"This is the mastershrine of Nebran."
_Nebran!_
The stray pieces of the puzzle suddenly jolted into place. Kyral had
warned me, not knowing he was doing it. I hastily imitated the gesture
Kyral had made, gabbling a few words of an archaic charm.
Like every Earthman who's lived on Wolf more than a tourist season, I'd
seen faces go blank and impassive at mention of the Toad God. Rumor made
his spies omnipresent, his priests omniscient, his anger all-powerful. I
had believed about a tenth of what I had heard, or less.
The Terran Empire has little to say to planetary religions, and Nebran's
cult is a remarkably obscure one, despite the street-shrines on every
corner. Now I was in his mastershrine, and the device which had brought
me here was beyond doubt a working model of a matter transmitter.
A matter transmitter, a working model--the words triggered memory.
Rakhal was after it.
"And who," I asked slowly, "are you, Lord?"
The green-clad creature hunched thin shoulders again in a ceremonious
gesture. "I am called Evarin. Humble servant of Nebran and yourself," he
added, but there was no humility in his manner. "I am called the
Toymaker."
_Evarin._ That was another name given weight by rumor. A breath of
gossip in a thieves market. A scrawled word on smudged paper. A blank
folder in Terran Intelligence. Another puzzle-piece snapped into
place--_Toymaker_!
The girl on the divan sat up suddenly passing slim hands over her
disheveled hair. "Did I faint, Evarin? I had to fight to get him into
the stone, and the patterns were not set straight in that terminal. You
must send one of the Little Ones to set them to rights. Toymaker, you
are not listening to me."
"Stop chattering, Miellyn," said Evarin indifferently. "You brought him
here, and that is all that matters. You aren't hurt?"
Miellyn pouted and looked ruefully at her bare bruised feet, patted the
wrinkles in her ragged frock with fastidious fingers. "My poor feet,"
she mourned, "they are black and blue with the cobbles and my hair is
filled with sand and tangles! Toymaker, what way was this to send me to
entice a man? Any man would have come quickly, quickly, if he had seen
me looking lovely, but you--you send me in rags!"
She stamped a small bare foot. She was not merely as young as she had
looked in the street. Though immature and underdeveloped by Terran
standards, she had a fair figure for a Dry-town woman. Her rags fell now
in graceful folds. Her hair was spun black glass, and I--I saw what the
rags and the confusion in the filthy street had kept me from seeing
before.
It was the girl of the spaceport cafe, the girl who had appeared and
vanished in the eerie streets of Canarsa.
Evarin was regarding her with what, in a human, might have been rueful
impatience. He said, "You know you enjoyed yourself, as always, Miellyn.
Run along and make yourself beautiful again, little nuisance."
The girl danced out of the room, and I was just as glad to see her go.
The Toymaker motioned to me.
"This way," he directed, and led me through a different door. The
offstage hammering I had heard, tiny bell tones like a fairy xylophone,
began again as the door opened, and we passed into a workroom which made
me remember nursery tales from a half-forgotten childhood on Terra. For
the workers were tiny, gnarled _trolls_!
They were _chaks_. _Chaks_ from the polar mountains, dwarfed and furred
and half-human, with witchlike faces and great golden eyes, and I had
the curious feeling that if I looked hard enough I would see the little
toy-seller they had hunted out of the Kharsa. I didn't look. I figured I
was in enough trouble already.
Tiny hammers pattered on miniature anvils in a tinkling, jingling chorus
of musical clinks and taps. Golden eyes focused like lenses over winking
jewels and gimcracks. Busy elves. Makers of toys!
Evarin jerked his shoulders with an imperative gesture. I followed him
through a fairy workroom, but could not refrain from casting a lingering
look at the worktables. A withered leprechaun set eyes into the head of
a minikin hound. Furred fingers worked precious metals into invisible
filigree for the collarpiece of a dancing doll. Metallic feathers were
thrust with clockwork precision into the wings of a skeleton bird no
longer than my fingernail. The nose of the hound wabbled and sniffed,
the bird's wings quivered, the eyes of the little dancer followed my
footsteps.
Toys?
"This way," Evarin rapped, and a door slid shut behind us. The clinks
and taps grew faint, fainter, but never ceased.
My face must have betrayed more than conventional impassivity, for
Evarin smiled. "Now you know, Rakhal, why I am called Toymaker. Is it
not strange--the masterpriest of Nebran, a maker of Toys, and the shrine
of the Toad God a workshop for children's playthings?"
Evarin paused suggestively. They were obviously not children's
playthings and this was my cue to say so, but I avoided the trap. Evarin
opened a sliding panel and took out a doll.
She was perhaps the length of my longest finger, molded to the precise
proportions of a woman, and costumed after the bizarre fashion of the
Ardcarran dancing girls. Evarin touched no button or key that I could
see, but when he set the figure on its feet, it executed a whirling,
armtossing dance in a fast, tricky tempo.
"I am, in a sense, benevolent," Evarin murmured. He snapped his fingers
and the doll sank to her knees and poised there, silent. "Moreover, I
have the means and, let us say, the ability to indulge my small
fantasies.
"The little daughter of the President of the Federation of Trade Cities
on Samarra was sent such a doll recently. What a pity that Paolo
Arimengo was so suddenly impeached and banished!" The Toymaker clucked
his teeth commiseratingly. "Perhaps this small companion will compensate
the little Carmela for her adjustment to her new ... position."
He replaced the dancer and pulled down something like a whirligig. "This
might interest you," he mused, and set it spinning. I stared at the
pattern of lights that flowed and disappeared, melting in and out of
visible shadows. Suddenly I realized what the thing was doing. I
wrested my eyes away with an effort. Had there been a lapse of seconds
or minutes? Had Evarin spoken?
Evarin arrested the compelling motion with one finger. "Several of these
pretty playthings are available to the children of important men," he
said absently. "An import of value for our exploited and impoverished
world. Unfortunately they are, perhaps, a little ... ah, obvious. The
incidence of nervous breakdowns is, ah, interfering with their sale. The
children, of course, are unaffected, and love them." Evarin set the
hypnotic wheel moving again, glanced sidewise at me, then set it
carefully back.
"Now"--Evarin's voice, hard with the silkiness of a cat's snarl, clawed
the silence--"we'll talk business."
I turned, composing my face. Evarin had something concealed in one hand,
but I didn't think it was a weapon. And if I'd known, I'd have had to
ignore it anyway.
"Perhaps you wonder how we recognized and found you?" A panel cleared in
the wall and became translucent. Confused flickers moved, dropped into
focus and I realized that the panel was an ordinary television screen
and I was looking into the well-known interior of the Cafe of Three
Rainbows in the Trade City of Charin.
By this time I was running low on curiosity and didn't wonder till much,
much later how televised pictures were transmitted around the curve of a
planet. Evarin sharpened the focus down on the long Earth-type bar where
a tall man in Terran clothes was talking to a pale-haired girl. Evarin
said, "By now, Race Cargill has decided, no doubt, that you fell into
his trap and into the hands of the Ya-men. He is off-guard now."
And suddenly the whole thing seemed so unbearably, illogically funny
that my shoulders shook with the effort to keep back dangerous laughter.
Since I'd landed in Charin, I'd taken great pains to avoid the Trade
City, or anyone who might have associated me with it. And Rakhal,
somehow aware of this, had conveniently filled up the gap. By posing as
me.
It wasn't nearly as difficult as it sounded. I had found that out in
Shainsa. Charin is a long, long way from the major Trade City near the
Kharsa. I hadn't a single intimate friend there, or within hundreds of
miles, to see through the imposture. At most, there were half a dozen of
the staff that I'd once met, or had a drink with, eight or ten years
ago.
Rakhal could speak perfect Standard when he chose; if he lapsed into
Dry-town idiom, that too was in my known character. I had no doubt he
was making a great success of it all, probably doing much better with my
identity than I could ever have done with his.
Evarin rasped, "Cargill meant to leave the planet. What stopped him? You
could be of use to us, Rakhal. But not with this blood-feud unsettled."
That needed no elucidation. No Wolfan in his right mind will bargain
with a Dry-towner carrying an unresolved blood-feud. By law and custom,
declared blood-feud takes precedence over any other business, public or
private, and is sufficient excuse for broken promises, neglected duties,
theft, even murder.
"We want it settled once and for all." Evarin's voice was low and
unhurried. "And we aren't above weighting the scales. This Cargill can,
and has, posed as a Dry-towner, undetected. We don't like Earthmen who
can do that. In settling your feud, you will be aiding us, and removing
a danger. We would be ... grateful."
He opened his closed hand, displaying something small, curled, inert.
"Every living thing emits a characteristic pattern of electrical nerve
impulses. We have ways of recording those impulses, and we have had you
and Cargill under observation for a long time. We've had plenty of
opportunity to key this Toy to Cargill's pattern."
On his palm the curled thing stirred, spread wings. A fledgling bird lay
there, small soft body throbbing slightly. Half-hidden in a ruff of
metallic feathers I glimpsed a grimly elongated beak. The pinions were
feathered with delicate down less than a quarter of an inch long. They
beat with delicate insistence against the Toymaker's prisoning fingers.
"This is not dangerous to you. Press here"--he showed me--"and if Race
Cargill is within a certain distance--and it is up to you to be _within_
that distance--it will find him, and kill him. Unerringly, inescapably,
untraceably. We will not tell you the critical distance. And we will
give you three days."
He checked my startled exclamation with a gesture. "Of course this is a
test. Within the hour Cargill will receive a warning. We want no
incompetents who must be helped too much! Nor do we want cowards! If you
fail, or release the bird at a distance too great, or evade the
test"--the green inhuman malice in his eyes made me sweat--"we have made
another bird."
By now my brain was swimming, but I thought I understood the complex
inhuman logic involved. "The other bird is keyed to me?"
With slow contempt Evarin shook his head. "You? You are used to danger
and fond of a gamble. Nothing so simple! We have given you three days.
If, within that time, the bird you carry has not killed, the other bird
will fly. And it will kill. Rakhal, you have a wife."
Yes, Rakhal had a wife. They could threaten Rakhal's wife. And his wife
was my sister Juli.
Everything after that was anticlimax. Of course I had to drink with
Evarin, the elaborate formal ritual without which no bargain on Wolf is
concluded. He entertained me with gory and technical descriptions of the
way in which the birds, and other of his hellish Toys, did their
killing, and worse tasks.
Miellyn danced into the room and upset the exquisite solemnity of the
wine-ritual by perching on my knee, stealing a sip from my cup, and
pouting prettily when I paid her less attention than she thought she
merited. I didn't dare pay much attention, even when she whispered, with
the deliberate and thorough wantonness of a Dry-town woman of high-caste
who has flung aside her fetters, something about a rendezvous at the
Three Rainbows.
But eventually it was over and I stepped through a door that twisted
with a giddy blankness, and found myself outside a bare windowless wall
in Charin again, the night sky starred and cold. The acrid smell of the
Ghost Wind was thinning in the streets, but I had to crouch in a cranny
of the wall when a final rustling horde of Ya-men, the last of their
receding tide, rustled down the street. I found my way to my lodging in
a filthy _chak_ hostel, and threw myself down on the verminous bed.
Believe it or not, I slept.