52.

Not for the first time, Beltan swam upward through the dark waters of unconsciousness, broke the viscous surface, and found himself naked and motionless upon a hard, cold slab.

He struggled for comprehension. Was this the crypt beneath Calavere where his father slept, the life stolen from him by murder? It was impossible to be certain; a fog lay before his eyes. How had he gotten there? He remembered the fire burning along his veins. Poison. Yes, she had poisoned him and had brought him here in order to turn him into a thing like herself. Kyrene.

Do not take my heart, witch!

But why did it matter if she cut the organ from his chest, if she placed in its stead a lump of cold iron? What need did he have of a heart?

You love him.

No, that was no reason; that was his usual stupidity. What did love matter? He had loved his father, King Beldreas, and what had it meant in the end? Again Beltan saw the image that had once haunted his dreams and now—because of the Necromancer Dakarreth—his waking mind: a knife sinking deep into a man’s strong, broad back, and a hand pulling away, covered with blood. Beltan’s hand. He had worshiped Beldreas, his father, and he had murdered him—stabbed him when he wasn’t looking. Wasn’t that what love always led to in the end—pain, betrayal, death?

No, it’s not the same. I only want to see Travis Wilder once. That’s all. I just want to tell him I’m sorry.

But he wouldn’t have the chance. Lady Kyrene was going to cut out his heart. And maybe it was better this way. Maybe it was better to have the thing removed than to destroy yet another who could not possibly return his love.

Except something was wrong. He had seen Kyrene die. And it was too bright here to be the crypt beneath his father’s castle. The gray was dissolving into hard, lifeless white.

A metallic click, then a voice drifted on the air: a woman’s voice, though strangely sharp and guttural.

“Subject E-2, medical log. Seven October, cassette two. Test results and duplicate blood and tissue samples have been forwarded to headquarters for analysis and verification, and we are waiting for a directive on how to proceed.

“Since yesterday, I’ve had time to review the security videotapes, and I’m convinced now that the aboriginal does not speak English. On the tape’s audio track, the subject’s speech is unintelligible. The logical explanation is that, startled by his unexpected awakening, I projected words I could understand onto the sounds the subject made. I had been on shift for thirty-six straight, and while meds can keep you going, they can do it only for so long without impairment. But I’ve had a good seven hours of real sleep since yesterday.

“All the same, on the chance the sounds made by the subject represent indigenous speech, I’ve forwarded the tape to headquarters for digitization and cross-comparison with the current known lexicon. However, I doubt they’ll find any matches. I’m sure now the subject was not speaking in any language, but merely uttering sounds of pain and fear. In the meantime, for security reasons, we are keeping Subject E-2 sedated at maximum safe levels. After such a long incapacitation, even accounting for the effects of the alternate blood serum treatment, the strength he displayed was … surprising. We’ll wake him up when we receive instructions, hopefully tomorrow. End entry.”

The light was growing brighter, resolving into shapes.

But I am awake, witch! he wanted to shout, only his jaw would not work. She had thought her poison would keep him asleep until tomorrow, yet it had not. Once before a witch had underestimated him. Kyrene. That was how he had been able to rise from the stone bier, to throw her down, and to put the torch to her.

Why was it he had twice proved a witch’s spell weaker than she had thought? He wasn’t sure, but his own mother, Elire, had been a witch after a fashion.

As a young man, before he became king, Beldreas had gone riding into the marches of western Calavan to hunt stag and had come upon Elire in the village of Berent. Her green eyes had drawn him to her bed. However, when he learned the next day that the other villagers held Elire to be the village wisewoman, he had flown into a rage. Never had the followers of Vathris been fond of witches, and Beldreas had been a warrior to the marrow.

He came upon her in the village common, and he would have struck her down in his rage had she not told him that his bastard son was already alive and quickening inside her belly. Young and hot-tempered as he was, even Beldreas would not harm a woman who was with child—his child.

However, she was still a witch, and Beldreas would have nothing to do with her. He rode back to Calavere, and Beltan had spent his first seven years in Berent with his mother. Often she made him drink bitter teas she brewed, or bade him chew on some foul-tasting piece of root that would make him go green and vomit. He never knew why. She would only tell him, It will make you strong, my little prince. But he had loved her and had never disobeyed, and when the potions made him sick, she would take his head in her lap, stroke his hair, and sing until he slept.

Then, the summer he was seven, Elire caught a fever, and while she would have tended to any villager so stricken with some of her simples, there was no one to make simples for her. Despite all she had done for them, no one in the village would lift a hand to bury a witch. So Beltan had placed her favorite green scarf in her stiff hands where she lay on her bed and had kissed her cold cheek. Then with a lamp he had set fire to the little wooden house where they had lived and watched it burn.

Such was the measure of Beldreas’s honor—if not his affection—that he would not see his only child, bastard or no, live as a pauper in a provincial village, and so he sent his seneschal, Lord Alerain, to bring Beltan to Calavere. Quickly enough, Beltan grew to adore Beldreas and his new home. But he never forgot his mother, or how in the end her witchwork had betrayed her—and ever after Beltan believed it to be a treacherous art.

Yet Lady Grace Beckett was a witch. And perhaps it was from all the simples his mother had made him drink as a child that he had some resistance to them now. Even as he remembered these things, the room grew clearer. He could see the flat ceiling, and the strange, blue-white lights. He made out a shadow on the other side of the room: slender, sitting at a table, head bowed over something in her hand.

It was good that he had not managed to cry out. This way she did not know that he could hear, that he could somehow understand her words—or at least some of them, for there was much she said that indeed sounded like the words of a witch’s spell.

Another click. Now she spoke in softer words.

“Personal note. We know that the subject is genetically a fully modern human being. The results of the phylogenetic analysis based on the DNA sequencing came back yesterday, and the most parsimonious tree suggests a divergence from northern European populations five thousand years before the present, with a margin of error of one thousand years.

“My own ancestors came from Norway. In a way, I suppose you could say we’re cousins of a sort. All the same—even knowing how close he is to us, to me—there is a brutishness to him I find alien and disturbing. Is this what the Vikings were like, the ones who raped and pillaged their way across Europe?

“Headquarters says the civilization level of the aboriginals is medieval, approximately eleventh century, with some tech-specific variance of plus or minus two centuries. I still find it amazing that development could happen in such parallel with Earth, just lagged a thousand years. But that’s what our historians have been telling us all along. Humans are humans. It’s population density and probability theory that are the controlling factors, not individual will. Maybe the high-ups are right. Maybe manifest destiny exists after all.

“Whatever the case, it must be a violent period there. The subject can’t talk to us, but the scars, the multiple injuries to his bones, tell a story of brutality. I know this hypothesis isn’t particularly scientific, but I believe that, were he awake and unrestrained, he would kill me with his bare hands.”

Silence.

“This is Dr. Ananda M. Larsen. End recording.”

A sigh, shuffling noises, then the scrape of a chair being pushed back. The shadow stood.

Beltan let his eyelids droop shut. That was the first rule of a prisoner of war. Make your captors believe you were helpless. The woman—the doctor named Larsen—was not completely wrong about him. Were he free, he would not have killed her, but he would have done anything else it might take to be free of this place and these people who were holding him.

A sound he did not recognize rose on the air—a series of chiming noises. Then came a heavy thunk followed by a grinding sound that on any world meant a lock was turning. He was trapped. And alone.

A rattle, followed by a soft whuffling of breath.

No, not alone after all.

Beltan opened his eyes and craned his neck. From the steel cage in the corner, the chin-pasi gazed at him with intelligent brown eyes.

“Hello,” Beltan said, his voice a dry croak. “So you’re still here, too.”

The creature tilted its head, then ran long, dark fingers over the wire mesh of its cage.

Beltan frowned. “You understand me, don’t you? Not my words, maybe, but you’re like I am to them. You know more than they think you do.”

The chin-pasi stretched long, scarred arms toward one of the glowing bone-pictures on the wall: a high, delicate skull with too-large eyes.

Beltan tried to lift his head, found he could a little, and examined his surroundings. He was still naked, but they had cast a thin sheet over him. So perhaps he was not just an object to them, but a man. The myriad wires and tubes of his last awakening were gone, and now there was only one tube that led from a clear bladder above to a needle stuck in his arm. He was still restrained, but the bonds seemed a fraction looser than before, as if carelessly tied. Again, they had not believed he could wake so soon. As far as he could tell, there were three bands beneath the sheet: one that passed over his arms and chest, one that bound his hands beside his hips, and one that held his legs.

Gritting his teeth, Beltan strained against the bonds. Whatever the straps were made of, it was stronger than he. He tried wriggling instead. This was more effective; he was nearly able to pull his right hand free from the strap around his waist. If there was just a little more space.…

He strained, but after several minutes—exhausted and right wrist burning—he stopped. There was not enough room inside the strap. The only way he could pull his hand out was if he chopped off a limb.

Think, Beltan. Your muscles are gone, so use your brain for a change, if it hasn’t completely withered over the years. Think about saddling your charger. A horse always takes in a breath when you’re cinching the girth, so that when it breathes out the girth loosens and the saddle slips down. Breathing out won’t do you any good—the strap is around your hipbones. But is there a way you can make yourself smaller?

Then he had it.

He pushed upward against the straps. The looseness left an inch between his back and the steel table, but he needed a little more. He gritted his teeth and felt a cool tingling, like a swarm of pinpricks over his body. The straps creaked as they stretched. Somehow he was stronger after his ordeal than he had thought.

There—it was enough. The fingers of his left hand crept along the metal. He tucked his hand beneath him, into the hollow at the small of his back. Then he pressed his body back down, hard.

He held his breath, and like a horse he forced the air from his lungs. He pulled on his right hand. There was resistance—

—then with a bright jolt of pain it popped free from the encircling strap.

Beltan stared at his right hand. It was bleeding. He’d torn off a good strip of skin. But it was free.

Quit staring, you stoneskull, and move.

The strap around his hips was loose now, and it was simple to pull his left hand free. Loosening the band around his upper arms and chest was a harder feat. However, after much grunting, and a fair amount of popping on the part of his elbow, he was able to work his right hand over to the clasp that held the strap in place. He couldn’t see what he was doing, and his fingers were numb; it was going to be impossible to figure out the strange clasp.

Except that it wasn’t. Again came the cool tingling, in his fingers this time, which moved with a dexterity he was fairly sure he had never possessed before.

The strap went slack. Beltan sat up.

The sheet fell down, and he stared. The last time he had glimpsed himself, he had been horribly thin, like the people of a village he had passed through one spring, where mold had spoiled the winter store of grain and folk had nearly starved to death.

Not today. He was still thin—far too thin. There was no trace of his old ale belly, and he could easily count his ribs. But his skin glowed with pink warmth, and flat sheets of muscles worked visibly beneath. His wound from last Midwinter’s Eve was a rough, white line snaking down his side. He flexed his arms. They were stiff, but he had the feeling he could swing a sword with them if he had to.

But that was impossible. A sickly man could not put on a stone’s weight in such a short time.

Whatever the answer to this mystery, it would have to wait. He threw back the sheet. The straps around his ankles were easily removed, but he was less certain about the tube in his arm. He gripped it, clenched his teeth, then jerked it out. There was some pain and blood, but it was not as bad as he had thought. Carefully, he swung his feet around, then pressed them against the cold floor. He pushed himself up from the bed, and for the first time in two months Beltan stood.

It was almost the last time. A rushing noise filled his ears, and the room spun around him. He stumbled and might have fallen, cracking his skull on the hard floor, but at the last moment he grabbed the steel rack beside the bed and hung on it like one of the clear bladders of fluid.

He breathed and spat; gradually the dizziness passed.

Slow this time, he took a few steps. With each one blood and confidence pumped through him. In moments he had reached the door. He was sweating, and breathing ridiculously hard for having walked no more than a dozen steps, but he had made it. Hanging from a hook by the door was a thin, white coat like the doctor had worn. He shrugged it on and held it around him. It was too small, but it was better than nothing.

A soft, hooting sound.

The chin-pasi gazed at him through the mesh of its cage. Its brown eyes were soft as it made a low sound. The thing almost seemed concerned for him. But then, maybe it was. Close as he was to it now, he could see it was female.

Beltan grinned. “I’m all right, my lady.” He lifted a finger to his lips. “Now, be quiet. We don’t want anyone to know what we’re up to.”

The creature kept watching through the wire.

The door was made of steel. It did not have a bar to hold it shut, like most doors Beltan knew, but there was a steel handle that obviously worked as a lever to open it. Beltan tried to move the handle.

It didn’t budge.

He leaned all his weight on it, but it was no use. What kind of lock was this?

Another hoot. The chin-pasi had stuck its fingers through the mesh and was waving them at him.

“Not right now, my lady,” he muttered. “I’ve got to find a way to get this door open.”

He examined it more closely. On the doorframe was a small box. The box had a glass window in which crimson symbols glowed, eerie as the pale lights behind the bone-pictures. Beneath the window, on the box, were ten raised metal squares. A symbol was engraved upon each of the squares, but he did not know what they were. Whatever power enabled him to understand the speech of this place, evidently it did not allow him to read it. But then, even on Eldh his skill at letters was poor. Reading was for priests, highborn ladies, and kings, not bastards.

Again he ran his hands over the door, but he could see nothing—no opening, no weakness—he might exploit. There were no hinges on this side. Only the box with the squares and the glowing symbols.

He swore. If they found him like this, out of his bed, they would bind him far more tightly. Or cage him, like the chin-pasi. He had to get out of here before they came back.

The rattling of wire mesh, followed again by the hooting sound. It was higher this time, more urgent. Beltan looked at the cage. Inside, the chin-pasi moved rapidly up and down, then it squatted, held one hand flat before it, and poked at it with a long finger. What was it doing?

Now the thing rose and once more wiggled its fingers through the mesh, pointing at Beltan.

No, you fool. Not at you. Behind you.

He turned, and his gaze fell on the box with the shining crimson symbols.

“This thing.” He moved to the box by the door, then looked back at the creature in the cage. “You want me to do something with this, don’t you?”

Once more the chin-pasi poked at its hand with a finger. Beltan frowned, then stretched his own finger toward the box. He brushed one of the squares.

A screech startled him. He glanced back. The creature was watching. He touched another of the squares on the box. Again the creature screeched, causing him to flinch. He clenched his jaw and touched a third square.

A soft grunt. Beltan hesitated, then pushed the square.

The window on the box went dark, then a single red symbol appeared as a chime sounded. It was just like the chimes he had heard when the doctor left the room.

Another grunt, urging him on. He froze. Was he mad, letting this half-human beast tell him what to do?

It’s smart, Beltan. Too smart, maybe. Who knows what they’ve done to it? Then again, who knows what they’ve done to you? You’ve got to get out of this place. And sure as you’re a bastard, this creature has been watching them when they didn’t know it.

He moved his finger to another square.

He got this one in two tries. A second red symbol appeared in the window, accompanied by another chime. The next one took several attempts, as well as several clipped screeches, but he got the following one on the first try. The chin-pasi let out a low hoot. Beltan licked his lips and pushed the button.

Chime.

A fourth red symbol appeared. Then, for a terrible moment, the small window on the box went black. Beltan started to swear, sure he had done some harm, when the symbols flashed into being again, only not crimson now but emerald green. There was a chunk as, somewhere inside the door, metal tumblers turned.

He gave the creature in the cage a look of astonishment. It had watched them, and it had learned their secret. Smart indeed.

“Thank you,” Beltan whispered.

The creature sat back on its crooked legs, gazing at him quietly. He turned again to the door, gripped the handle, and pushed. With a click, the door swung outward.