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Chapter 2

"Murder is merely a passion, but slaughter is an art."

—Conrad Bland

 

It was not, at first glance, all that odd a world.

Jericho had prepared for it as best he could. The physical portion was easy, consisting of simply adjusting the ship's systems to give him the feel of the lighter gravity and somewhat higher oxygen content of Walpurgis, so that he could maneuver on the planet without giving himself away through a sudden unexpected show of strength or agility, or by the slow intoxication that occasionally overtook a body unused to the enriched atmosphere.

He spent three weeks reading everything he could find on the various cults and covens of Earth prior to their departure for Walpurgis III 123 years ago—but since societies were living, evolving things, he had the feeling that his information would be, for the most part, outdated and archaic.

When his preparations were complete, he proceeded to the next stage of his plan. Replacement ships were continually joining the cordon of Republic vessels blockading Walpurgis, and one of those ships, within three days of taking up its position, found its orbit decaying and had to set down on the planet for minor repairs. No member of the crew had been aware of Jericho's presence on board the ship; none knew that the malfunction was carefully calculated to allow them to land in the southern hemisphere; no one saw him leave the ship shortly after nightfall.

A major city lay adjacent to the spaceport, and using the cover of night he made a quick but expert tour of the nearest shopping center. Once he had determined from examining various window displays that the local clothing bore no symbols of rank, class, or occupation, he methodically looted four haberdasheries, taking a shirt from one, pants from another, an outer jacket from a third, and shoes, socks, and cash from a fourth. Though he was certain that no one had seen him leave the spaceport, he also changed his appearance from that of a pudgy blond man in his early thirties to a somewhat slimmer man of about fifty. Since he couldn't be sure of the local hair styles—store mannequins were frequently out of date—he decided that it would be best to give himself a sparse, thinning head of hair, receding in the front, balding at the back, light brown on top and gray at the sides. He decided against a mustache or beard, but gave himself an impressive scar extending from his upper lip to his jaw, just in case he needed an excuse for his bare face.

Feeling himself to be relatively safe from immediate detection, he took a second, slower tour of the area, trying to get the feel of the place, and walking toward what he took to be the center of the city. There were a number of stores specializing in this world's equivalent of religious tokens and charms, and a few more herb shops and palmists and phrenologists than he would expect to see in a normal Republic city of comparable size. Many of the shops selling what he considered to be "normal" goods—clothing, groceries, hardware, and the like—had cabalistic designs painted or etched on their windows, and almost all of them had small charms and amulets in among their merchandise. None of them, however, were advertising cut-rate surefire curse removals or virgins for sacrifice, and this disturbed him. It would be far easier to infiltrate a society so new that it still belligerently exhibited and commercialized the signs of its beliefs than to pass unnoticed in a society where those beliefs were so commonly held that the tokens became unimportant.

Suddenly he heard voices off to his left, and he quickly ducked into a recessed doorway. A moment later a number of bare-breasted women, dressed uniformly in shoulder-length gloves and thigh-high boots made of rubber, walked past him, moaning and chanting what seemed to be a prayer, though the language was unfamiliar. Two of them carried a small litter between them, and on it sprawled the body of a dead cat which had evidently been crushed by some type of vehicle.

That it was a funeral procession for a familiar, in the form of a cat, seemed obvious. As for the clothing of the mourners, he could make no sense of it—or of its failure to attract any masculine attention.

He walked another block, then again ducked out of sight as two hooded figures, clad totally in black, approached him in the company of three men wearing what he took to be standard business suits. They seemed to be having a vigorous but good-natured discussion about some sporting event or other, but he couldn't catch the details. None of them seemed to be aware of the incongruity of their outfits.

He continued walking, observing and making mental notes about the city. It was starting to show its age in places, despite the obvious care taken by its sanitation department. The streets were devoid of dirt and litter, the smooth sidewalks glistened as if they had been polished, trash atomizers were on every corner—but here and there were the signs of deterioration: level upon level of patchwork placed over pothole-prone sections of the street, a building in need of sandblasting, a small shop between two large office buildings obviously being allowed to run down so that it could be condemned and replaced by still another steel-and-glass tower of enterprise.

As he walked along he passed a number of churches, most of them mock-Gothic in architectural style, each with goats grazing on its lawn. He thought he heard screams and moans coming from one of them, and he actually did see a few nude bodies doing a frantic dance through the window of another, but he had no intention of inspecting them more closely until he knew more about the customs of the planet. One rather small church, perched at the top of a slight incline, actually had a circle of fire around its doorway, through which the congregants presumably had to leap in order to pay homage to their particular god or demon.

He realized that he was still a couple of miles from the heart of the city, and he reached it just before dawn. When the businesses began opening a few hours after sunrise, he decided to buy a local newspaper. He passed five vending machines, ascertained to his relief that he was indeed in Amaymon, and not wishing to draw attention to himself by inserting the wrong coin, sought out a human-operated newsstand, preferring an excessive amount of change to the possibility of underpaying from ignorance.

He stopped next at a seedy-looking restaurant, had some coffee and an odd-tasting roll, and decided that finding lodgings was his next order of business. He avoided the larger hotels, since he didn't know what kind of identification or credit information they would require. He would have much preferred a rented room in a private home, but he was too unfamiliar with the city and felt that the sight of a strange man wandering through a residential area was far more likely to draw unwanted attention than he would receive if he remained in the business section. He walked a few blocks until the surroundings grew a bit more squalid, then entered the lobby of a particularly dismal-looking hotel, the type which in most societies would have rented its rooms by the hour rather than the night.

"Name?" said the bored desk clerk.

Jericho looked around to make sure the lobby was empty.

"Conrad Bland," he said, watching for a reaction.

"Don't tell me, feller," said the clerk, shoving a book toward him without any hint of recognition. "Write it down here."

Jericho picked up a pen and scribbled the name so badly that a score of handwriting experts could spend days trying to decipher it without success.

"Any luggage?" asked the clerk.

"Just what I'm wearing."

"Right," said the clerk, unsurprised. He handed Jericho a small slip of paper with the room combination written on it. "Do you belong to the Cult of the Messenger or the Church of Baal?"

Jericho shook his head.

"Okay. If you belong to any other cult or sect requiring the sacrifice of living animals, you must inform the management and a stipend will be appended to your bill. You don't look like you've got any candles with you, but if you decide to go out and get some, we allow cold candles only. No hots. Got it?"

"Got it," replied Jericho. "Where's my room?"

"I'm not through yet," said the clerk irritably. "Any charms attached to the walls in a manner that the management considers permanent will become the property of the hotel. Any ritual weapons found in your room by the maids will become the property of the hotel. No visitors of either sex are allowed after midnight. And we demand a week's rent in advance."

"What if I don't stay a week?" said Jericho, certain that this reaction was expected of him.

"Then you apply for a refund," said the clerk.

"I don't like it," grumbled Jericho.

"No one pulled you in off the street," said the clerk. "You don't like it, all you got to do is turn around and walk out."

Jericho glared at the man for a long minute. "How much?" he asked at last.

The clerk smiled. It was the grin of a man who played this scene out several times every day and knew both ends of the dialogue by rote. "Seventy sterlings," he said, holding out a huge hand.

Jericho turned his back and pulled out a handful of bills, checking the denominations and handing the proper amount over to the clerk. He allowed the clerk a long look at his bankroll.

"That's a fair-sized wad you got there," commented the clerk, staring intently at him. "Nice new clothes, too."

"I got lucky," replied Jericho, again watching for a reaction.

"If it starts burning a hole in your pocket, I might know a couple of interesting places to spend it," said the clerk. "For a small consideration, of course."

"Perhaps later," said Jericho. "How about my room?"

"Three-ten," said the clerk. "Up three flights and down the corridor. The lift is broken; you'll have to take the stairs."

Jericho nodded. A quick glance at the elevator convinced him that it had been in a state of disrepair for months, probably years, and he walked over to a concrete staircase. A moment later he had reached his room, punched out the combination on the computer lock, and entered.

It was a dingy, barren room, pentagonal, as he suspected all of them were. It possessed a narrow bed with a stain on the spread, a much abused dresser, one chair, and a nightstand. He pulled out the top drawer of the dresser, hoping for a phone book, but found only a throwaway pack of tarot cards and a cheaply bound copy of the Malleus Maleficarum, an ancient grimoire dating back to the days when Man was still Earthbound. There was no phone, no video set, no radio, nothing that he could possibly use to gain a further working knowledge of the world. The bathroom contained a small chemical commode and dryshower of the type used on spaceships, but he couldn't tell if water was especially hard to come by or if the hotel was simply too cheap to pipe it in.

Having examined the premises thoroughly, he returned to the bed, sat down on the edge of it, and began reading the newspaper he had purchased. It was thin, too thin to service a major city, which implied that most of the news was disseminated through newstapes and discs or by means of video transmissions. It also meant that he would get only major news stories rather than the local color he was after.

The lead story concerned the economy, which was growing a little too erratically to suit those who controlled it. Also on the front page was an editorial which managed to castigate the Republic thoroughly for eleven paragraphs without ever once mentioning Conrad Bland. The third page made brief mention that the Brotherhood of Night and the Cult of the Messenger had both closed their branches in the city of Tifereth, and a quick check of the financial page showed that the Tifereth commodities market had ceased trading almost a month ago, ostensibly because of a major decline in volume.

Possibly the city had fallen on hard financial times. Possibly it was due to Bland. He couldn't tell based on such minimal information, but he put a visit to Tifereth on his list of priorities.

The clerk and the news story had both mentioned a number of cults, and, on a hunch, he turned to the advertisements listing the local churches. It was as he had feared. There was no one religion whose tenets he could quickly assimilate. Rather, there were such sects as the Cult of the Messenger, the Church of the Inferno, the Daughters of Delight, the Church of Baal, the Order of the Golem, the Sisterhood of Sin, the Church of Satan, and literally dozens more, almost as many splinter groups as Christianity had possessed in its heyday.

He sighed. There was more to this world than met the eye. Intermixed with ads for furniture and clothing and real estate were occasional ads selling protection against both good and evil forces, ads for amulets, for voodoo dolls and love potions and immortality elixirs.

When he had finished with the advertisements and notices, and had thus obtained a reasonable approximation of the value of his money, he went through the paper thoroughly to see if his thefts had been reported, though he suspected it had been printed too early to cover them. He was correct, but in the process of looking for the stories he made another discovery: not a single crime had been written up. He couldn't believe that a city of Amaymon's size, which he estimated to be well over a quarter of a million, could go through an entire day without its share of murders, robberies, and rapes, especially on a world that had a religious passion for such things. This implied one of two things: either the news was being carefully managed, or else the concept of crime had undergone an almost unbelievable metamorphosis on Walpurgis.

He suspected the former. No matter how much lip service Walpurgis paid to the concept of evil, no society could ignore felonies without falling into anarchy; and while he could only guess at the framework of this society, anarchy was the one thing he had seen no trace of.

Still, censored news could work to his advantage. If Bland was entrenched solidly enough to make the civil government ask for help in eliminating him, there was no way that Jericho was going to be able to march into his headquarters, wherever they might be, and simply gun the man down. Bland would have layer upon layer of protection, or else he wouldn't have survived long enough to get to Walpurgis. Which in turn meant that Jericho would have to approach Bland indirectly. He didn't know how long he could hide his presence, and it was at least comforting to know that in all likelihood the government would make no more mention of his actions than he himself would.

Having learned everything he could from the paper, he cast it aside, stretched out on the bed, and went to sleep.

It was just after sunset when he arose. He showered, shaved, put on his identity, and went out of the hotel for dinner. He chose a restaurant frequented by people who were dressed like himself and spent some time studying the menu. After he had eaten he again walked through the city, listening to snatches of conversation, and then went to a Tri-Fi cinema. If he had hoped to learn something about Walpurgis he was disappointed, for it was a conventional love story during which the audience laughed hysterically every time the heroine made some sacrifice to Beelzebub. He gathered that it fell into the realm of lighthearted historical romance, but be didn't dare ask anyone.

He spent the next hour checking into three more hotels, signing names he had memorized from the Tri-Fi's credits at each. He returned to his original hotel and emerged ten minutes later as a middle-aged and semi-obese man with close-cropped red hair. In this guise he visited two bars about a mile from the hotel, got himself thrown out of both for unruly conduct, and then lumbered into an all-night restaurant, ostensibly for black coffee. When he left half an hour later he had a steak knife tucked under his belt.

Then, because he had to learn more about the police and their efficacy, he went hunting. Two blocks from the restaurant he spotted his prey, a mild-looking man in his late fifties, who was walking along the sidewalk alone and unconcerned.

Jericho fell into step behind him like some awful jungle animal that had marked its dinner. He didn't hurry, never seemed to increase his pace, often appeared to be traveling in a different direction on the deserted streets; but slowly, inch by inch, he narrowed the gap between them with a dreadful patience. Within ten minutes they were eighty feet apart, then forty, then twenty—and then, with the swiftness and surety of a cobra, he struck.

The man never made a sound, never felt a stab of pain, never even knew his throat had been slit. He was dead almost before he hit the pavement.

And Jericho, like some besmocked technician who has added a dangerous element to a solution in a laboratory, settled back to observe what happened next.

 

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