ARMON JARLES crouched where the shadows were darkest, trying to force himself to make a plan. But the deep wrath-ray burn on his shoulder had already started a fever, so that the throbbing dance music and squealing laughter from the house behind him became an evil thing, weaving nightmarish visions in his pain-racked mind.
This was the only part of Megatheopolis where curfew violations were tolerated. This district sacred to the ministrations of the Fallen Sisters. This place of slinking forms, priests without halos, cracks of light, doors that swiftly opened and closed, whistles, whisperings, throaty greetings, and invisible merriment with overtones of a desperate melancholy. A wanly beautiful, flimsily clad girl, standing in a lighted doorway, had seen him pass. There must have been something hunted about his manner, for her eyes had, gone wide with terror and she had screamed, once again bringing pursuit down upon him.
For a moment they were off on a false scent, beating up another street. But they would be back. They would be back.
He must think of a plan.
Fever dulled hunger, but his throat was dry. Ill-made sandals cut his swollen feet. He had not realized how two years in the Sanctuary had softened him.
But other pains were nothing to the rasping of the coarse, stolen tunic against his unbandaged shoulder.
He must make a plan.
He had thought of leaving Megatheopolis. But neatly cultivated fields offered poor concealment, and if the farmers proved themselves half as hostile to him as the commoners of Megatheopolis had-
He must-
But an agonized swell in the sultry music conjured up an evil vision of his mother’s workworn face. Even now it was hard for him to realize that she had betrayed him. That his father and brother had done the same. Home. The one place where he had been sure he could find refuge. Even their obviously cold, unfriendly, panicky reaction to his sudden appearance had not put him on guard. But sidewise glances-and that matter of sending his brother off on an unexplained errand-had finally forced him to recognize the truth. Almost too late. He had barely outsped the deacons his brother had brought. That was when he had got the wrath-ray burn. It was then, too, that he had learned there was a price on his head, a price which every commoner lusted to earn.
He had had to grapple with his father and knock him down, when the old man had tried to hold him.
His mother’s shadowy face, like something seen through heat waves, seemed to leer at him in the darkness. He reached out his hand to brush it away.
Perhaps, he told himself, feeling all the while that the universe was crazily tipping, he ought to be glad they had acted as they did. It showed that deep in their beings the commoners nursed for the Hierarchy a hate almost beyond belief. A priest backed by the Hierarchy was something to fear, to fawn upon, almost to worship. But a priest whom the Hierarchy cast out-their one chance to give expression to their hatred! It was commoners who were pursuing him now. Commoners led by deacons. But commoners.
Two years ago he had passed his examinations and set out, his head crammed with determinations to improve the morality and living conditions of the commoners and to do his part in hastening the New Golden Age. He had thought of himself as helping his family. But on that same day his family had looked upon him as someone lost to them forever, as having become something more and less than a man-a priest-inhuman.
“Look! There he is!”
He shrank, blinking, from the search-beam. Pain lashed through his stiff muscles as he lunged into a run and darted up the alley across the street. A wrath ray sizzled against the far wall. Cobbles. Bite of the sandal thongs. Rasp of the tunic. His hurt arm dangling. Darkness. Rectangle of light. A woman’s painted face. Screams.
Running. Running. Running.
Sudden swell in the shouts behind him, as they reached the mouth of the alley. Violet needle of a wrath ray over his head.
But before it chopped down into him, he had swerved into the next street, crossed it, and plunged into the ruined area toward which he unconsciously had been heading. Rubble. Matted weeds. Feeling his way. Great blocks of stone and fractured plastic. Ragged wall that might have been erected before the Golden Age. Narrow, twisting spaces. Blind alleys. A maze built by the dilapidation of mighty structures.
Shouts from behind. Circle of light just above his head, against a vast, jagged block. Ducking. Wriggling. Crawling.
More shouts, very close. Panicky rush for cover. Flood of pain, like blinding light, as his burnt shoulder rammed rock. Biting his cheek to hold back the scream. Salt taste of blood. From that point onward he had no object but to burrow deeper and deeper into the ruins. Always to take the darkest and narrowest turning available. Sometimes the shouts moved away. Sometimes they drew close. That in the course of his aimless progress he would eventually crawl into the hands of his pursuers, was a fact depending on a kind of reasoning that no longer held significance for him.
It seemed to him he could still hear the dance music, throbbing in rhythm with his shoulder, screeching obscenely, wailing raucous despair. And the whole universe was dizzily swaying to the tune. He wanted to dance, too, but it hurt too much. He was someone else. He was Armon Jarles, but Armon Jarles was someone else. His father-his father was an archpriest. Those grim old arms were hugging him and would not let him go. His brother was a chubby, cooing little baby, named Brother Chulian. His mother-
A beautiful girl stood in a doorway, smiling at him, beckoning. Closer and closer he edged, his suspicions melting. Then she reached suddenly forward, and caught his hurt shoulder, and wrenched it, and from behind her poured a tide of scarlet robes. And her features grew old and workworn, and his mother, dressed in a tawdry tunic, leered at him. But her features were getting too old, much too old even for his mother. Cheeks were sinking, lips puckering, nose growing to a thin beak, chin becoming a brown knob.
“Wake up, Brother Jarles!” A cracked whisper.
Something was wrong with the face. It was real, and he did not want to look at reality now. But the hand kept hurting him. He tried to push it away, looked up, saw, in the glow of a search-beam striking above the narrow passageway, the same croneface, recognized it.
“Come with me, Brother Jarles! Come with Mother Jujy!”
Almost, he smiled.
“I’d sooner you had the reward than my father,” he murmured. A bony palm was clapped over his mouth.
“You’ll bring them down on us! Get up, Brother Jarles!
It’s not far, but we must hurry, hurry!”
It was less painful to get up than to lie there and be rugged at. After a little while he managed it, though the effort made the darkness reel dizzily and brought back the visions. As he staggered along beside her, leaning on the skinny shoulder, it seemed to him that she kept changing. First his mother. Then Sharlson Naurya. Then Mother Jujy. Then the girl in the doorway. Then his mother-
“Let me call them,” he said, smirking foolishly. “No need to look for them. Just let me call them and they’ll come. Then-just think-you’ll have the reward all to yourself. Or are you afraid they’ll cheat you out of it?”
For answer, he was rapped across the mouth with a cane.
“There he goes! There he goes! Someone with him!”
Sudden turn into a side passageway. Eager voices baying from all directions. Another sharp turn. Then he saw Mother Jujy tugging at the weeds, tilting up a whole section of them.
“In! In!”
The blow had given him a little sense. He let himself down into the black hole she had uncovered. He half-climbed, half-slipped down a short ladder, rolled away from the bottom of it, lay there.
The shouting was cut off. Pitch darkness. Silence.
After a while a light was struck, and he saw the ancient face grinning toothlessly at him over a candle flame.
“So you see how Mother Jujy claims her reward, Brother Jarles!” she cackled. She hobbled over to him and poked at his shoulder, lifting the cloth. He gritted his teeth.
“I must fix that,” she mumbled. “Fever, too. But we must go a ways first. Drink this.”
She put a little bottle to his lips. The fiery liquid made him gag and gasp.
“Burns, doesn’t it?” she observed gleefully. “Not like the wines of the Hierarchy, is it? Mother Jujy makes her own nectar. Mother Jujy has a still.”
He looked around.
“Where are we?”
“In one of the runnels of the Golden Age,” she replied. “Don’t ask me what they were for. I don’t know. But I know what they’re for now.” She giggled slyly, bobbing her head. “Just ignorant old witches! The priests know all about us! Oh, yes!”
He stared at her, puzzledly.
“Ah, don’t bother your addled wits, Brother Jarles. Just come with Mother Jujy.”
He followed her. In places the tunnel was almost whole -a circular tube of dull metal, big enough to stand in. More often it was cracked, and floored with dirt. Once or twice they passed crude shorings, obviously recent.
The trip seemed endless. Before it was over, he was very sick. His fever had gone up, fanned by exertion and perhaps by Mother Jujy’s flaming nectar.
He began to stumble. The visions came back. Only now Sharlson Naurya walked at his side, nibbling a pomegranate. They were King and Queen of Hell, making a tour of the Underworld, conducted by their prime minister, Mother Jujy, whose cane had become a staff coiled with living serpents. Behind them walked a man who was all blackness. And around their feet gamboled halfhuman little apes. Another ladder. Mother Jujy driving him up it. A narrow bed like a box with one side open. Short for him, but wonderfully soft. Against his tortured shoulder the blissful coolness of a bandage soaked with a dark, aromatic liquid. Momentary twitch of fear because he had never been doctored by anyone but a priest. The priests doctored everyone. Something warm trickling down his throat. Softness. Sleep.
His next conscious moment, omitting feverish visions with perhaps bits of reality jumbled in, began when he saw a black, blurred something squatting on the bedclothes over his feet. He concentrated on it patiently until it came into focus.
It was a large black cat, washing her paws and regarding him with a stony judiciousness. That didn’t seem right. It oughtn’t to be a cat. Mother
Jujy ought to have something small and furry and alive-but not a cat. For an interminable period, he vaguely pondered the problem. All the while he watched the cat, half expecting it would speak to him. But it only went on washing its paws and judging him dispassionately.
Gradually he became aware of his surroundings. His bed was a box, after all. A box built into the wall of a room. His view of the lower part of the room was cut off by a solid side which held in the bedclothes.
The ceiling of the room was low, with all sorts of things hanging from the rafters. He could hear a little fire singing and something bubbling in a pot. It smelled good. He tried to look over the side. That brought twinges of pain, not very bad but enough to make him catch his breath.
The old crone hobbled into sight.
“So you’re back with us again, eh? For a while Mother Jujy thought she was going to lose her little boy.”
He was still obsessed by his problem.
“Is that just a cat?” he asked weakly.
The witch’s eyes, bright in their leathery sockets, regarding him narrowly. “Course! Though she gives herself awful airs!”
“She doesn’t suck your blood?”
Mother Jujy made a contemptuous sound with her gums and tongue. “Maybe she’d like to. But just let her try!”
“But… then… are you a witch, Mother Jujy?”
“Do you think I make myself unpopular for fun?”
“But… I thought… I mean, the other witches I met-“
“Oh, them! So you’ve met some of them, eh?”
He nodded feebly. “Who are they?”
She glared at him. “You’ve asked too many questions already. Besides, it’s time for soup!”
While she was spooning hot broth into him, with the cat come up to sniff the bowl and follow the movements of the spoon, there was a knock at the door. Mother Jujy hissed, “Not a peep out of you, now!” She slid a section of the wall across the front of his box, leaving him completely in the dark. He heard a muffled flop, as if a hanging of some sort had been dropped down. The cat stood up on his chest. He could feel the pressure of the four paws, like a little table. From the room came the sounds of talk, but he could not make out what was being said. Presently the cat lay down on his good shoulder and began to purr. Jarles fell asleep. During the next few days, the section of boarding was slid in front of Jarles’ bed many times. After a while Mother Jujy omitted to drop the hanging, so he could hear fairly well what went on. He listened to the old witch dispense dubious-sounding magic and hardheaded advice to all sorts of commoners, especially girls of the Fallen Sisterhood, who couldn’t have their fortunes told often enough. He made the acquaintance, in this indirect way, of Megatheopolis’ scanty and indigent criminal class, with whom Mother Jujy seemed on suspiciously good terms. Apparently she acted as a fence.
But those were not all her visitors. Twice, deacons came. The first time, Jarles was tight with apprehension. But, strangely enough, the fellow turned out to be genuinely desirous of obtaining Mother Jujy’s sorcerous aid in winning back a girl who had been stolen from him by a priest. The second time was worse. The deacon sniffed around suspiciously, spoke meaningfully of the penalties for illicit distilling and other illegal activities, and rapped the wall in one or two places. But apparently that was merely an attempt to get services for nothing, for he finally got around to telling a story somewhat similar to that of the first deacon. Jarles was vaguely glad when he heard Mother Jujy sell him a piece of magic the performance of which would involve several toilsome and degrading actions.
And he sometimes thought of the Black Man and Sharlson Naurya, though the coven meeting now seemed almost a part of the hallucinations of his fever. But he thought about it a great deal. And he plagued Mother Jujy with questions about them, until he had wormed considerable information out of her, although he had the impression that she knew a little more about them than she would admit.
According to Mother Jujy, it was only a very few years ago that the “new witches” had first cropped up. At first she had thought that they were directly inspired by the Hierarchy, and that the priests had decided to “run us old women out of business.”
After a while she had changed her opinion of the new witches, until now she seemed to regard them as not altogether unfriendly business rivals. She admitted to certain sketchy dealings with them, though of what sort she would never tell Jarles.
As his burned shoulder healed, with a white-ridged pit in it, and his fever abated-slowly, since the marvelous restoratives of the Hierarchic physicians were lacking-Jarles mulled this information and one day he asked Mother Jujy straight out, “Why did you rescue me?”
She seemed perplexed. Then she leered at him and said, “Maybe I’m in love with you! There’s many a pretty boy Jujy helped out of scrapes and hid away when she was the sweetest little dickens in the whole sisterhood.”
After a moment she added gruffly, “Besides, you were halfway decent to me when you wore the robe.”
“But how did you ever find me? How did you happen to be there in the ruins, when they were tracking me down?”
It was merely chance, Mother Jujy told him. She had just happened to be coming out of the tunnel. Later she amended this by claiming to have had a “vision” of his predicament. He knew she was not telling the whole truth.
Late one evening he felt restless and insisted on getting out of bed and walking up and down the room, ducking and weaving around the stuff hanging from the rafters, impatient to grapple with reality. There came a knocking at the door, quite different from any of those he had learned to recognize. A lilting tattoo of rippling fingers. Grimalkin, the cat, snarled menacingly. Mother Jujy drove Jarles back into the wallbed. Then she went to the door, unbarred it, slipped outside, and closed it behind her.
It was very dark, but confronting her was a deeper darkness, manshaped.
“I see you,” she said tartly, though a little nervously, pulling her ragged shawl a little tighter against the cold. “And you needn’t go pulling tricks to show off. You can’t faze me.”
“Grimalkin knew my knock,” answered a laughing voice. “Shall I send Dickon in to play with her?”
“She’d scratch his eyes out! Creepy, crawly, snuggly, dirty-minded little brute! What do you want?”
“How is our patient?”
“Wants to get up and set the world on fire! I have to tie him down.”
“And his-education?”
“Oh, I think he’s getting a little sense. Hard knocks have a way with them. He’s tough, though. Got a slambang, dragout mind, for all he’s a gentle boy. Still, I think he’s softening toward you people-worse luck for him!”
“Good! You are too modest, though. You underestimate the influence of your companionship on him. We are much beholden to you, Mother Jujy.”
“Beholden pudding!” The old crone drew herself up, and stuck out her shriveled chin. “Listen, I’m willing to help you people now and then, because I know you’re out to get the priests. But there’s one thing I always want you to understand: I saw through you from the first. In spite of all your tricks and stunts and gibbering little monkeys, you’re not real witches!”
There was a half-pleased chuckle from the darkness. “Let us pray that the Hierarchy never achieves your penetration, Mother Jujy.”
She ignored the compliment. “You’re just fakes,” she persisted. “I’m the real witch!”
The darkness bowed. “We will not dispute the honor with you.”
“That’s right!” said Mother Jujy.