoro. His gardening bills alone run to above three hundred a month. I know, because I supplied him with men to clip his hedges, crop his lawns, and prune his shrubs until he got too far behind in paying what's due."
Stone huts began to show in the fields, and lion men, women, children. There were apparently farmers and cattle raisers as well as thieves in Leodoro. "You must know, Yuba," said Sand to the big lion man, "that as a friend of Lemkerr I can be trusted."
Yuba said, "True, true. Among human types Lemkerr is, despite his often eccentric notions, one of the most honest. If you're his friend, and if you do indeed have that fifty you mentioned, then you are to be trusted, too. What is your name?"
Sand told him, then drew a folding of bills from his money pouch as best he could with his new paws, "Here is the money."
"So it is. What would you know, Sand. Beyond Lord Muscrow's marital intentions?"
"About the girl he's hiding there," said Sand. "And the human types who are using his estate as a hideout."
Yuba scratched his chin with a paw, licked the paw and scratched again. "That's valuable information. I wonder if it's only information."
"It better not be more than seventy-five dollar information. Because that's my top offer."
Still worrying his chin with one big paw, the lion man said, "Make it ninety."
"Eighty."
"So it is." They stopped in the roadway while Sand put the paper money into Yuba's open paw. "You'll find her in the greenhouse."
"The kidnapped girl?"
Yuba slipped the money through a slot in his grass-stained tunic. "Yes. Lord Muscrow's need of funds has caused him to stoop in several directions. The fair girl and four other humans are in the greenhouse. Three big lads, built along the Lemkerr line at least two of them are, and a withered and wizened old fellow."
"Does Lord Muscrow have any of his own guarding her?"
Yuba shook his head. "His staff consists of only a valet, an upstairs maid, a barber, and a gatekeeper at the moment," he said. "Should he make another successful marriage the staff will grow." The lion man waved a paw back at the rolling hills he and Sand had climbed to reach Leodoro. "No human could enter here to steal the girl back anyway. Nor any army of them, for that matter. We have, hidden and patient, numerous of our best young fellows on guard always. No doubt you scented them as you came here, but humans are nowise so perceptive."
Sand nodded. Up ahead on the road loomed a long arched stone bridge. A wide river ran beneath it and moored nearby at a single dock was a galley with one bank of oars. Scruffy oarsmen, most of them human, in tattered breechclouts were being herded aboard. "Anna Maria Therese Clarinda Lagunita Diana," read Sand from the ship's name plate.
"Speaking of Lord Muscrow, that's his very own pleasure boat. Named after his wives. Each time he weds he adds a name. You would have liked Maria," said Yuba. "They must be preparing for a cruise."
Sand said, "I'd like to see Lord Muscrow's estate."
Yuba stopped near the bridge. "I hope you have no serious mischief in mind. Well, that's your affair. Lord Muscrow's estate is at the crest of that far hill up ahead. You cross another bridge there, over an artificial lake, and then you'll find his place behind high stone walls. About three miles from this spot."
A drumming of hooves sounded at their backs and a coach pulled by six white grouts drew up. "That's the bloody ship, ain't it?" called down the driver of the empty coach.
"Lord Muscrow's pleasure boat," answered Sand.
The coachman was enormous and he was tapping at the air with one gigantic paw. "That's his bloody place of residence way up there now, ain't it? With me down here, hired to pick up his bloody lordship and his new bloody lady friend and bring them to this ship. Me late no doubt."
"Give this lad a ride," suggested Yuba. "He's bound in a similar direction."
The huge coachman said, "Ain't no harm in that. Get on up here on the bloody seat next to me and we'll get on with this."
Sand saluted Yuba by touching his paw to his shaggy brow and then climbed up onto the gilded coach. They proceeded across the stone bridge. The lion captain of the oarsmen used a two-tongued whip on the men's backs while they shuffled aboard the pleasure boat.
THE OBESE lion coach driver scratched himself behind the ear. "Ain't the ticks something terrible around here this time of year? I'm virtually infested with the bloody things." He showed Sand the shiny grape size creature he'd just plucked from himself.
"We don't have as much trouble with them in my part of the country."
"You hails from where?" The six white grouts were trotting on level ground, passing along a widening road.
Sand told him the name of a lion colony to the north. "You're from where?"
"The south originally," said the enormous lion man. "I ain't had this job but a week and this here is my very first bloody visit to his highness Lord Muscrow." He held the reins in one paw and dug behind his ear. "Being so gross I offer a lot more surface to be plagued."
"Then the gateman at Lord Muscrow's has never seen you?"
"No, he bloody ain't." They were leaving the houses of Leodoro behind and entering fields of fruit trees interspersed with animal cages of white wrought iron. "Once he has seen me he won't soon forget. Being so bloody huge, I makes a lasting impression."
"I imagine. You're sure they'll let you in?"
"Ain't nothing to worry about. I was given a bloody password to spout," confided the driver. "Ah, there's a satiated bloody rascal now." He displayed the new larger tick he'd extracted from the fur at his fat rumpled neck. "You should of seen me as a cub. Little fellow I was. My dear mum thought I was too frail to live, that's how bloody slender I was."
"Password, huh?" Sand watched the plucked tick sail off in the direction of an orange grove.
The coachman waved at a cage of gazelles. "Ain't they delicious, them bloody fleet-footed rascals. It was partly gazelle pie that made me the bloated heap you sees before you now. These bloody lords always gets all the gazelle they can eat. Well, for most of us this life is up and down at best."
"Password, huh?"
"Right you are. I got to stop at the gate and say, 'Is this the way to Terra Nova?' Bloody foolish, ain't it all?"
"Then they let you in?"
"Right you are. Then I picks up his bloody highness and then his latest bloody supposed virgin bride candidate and then I takes the bloody lot of them to his pleasure boat. Imagine using a big bloody ship like that and all them poor slavey oarsmen just so's you can knock off a little while you're over the water. You could just as like take any woman I know onto a covered bridge like this one up ahead and get the same effect with a lot less of a bloody fuss."
"Sure," said Sand. When all six grouts and then all four wheels of the coach were on wood plankings and it was dark all around Sand slid out his dagger and conked the obese coachman on the skull with the hilt.
"What are you bloody doing?" asked the huge lion man.
Sand now located the right spot and with three more whacks he got the coach driver knocked out. He caught the reins and called out, "Whoa!" to the prancing grouts. By the time the gilded coach was on the estate side of the covered bridge the huge lion man was tied and gagged and inside the coach and Sand was in the driver's seat.
Lord Muscrow was in an acre-wide patio surrounded by sundials. He was bent and old and his mane was downcast and grizzled. He wore a long sky blue cloak trimmed in white fur. A long gold staff lay on the stones near him. "Yes, over here, young man," he called to Sand.
After using his password phrase and being admitted to the walled estate grounds, Sand had, as directed by the gatekeeper, left the coach at the side of Lord Muscrow's two-story wood and plaster mansion. Lord Muscrow had hailed him then and summoned him down to the sunlit patio. "How can I help you, sir?"
Lord Muscrow's right foot was wrapped in white cloth strips and he held a polished gnarled cane in his right paw. He tapped on the patio stones with the cane and asked, "Do you see what time it is?"
"It's hard to avoid," said Sand, joining the old lion man in the circle of a dozen sundials. "Am I late, sir?"
"Not exactly, no," said Lord Muscrow. "The problem is, actually, a few of my servants, including my trusted valet, have gone off on a lark. Yes, leaving me with no one to help me get everything loaded into the coach."
"Off on a lark, sir? What provoked them into doing that?"
Lord Muscrow fluffed his sparse muzzle whiskers with one lean paw. "They resent my thwacking them with my cane. That, coupled with the fact that they haven't had any wages in a good spell, is what provoked them." He stopped to lick at his muzzle with a purplish tongue. "You may think me a tiny bit anxious-acting, especially for one in so exalted and seemingly serene a position. Yet, despite all the obvious splendors your young eyes are now feasting on, I myself am a man of very limited means at the moment. Should I not be able to get this new marriage arranged by the end of this week or early next week at the latest, then I may well face ruin. Yes, my creditors have already taken off six of my best sundials. Do you know why I collect sundials, young man?"
"To remind you that time is fleeting and life precious short."
Old Lord Muscrow blinked at him. "Why, that's exactly it. You're quite perceptive for so young and loutish a fellow. Well, now you must get down to the summer house yonder and fetch the suitcases you'll find in the parlor. I had actually to pack the baggage myself, so fallen on sad days am I."
Sand saw now the greenhouse. A giant tinted glass dome some thousand paces down hill from the small shingled summer cottage that Lord Muscrow was pointing at with the head of his crooked cane. "Right away, sir." He took three steps in that direction.
"Perhaps you had better first carry this to the coach, young man." Lord Muscrow tapped at the gold, ball-topped scepter that was at his feet still. "This is the official staff of the family surmounted by the great seal of Muscrow. There's the great seal, on the ball there. See it? Eagles set with rubies. Actually not rubies at this time, but we'll soon buy them back and replace these imitations. I dropped the scepter when the clatter of your arriving coach startled me."
"You wish the scepter placed atop my vehicle along with the baggage, sir?"
Lord Muscrow said, "Well, I'd rather you held it beside you as you drove. You see, we'll be picking up the fair young lioness and her chaperone before we drive to my ship. I think that will look impressive as we drive up on her estate grounds. Don't you, great seal of Muscrow up on a gold pole proudly?"
"Yes, sir." Sand picked up the heavy rod. "I imagine, sir, this staff is recognized by all and sundry in Leodoro."
"When you're sporting the great seal of Muscrow you're admitted anywhere. Well, perhaps not everywhere during the current financial crisis, but still a good many places. Yes."
"Good." Sand brought the gold ball down on the lord's old head once and that was sufficient to render him unconscious.
SAND KNOCKED on the blue glass door. The tinted panels of the great greenhouse dome were blurred with steam and he could make out only bits and pieces of flowering bushes, dwarf fruit trees and potted palms inside. He knocked again.
A wart appeared on the other side of the glass, inscribing lopsided arcs in the moisture. A wide nose showed next, pressed against the blue glass. A full bristly beard. "What ho?" asked a gruff voice.
"Don't, now-now, go what hoing me," said Sand. "I've had enough of a difficult time getting here, now-now, to warn you."
The wart and the nose were pulled back from the moist tinted glass and the door opened slightly. "Who are you?" asked the large bearded guard.
"Well who, now-now, do you think I am, coming here and all," said Sand. "And don't, now-now, go saying I don't look like myself because I already know that. You ought to get lost in the, now-now, Boneca Woods sometime and have hallucinations drop on you and get your boots all muddy and have a spell turn you into a lion man."
The guard said tentatively, "Priceless?"
Sand said, "Yes, of course. Some, now-now, malicious sorcerer put a spell on me and just look. I may stay in this dreadful shape forever."
"You don't sound like yourself."
"How do you know how I'm supposed to, now-now, sound after being transmogrified into a, now-now, lion?" asked Sand. "Let me in quickly. I bear an important, now-now, warning."
"I would have thought you'd at least be a red-haired lion." The guard backed and allowed Sand to enter the steamy hothouse. "Outside of that, though, Priceless, I think this is a definite improvement. Yes, an improvement."
Sand glanced around. There were hundreds of flowers growing under the giant dome. Dozens of metal urns with young palm trees growing in them. He made a guess. "Take me to Hoffning right away. We've all of us got to, now-now, get out of here right away."
"Why?" The guard turned and went jogging along a narrow lane between thick flower beds.
"That, now-now, Sand fellow is loose again and he's raised a virtual army. They're all headed here."
The bearded guard stopped. "Is that all? They won't get in. The lion men will stop them."
"He's bribed the, now-now, lion men to give him safe entry."
"He bribed all the lion men?"
"No, only the hundred most important lion men," said Sand. "Really, his armies will be upon us in, now-now, no time."
A grave-size rectangle of mulch lifted up on their left and a very old and very pink man came halfway up out of the ground. "I told you to keep those smelly lions out of here."
"This isn't truthfully a lion," explained the large guard. "This is Priceless Rorollo, Mr. Hoffning."
The old man was holding the camouflaged trap door above his head with one sharp-knuckled hand. He felt at his wrinkled surcoat with the other hand and located a monocle. He popped it over his left eye. "Why is he so small?"
"You've got your eyeglass in the wrong eye, Mr. Hoffning," said the guard.
"Ah?" The old treasurer switched the monocle to the alternate eye. "How do you explain yourself, Priceless? What stupid thing have you done now?"
"Don't take time to, now-now, criticize me," said Sand. "They're almost on us."
"He got enchanted in the Boneca Woods, Mr. Hoffning," put in the guard.
"Can't you even traverse a woodland without getting yourself enchanted, you stupid smelly boy?"
"I can't help it if some sorcerer, now-now, decides to hex me." Sand pushed the guard aside and walked closer to the old treasurer. "Sand and his minions have bribed their way into Leodoro and will be storming our stronghold before too very long."
Hoffning coughed with surprise. "You should have told me that at once, Priceless. As I've often told you, order and proper sequence are important in life."
"I have our escape all arranged," said Sand. "A fast coach awaits outside and a ship is on the, now-now, river to take us down to the sea."
Hoffning said, "You've probably procured the wrong sort of boat for an escape try, Priceless. Well, I suppose we'll have to try it. Help me up out of this underground chamber."
Sand pulled the old treasurer of Calandara Territory up out of the trapdoor entryway and set him next to a potted tree. "I'll fetch the girl," he said and dropped into the hole.
Hoffning called down after Sand, "Tell the men to gather up everything with haste."
A board stairway took Sand into a rocky corridor and at its end he found a large musty wood-walled room. Two men in dark cloaks sat at a wooden table, eating fresh fruit from a copper bowl. On a wooden chair nearby was Jenna Peaquill, tied and gagged. "I'm Priceless and I'm under a spell," Sand told the two men. "Don't, now-now, let it unsettle you. We have to get out of this place at once. You two are to pack up everything. Hoffning has ordered me to carry the girl."
"I bet you did something stupid in the Boneca Woods," said one of the men, leaving his chair hurriedly.
Sand caught up Jenna in both arms and ran from the underground room. When he was aboveground again he said to the bearded guard, "You'd better get down there quickly. They're having trouble with the stuff."
"What stuff?"
"Don't ask so many questions," said Hoffning. "Go down there and help."
As soon as the guard was below ground Sand handed Jenna to Hoffning. "Hold her a second." He slammed the trap door and tugged a half dozen heavy potted trees over it. He looked at the weighted-down door for an instant, added two more trees.
"I don't like to be continually criticizing you, Priceless," remarked the old treasurer as Sand took back Jenna, "but this has the look of something else stupid."
Sand said, "On the contrary." He reached out and gently punched the old man on the chin.
The treasurer of Calandara Territory swooped back and fell into a bed of blackeyed daisies.
Sand hurried with the governor's daughter from the glass dome, sprinted across the sundial patio where Lord Muscrow was now gagged and tied to a marble dial column. Sand set the now agitated Jenna inside the gilded coach, dumped out the obese coachman and galloped the vehicle away from the mansion. He rode through the gates with the gold staff and the great seal of Muscrow held high.
Lord Muscrow's quarters on the pleasure boat consisted of three large paneled rooms. The squat lion man captain was carrying Jenna into the bedroom and saying to Sand, "This all strikes me as very strange, even for Lord Muscrow."
"I only do what I'm told," answered Sand. He gestured with the great seal of Muscrow scepter.
"We're to put this trussed-up human female in here and then cast off?" said the captain. "We're to stop five miles downstream and I'm then to turn the ship over to you? It all seems very strange."
"That bed there will do," said Sand, indicating the large silk-canopied bed. "I suggest we depart now and not anger Lord Muscrow."
There was the sound of running in the corridor. "Yoo hoo, captain," called a rough lion voice.
"Coming." The captain scowled at Sand. "Very strange."
Sand walked the captain to the door. The overseer of the oarsmen was in the corridor, nervously stropping his whip across one paw. "Captain, there's some trouble with the galley slaves."
"Well, whip them and let's get going."
"One of them insists he's on a hunger strike."
"How can he be on a hunger strike? We haven't even fed them today."
"It's that sophisticated human-type galley slave we just bought," said the overseer. "I had my reservations about him from the start. Too talky and too chubby. Doesn't even know his name. Sometimes he's Ralph and sometimes he's Mort."
"Ralph or Mort," said the captain, "flog the fellow. Then get the ship under way. We have Lord Muscrow's latest whims to satisfy."
Sand said, "A human calling himself both Ralph and Mort?"
"Chubby," said the overseer. "We purchased him a day or so ago while down in Port Nariz. He talks too much for an oarsman."
"Unchain him and have him brought here at once," said Sand. "I do believe this must be the very man Lord Muscrow asked me to locate for him."
"I vow Lord Muscrow grows more whimsical each day," said the captain.
"So many years," said Sand. "So many wives. They both take their toll."
"That's true enough," agreed the overseer.
The captain roared to himself softly and pawed his whiskers. "Human females tied up in the bed chambers, young whelps in command, slaves in the parlor. It's all very strange. All right, bring the fellow here." He scowled at Sand and stalked off.
"Some people," confided the overseer, "never completely take to the life upon the rolling sea. I'll fetch your talky slavey for you."
THE CHUBBY Political Espionage Office agent took another slow drink of white wine. The galley was moving away from Leodoro now. "Who did you say you were?" he asked in his high Ralph voice.
The medallion glowed for a moment against his chest and Sand stopped being a lion man and was himself again. "Sand," he said.
The sweaty and bruised PEO agent sat up straight.
"John Wesley Sand." He sighed and tried a bit more wine. "Didn't I tell you when I hired you that this was a strange planet? You a lion man, me a galley slave."
"How?"
"Intrigue," said the agent, using his deeper Mort voice now. "This fatso nitwit walked right into it. A couple of fellows claiming to be agents of Governor Peaquill gave me a tip that I ought to go to a certain cafe in Delfin. With my old body I could have fought my way out. This chubby carcass wasn't up to it, though, and I got shanghaied." The Ralph voice took over. "They really are working for the governor, John, the two who set us up. I'm certain. Which means the governor himself is involved in this, in the kidnapping and the robot pirate attacks. Involved in the disappearance of our other PEO agents, too."
"Right." Sand watched the afternoon through a porthole. "They tried to do me in a couple of times." He put his lean hands together, cracking his knuckles. "Governor Peaquill was in on the original kidnapping I'm sure. Meaning it was a fake. Then his treasurer, old Hoffning, tried a plot of his own. He and Priceless Rorollo found out about the fake kidnapping and highjacked it. Took the ransom and Jenna Peaquill. The money they kept and the girl they were apparently planning to sell to a slave trader for an extra profit."
"A good virgin will bring around five thousand in the better slave markets now," said the chubby agent. "Where is Jenna Peaquill?"
Sand pointed a thumb at the bedchamber's thick oaken door. "I got her back from Hoffning." He walked toward the door. "We'll be stopping when we're a safe distance from Leodoro. I've got some guys working for me and I prearranged to meet them in the woods inland when and if I got out of the lion town. We'll pick them up, keep this galley and go to Port Nariz."
"Why the boat?"
"Decoy," said Sand. "I'll talk the rest of this business over with you after I see what Jenna knows. You can wait out here and rest up." He turned the doorknob.
The governor's daughter smashed a fine china plate. She threw a six-piece silver place setting out the nearest porthole. She smiled, dimpling, at Sand. "I'm very angry," she announced. Grabbing it with both thumbs and forefingers, she yanked the tablecloth off the table. Vases and plates and silver and flowers cascaded all around her on the bedchamber floor. "When I'm angry I'm quite physical."
"Being kidnapped twice," said Sand, sitting on the silk bedspread, "would anger anyone."
"It was only once." The girl jumped double-footed on the fallen flowers and glassware. "You must know that, working for father as you do."
Sand said, "Governor Peaquill, and Peter Pembrose, arranged the first kidnapping then?"
"Yes, yes," said the small, dimpled blonde girl. She made her little hands into fists and began punching holes in the ancestral portraits on the wall. As her right fist rent a hole in a priestly lion man, she said, "Father is up to his ears in debt and Peter throws money hither and yon, too. Though not much on girls. No, he's too busy with graft and mechanics to pay much attention to somebody coming to full flower right under his nose." She had two of the gold-framed ancestral paintings off the wall and was wapping them together like cymbals. "They make me so mad. Getting me all mixed up with authentic kidnappers and worse. And that smarmy old twit Hoffning. Have you ever had your knee stroked by an asthmatic old man with palsy?"
"Once in the fifth grade on Murdstone," said Sand. "So your father and Pembrose set up the fake kidnapping. Partly as a diversion and partly because they could use the ransom they'd divert from public funds. But then Hoffning and Priceless Rorollo found out and managed to construct a counter kidnapping."
"Dragged me through miles and miles of awful countryside, they and their minions did." The angry girl tossed both paintings aside and then kicked the table. "Not one of them good-looking or attractive either. At least Peter designs his pirates to be handsome, some of them. At least virile if not out and out handsome."
Sand watched her throw a silver teapot out the porthole. The galley was moving rapidly down river now. "Peter Pembrose is Master Clockwork then?"
"Of course, of course." Jenna kicked the table again, saying, "Ouch, ouch." Her blonde hair was hanging loose to her shoulders. "That's what makes me so angry, John. You did say your name was John?"
Sand nodded, still sitting and watching the angry girl. "Where does Peter Pembrose have his robot factory? Not in the capital?"
"No, no. On Cayora Island."
"Cayora Island?"
"That's the island Peter and father own. It's all shrouded in mist half the time and about thirty miles from Port Nariz. Peter has a chateau there and controls all his mechanical clunks from there. He builds them there, too, in some ramshackle sheds that smell of grease and seaweed." She ran one pale hand through her hair. "I shouldn't be telling you all this perhaps. Except I'm so mad at them for letting me get really and actually kidnapped after guaranteeing me the whole venture would work smoothly."
"You've been to Cayora Island then?"
"Yes, yes. Dozens of times. Peter spent a good part of last year there and since that was when I was mooning over him I got father to allow me to visit the pirate works and the Master Clockwork chateau and all I could even draw you a map of the place."
"Could you?"
"And I might." She had stopped acting angry and was standing quite near him. "Of all the men and machines I've run into these past two weeks, you're the best-looking by far. I don't see why you ever wanted to go around disguised as a lion man. You look much better this way."
"It was expedient."
"You didn't get the impression just now that I was in any way angry at you specifically I hope?"
"Not at all."
"I'm awfully angry at a lot of people, but you, John, are the one person I'm not angry at."
"Good," said Sand.
DEHNER SMOOTHED the map out on the round wood table, pushing aside his tankard of ale. "Cayora Island," he said. "Yes, I've heard of it. Though the island has supposedly been uninhabited for nearly a decade."
"Master Clockwork has his factory and control system there," said Sand, tapping the map the governor's daughter had drawn for him that afternoon.
It was raining tonight in Port Nariz and the wind threw rain drops and tatters of mist against the leaded windows of the small tavern Sand and the author were in. Across the brown shadowy room an old woman was drawing a fresh tankard of ale from a keg. "This foul weather reminds me," said the old woman, "of the night the General Furtado went down with all hands. It was sixty-three years ago, if it was a day. You wouldn't remember that." She brought the ale across the otherwise empty tavern and set it near Sand's hand. "I'm sure Tony is too kind to have mentioned it, but I'm over a hundred years old. And I have total recall. That can be a fearful thing when you've got a hundred years of memories to work with." She tapped the side of her old head. "Would you care to hear a few selected weeks of reminiscences?"
"No," said Sand.
The old woman tapped her temple again. "They're all up here. The pageantry of history, the rich tapestry of the past. Triumphs and tragedies." Her white hair fell off and came to rest on Dehner's left knee.
He returned it to her. "Mother Ferguson, we'll delight in your remembrances on some other occasion. Now we must talk privately."
Mother Ferguson put her hair back on. "I can remember not only the great events of the past, but the minor events as well. I can remember, for instance, every head cold I ever had."
Two whalers pushed in out of the rain. They sat at a far table and the swarthiest called out, "Grog."
The old woman left to serve the whalers and Dehner said, "You believe the governor's agents are still in Port Nariz?"
"They got the information that Jenna was to be brought here by torturing Marcus," said Sand. "They ought to believe it."
Dehner drank slowly from his tankard, glancing at the tavern door. "This secret agent friend of yours, this Political Espionage Office composite. Do you think he's in any shape to do what you've put him to doing?"
"Yes," said Sand. "He's got Hubley to help him. If the governor's agents are still here in town, Ralph and Hubley will find them."
"Or get shanghaied again."
"I've known Ralph for awhile and this was the first time he's ever been waylaid and sold into slavery."
"Perhaps he never had the opportunity before."
"He'll do okay."
"I'd feel more secure if Lemkerr were accompanying them," said Dehner. "But he's needed in the harbor to watch over our borrowed galley."
"And our rescued Jenna Peaquill."
Dehner finished his ale and sat with his large hands circling the empty tankard. "I think you're paying the oarsmen too much."
Sand shrugged. "It's a potentially hazardous job they'll have to do."
"So," said Dehner, "should your PEO friend and young Hubley locate the two governor's men, you'll present yourself to them?"
"Right," said Sand. "And convince them that I'm aware they're working for the governor and unaware they've been trying to kill me. Then I give them our fake story."
"Remember that these men are assassins."
"This far they haven't been too effective," said Sand. "At least, not in my case."
"You'll have to use considerable guile."
"I'm going to flimflam them, yes," said Sand. "These two are in contact with Master Clockwork. If they can be convinced that our galley is heading for a slave port with a great quantity of Hoffning's stolen loot and money aboard, it should prompt a pirate attack. Once the attack is under way I can slip onto Cayora Island."
"You have only this dimpled young girl's account to go on, John," said Dehner, "as to the number of automatons Master Clockwork has actually built. And only her word that when his pirate galleon is on the sea most of his robots are aboard."
"That's right." Sand slid his untouched tankard across to the author.
"Oh, my. Thank you. I was anxious for another ale but didn't want to unloose another flood of memory from Mother Ferguson." He sampled the new ale. "I appreciate, by the way, your suggesting that the Political Espionage Office pay me a bonus, a sort of reward fee."
"Well, we've saved the governor's daughter," said Sand. "We're likely to catch Master Clockwork and his pirates. That in turn will topple the government of the Calandara Territory. It's worth a little extra money."
Rain and mist rushed in at the open door. Hubley came running in out of the wet night. He poked Sand in the arm, grinning. "Found them, Sand. At one of the bordellos built on pilings over the bay. Mort is staying in an alley in case they move on."
"I'll go talk to them," said Sand.
"I hope they're sufficiently gullible," said Dehner.
They were.
SAND BEACHED his skiff on the misted beach. This was a narrow rocky stretch behind and distant from Master Clockwork's chateau. The chill of the gray water and the sharpness of the thick fog needled his bones and poked at the outline of his skull. Sand rested for a moment, crouching on the shore. There was only the sound of the misted water sizzling around the rocks and brushing at the gruff sand. Far off and high up, gulls called, lost in the spinning mist.
Sand stretched upright, working the chill out of himself. The black cliffside rose two hundred feet above him, but slanted slightly, and was dotted with strong scrub brush. It could be climbed. Rubbing his hands together once, Sand moved toward the cliff and began his ascent. Small spiky-backed slugs were climbing the rocks, too. Occasionally one crawled over Sand, doing him no harm. The brush was a foggy brown in color and tough enough to hold Sand's weight as he pulled himself upwards. Mist was spiraling up from the sea and seemed now to be also pouring down on him from over the lip of the black cliff above.
When Sand reached the top he sat and listened. The slithering of the spiky slugs, which he'd grown familiar with during his climb, and the fretful calls of the unseen gulls were all he heard. The island up here was thick with low stunted trees, their twisted branches a record of harsh winds and heavy mists. Sand jumped up suddenly, reaching for the dagger at his side. Someone was standing in the woods watching him.
"I thought you might wish this," said Bethanne. She was dressed in the same dark and simple fashion as before. Floating in front of her, not quite held in one slender hand, was a long deep blue cloak.
Sand made his way over the rocky ground to her. His voice was mist when he spoke. "You're still at home, a mile down?"
"Yes," replied the sorcerer's daughter. "My concern for you continues, even after the way you carried on with the kidnap victim, poor child. I would have guessed that being a prisoner for days and being carried through the wildest parts of Calandara would be a certain way to lose weight. But Jenna, especially with her garments off, is still quite a plump little thing, isn't she?"
Sand jabbed a long finger at the cloak. It felt real and substantial. "What's this?"
"A magic cloak," explained the image of the dark slender young girl. "I hope it fits you. It's one of my father's and it may be a little large."
"Why do you think I need a sorcerer's cloak?"
"This particular magical vestment will turn you invisible," said Bethanne. "You'll find that even though Master Clockwork is dispatching his galleon full of pirates to intercept your stalking horse of a galley, Sand, he still has near a dozen of his infernal machines remaining on guard around his chateau. Your plump Jenna underestimated the number of mechanisms here by a good dozen or more."
Sand inhaled, exhaled, looked back at the edge of the black cliff, narrowed his left eye. "Being invisible, I can get around the mechanical pirates."
"Yes, they have very limited sensory equipment," said the girl. "Not that you couldn't use cunning, as you did in appropriating Lord Muscrow's lovely ship, to intrude yourself into Master Clockwork's eyrie." Bethanne smiled her shy smile. "I thought, however, you might prefer to save time and avoid possible harm."
Sand frowned at the cloak and then took hold of it. "Invisible, huh?"
"Completely," said Bethanne. "Once you put it on, fasten it and tap the uppermost clasp thrice."
"Okay." Sand put the cloak on as the lovely girl had suggested. When he tapped the clasp the third time Bethanne herself vanished. Sand took a back step, held out his cloaked arm and noticed it was not there. He bent down, standing wide-legged. He was invisible. He gave a slight invisible shrug and headed toward the distant chateau of Master Clockwork.
STANDING in the vast yellow stone courtyard of the chateau were two mechanical pirates. One stood near the arched entryway of the courtyard wall and one stood at the foot of the stairway leading up to the carved oak doors. The pirate near the archway had a gold cloth wrapped around his head and a silver ring in his left ear. He was bare-chested, wearing tattered white pantaloons and heavy boots. His right hand rested on the hilt of a sword and there was a pistol thrust in his gold sash. A small pool of rainbowed machine oil was spreading out from beneath his left foot. The robot at the stairway was seven feet high and full-bearded. He wore a black greatcoat and pantaloons and was dotted all over with gold buttons. A long pike staff was held at ease in his right hand.
Mist was swooping down over the turrets and towers of the sprawling chateau. Sand waited a moment at the archway, watching the two robots. Neither took any notice of him. He stepped through into the courtyard, moving silently across the misty stones. Another archway cut off to the left of the main building. Sand, effectively invisible, went to that arch and skulked along its covered passway.
Leaning at the stone tunnel's other end was a third mechanical man. His big red-scarfed head was humming faintly and now and then, at irregular intervals; pungent black smoke puffed out of his ears. The two heavy brass earrings he wore quivered continually and the cutlass in his right fist rattled against the sweaty stones at his side. Sand sucked himself in even leaner and moved, unseen and unnoticed, by the pirate.
There was a smaller courtyard here. Three sooty lambs were nibbling at the grass at its forest-facing end. Light glowed at an open door and the smell of the midday meal being prepared came drifting out into the morning mist. Sand climbed the nine stone steps that took him to the doorway and entered the chateau. A large beam-ceilinged kitchen opened off on his right. A fat human chef was ladling cocoa out of a cauldron on his claw-footed iron stove. Two cocoa mugs rested on a tray held by a robot pirate. A black hatted, red-bearded giant in a scarlet suit.
"Stand still, stop jiggling, you rogue," said the chef.
"Avast," replied the pirate in a rumbling voice.
"Yes, to be sure. Now avast yourself up to the master's tower while the morning cocoa is still hot and scalding as he favors it."
"Belay," replied the mechanical pirate and wheeled about, weaving slightly, and coming straight at Sand.
Sand jumped out of the way and then followed the pirate up through the stone corridors of Master Clockwork's chateau. The heat of the big kitchen soon faded away behind them and the upward corkscrewing hallways grew cold and mildew-smelling. Black splotches of mildew were taking over the faded tapestries that hung, sagging, on the high stone walls. Fat blue spiders swung from the dark ceiling beams, building traps out of webbing and dust. Black-winged flies hummed and buzzed down to dance on the rims of the two steaming cups. The robot flicked a giant forefinger at a fly and chipped a notch out of a mug rim.
At a door carved to resemble a great clock face the pirate stopped and knocked. His fist hit so hard it broke off the carved numerals for three o'clock. He was stooped picking them up, sloshing hot cocoa, when Peter Pembrose himself yanked the door open inward. "Hot cocoa coming aboard, captain," bellowed the pirate.
"Look at the mess you're making, Redbeard," said Pembrose. He was dressed in simple pirate clothes now himself, a loose shirt and dark trousers and boots. He wore a striped apron over the costume and this was flecked with oil spots. "I've a mind to either overhaul or junk you."
"Avast there, cap."
"Or I may simply throw your switch and turn you off for awhile," said Pembrose. "How would you like that?"
"I wouldn't. Master Clockwork," said the robot, handing Pembrose the tray. "I sincerely hope you won't take my rough seaman's jests in the wrong spirit."
"Go away then."
Sand slipped in alongside Redbeard and as the pirate bowed and retreated Sand ducked into the study before Pembrose could slam the door.
"I hope they remembered to float a marshmallow in mine," said the governor's secret agent who was sitting, legs crossed, in a leather chair. His name was Igualdo and he was one of the two men Sand had given his false story to. "I truly love hot cocoa with a marshmallow melting in it."
"This is a wild, storm-tossed island, you twit," said Pembrose. "I don't stock marshmallows."
"What's the use of plundering if you can't have a few luxuries such as marshmallows," said the fat Igualdo, taking his cup of cocoa from the proffered tray. "Were I looting on the scale you and the good governor are, I'd have lots and lots of little amenities. Gumdrops are nice, for instance, and caramels. Divinity fudge."
"The governor has many debts to pay," said Pembrose. "We would eventually, as well, like to balance the territory's books."
"Can't you blame all that on old Hoffning?" asked the agent. "Imagine that old curmudgeon masterminding the whole counterplot. When I strangled Marcus the innkeeper he gasped out not one word about Hoffning. I still can't decide whether he was loyal or ill-informed. He screamed a great deal under torture, so I assumed I got all the information he had."
Pembrose strode to one of the room's many round windows. Sipping the hot cocoa in short, silent sips, he watched in the direction of the chief harbor of his island. Nothing was to be seen down there except fog. From a large mechanism across the room a beeping began. "Finally underway," said Pembrose. "Six live crewmen plus a live captain and still the galleon lumbers."
He crossed and sat in a carved chair facing a great wide console. The mechanism was black, resembling in shape a lopsided and eccentric pipeorgan. It was rich with dials and gauges, switches and toggles. Pembrose rested thin fingers on the faces of several dials in turn. "We should intercept that galley in two hours, Igualdo, provided your information is accurate."
"Oh, the information is correct, Master Clockwork," said igualdo, who was sniffing at his cocoa. "They didn't put any cinnamon in this either. You really do rough it here on Cayora. No, you needn't fear. We were subtle with that young dolt. John Edgley Sand or whatever he calls himself."
"He should be dead," said Pembrose. "Yet my pirates missed him on the merchant ship and your lady bandit friends couldn't hold. I should simply have cut his throat then, when I was Birdsmith."
"Don't you prefer not to kill Political Espionage agents?"
"Sand is only a mercenary. Well, no matter. We'll get him the next time he crosses our path."
Igualdo tasted his cocoa. "This is vile. How can you put up with this sort of life?"
"I'm only here intermittently. There are two others, here and in the capital, whom I've taught to operate all this." He waved at the control panels.
"Could you," asked the governor's agent, "really just turn one of these fellows off. This Redbeard, for instance, who brought us such vile cocoa?"
Pembrose said, "My remote control system is not as complex as the ones I remember from other Barnum planets I visited in my youth. As you know, the smuggled android plans and parts we were finally able to buy are not the most up to date."
"More than sufficient for Esmeralda," said the fat Igualdo. "Your pirates have earned us all a good piece of coin. Your activities as Master Clockwork have more than paid back the original investment in parts and equipment."
Pembrose sighed. "If I could but convince Peaquill to resist the gaming tables. Well. What was it you asked me?"
"About how to turn off the robots from here," said Sand. He was standing, invisible, directly behind the relaxing Igualdo.
Pembrose explained, "This row of four dozen switches here does it. They are the basic activating switches, one for each pirate. At the moment I have only forty of them in operation."
Sand reached around and took the cocoa mug away from Igualdo, at the same time giving the fat man three hard chops at the side of the neck. Igualdo made a deflating sound and sank down some. Setting the mug aside on a table top, Sand started for Pembrose.
Igualdo expelled more breath and tumbled fully off his chair, spine end first. His right boot caught in Sand's cloak and hooked in the hem. The unconscious agent went sliding across the flooring, between Sand's legs. This ripped the cloak from off Sand.
"Whatever are you—?" Pembrose looked back away from his dials and saw Sand. "Ah, the mercenary."
Sand let the now valueless cloak drop completely away. It fell over the sprawled Igualdo. "Master Clockwork," replied Sand.
"Yes." Pembrose grasped a short sword from atop the control console and came bounding for Sand. "You've avoided having your throat cut much too long, Sand."
Igualdo moaned and wrapped himself in the magic cloak. He was on his elbows, struggling to rise. Instead he slumped again and crawled. When he was settled on the floor again the cloak completely covered him and he became suddenly invisible.
Sand drew his dagger and circled the room.
The fat agent, unseen, groaned and made thrashing sounds. Then was silent.
Pembrose moved more cautiously, trying to avoid the invisible Igualdo. But he walked right into the crawling fat man and tripped. His sword arm bumped against a chair and the weapon clattered away free.
Sand leaped and stepped on it. When Pembrose began to rise, Sand hit him hard three times in the jaw. "I thought that cloak only worked if you tapped three times on the clasp," he reflected as Master Clockwork fell unconscious over the unseen Igualdo. He seemed to float, awkwardly bent, two feet above the tile floor and small rich throw rugs.
After tying Pembrose with coils of wire he found in a cupboard, Sand uncloaked Igualdo and tied him similarly. He then went to the control panel and clicked off all forty of the robot master switches that had been on.
Sand ran to a window which gave him a view, though vague in the mist, of the courtyard below. The robot he could see was slumped and appeared about to topple over.
Leaving the two tied men in Master Clockwork's study, Sand went carefully back downstairs. He surprised the fat chef and tied him up in a pantry closet. After making sure that none of the robots was now functioning, Sand headed for the central beach. Hung over his right arm was the now visible sorcerer's cloak.
Sand sat on a cluster of rocks overlooking the main harbor, awaiting the arrival of Dehner and the others in the borrowed galley. He anticipated they'd have little trouble overcoming the galleon and returning here with it now that the pirate ship's robots were not working.
While he waited the mist cleared some and then Bethanne appeared once more. "I do hope you didn't mind my interfering to the extent of making that gross Igualdo invisible for a few moments, Sand." She was standing at the water's edge.
"You saved me a fight."
"You have now finished the mission you were hired for?"
"More or less," said Sand.
The lovely girl said, "Do you intend to stay on here, on this planet?"
Sand answered, "No."
"I had hoped you might attempt to brave the rigors of the Moranga Mountains," said the sorcerer's daughter. "Face the wrath of my father and the impediments that might be placed in your path. I had hoped you might pay me a visit."
Sand watched the image of the lovely girl. "I'll probably stay on Esmeralda another week or so. If you leave your mile-down castle, come and see me."
"No, it would go against my father's wishes to do that," said the lovely girl. "Though I still see no reason why you can not journey to see me."
Sand held out the cloak to her. "Sometime, maybe, you will."
The dark cloak floated in the misty air between them and then vanished. And Bethanne with it.
Sand remained sitting on the rocks until he sighted the galley in the now clear afternoon sea. They had the pirate galleon in tow. He walked down to the water's edge and waved.
With his left hand he took off the medallion. He held it in his palm several long seconds and then flung it toward the sea. The medallion rose high, flashed in the new sunlight, and then fell and sank into the blue water.