She is one of their slaves, a small, pretty woman aged far beyond her years. She
was the only one who surprised me, and it was very much by chance. I think she
rises in the middle of the night to prepare the big lodge where most of them eat
the morning meal. She just stepped out back and almost ran in to me. She clearly
knew who I was. I guess they all do.
You say this is a friend, yet you do not know her name, her tribe, or her work
exactly, and she is a longtime slave here?
She could not tell me. She did not know the sign language or Hyiakutt. It would
not matter if she had seen you, however, who know so many tongues. Someone,
perhaps long ago, cut her tongue out.
That both angered and sickened him. So what makes you say she is a friend who
comes from the south?
Anyone can get a few basic pieces of information across with hand, body, and
eyes. I believe she would help us just to spite them, but she also does not wish
me to join her. She may be of great help. Kitchens such as theirs have sharp
knives and hatchets.
Perhaps fortune was finally taking pity on them, although it certainly hadn’t up
to now. He could understand the slave’s situation and pity her. Here in a
culture as alien to her as his was to the Aztec, she would be lost and without
friends. Escape? To where? Even if her tribe was willing to take her back, the
chances of which were fifty-fifty, she would first have to get there, far to the
south, a young woman without even the power of speech in a wilderness alien to
her.
We will check out the area and see what our true situation is, he told her.
See what we can and cannot get away with, too. They have the respect of the
tough river traders, so that means they have influence beyond this small
village. They are not hunters but traders. They could not support all this
without something strong to trade.
They are thieves! she shot back.
Yes, and more. They sell their protection, I think. If you trade with them, on
terms very generous to them, you have no problems. If not, well, the river is
wide and mostly desolate. You simply meet with an unfortunate accident, and they
have even more to trade.
It is indecent if what you say is true! They have no honor at all! I cannot
understand why warriors such as these traders do not band together and wipe out
this snake nest!
Roaring Bull is clever and only as greedy as he knows he can be. He does not
demand so much that they will be injured by paying him, and he probably does
this only to those traders far from tribes and homes. The tribes of this region
he does not touch, and he probably also supplies them with the fire drinks.
Perhaps he is very clever and keeps only what he extorts, letting the other area
tribes be the accidents. In any case, he keeps them happy and on his side. He
also knows, as do the traders, that if they were to come at him in force,
providing they could put aside all their tribal and national rivalries and trust
and cooperate with one another for that much, one of the other tribes would
simply move in and replace him.
You are speaking as if we cannot get away even if we do escape, she noted.
How far south would his voice reach?
He shrugged. Not too far either way or he would have far too large a set of
bribes to pay to make it worthwhile. A full day, perhaps. Give him two just to
allow for errors. That is why it is not as simple as slitting a few throats and
slipping away, and he knows it.
She considered that. Then if he wants me, I do not see why he plays this game
with us. He could just order you killed and take me.
He could, but he does have his own twisted code, I think. More important, he is
concerned that I am from Council. He knows I am in trouble with them, but he
also does not know how much influence I might have. We can be traced here simply
because Council hunters would start with the Four Families’ lodge and know of
you, and when they found you here, they would not be gentle with those who
mistreated me.
But you said they would kill you for what you know!
They would. Most times they can play tricks with the mind, erase or change
things, but they would not be permitted to take the slightest chance that anyone
could ever learn what I knew, and many would try to find out for their own gain.
They would kill me—but first they would want to know all that I know so they
could be sure that my death would end it.
She sighed. It is all so complicated. Roaring Bull is the high chief of this
whole region, yet he fears those of Council. Council, in turn, fears—what? You
said they would not be permitted to take the chance. Who would they have to ask
permission of? They are the guardians of all of this land, are they not?
Of this continent, yes, but there are many other continents and regions. The
man I need to see is head of Council in one of those places. The heads of all
the Councils in turn make up a body known as the Presidium. It is an odd,
non-Hyiakutt word, but it means ‘to rule.’ They are given great power to make
sure that the whole world follows the rules and great rewards for doing it.
She yawned but was fascinated. So who makes the rules all must follow?
A—there is no real word for it in our tongue. A man-built mind. A thing that is
as of man as this stable yet thinks impossibly faster than the finest human
minds and knows the knowledge of the universe. It made the rules and commanded
that this all be done long ago, in ancient times.
Where is it? It sounds like a great demon of the Inner Darkness.
It is. The demon that stalked our land weeks ago was created by it to serve it.
A machine in the crude, distorted form of a man. As to where it is, no one
knows. That knowledge is of the sort that would get anyone killed. It protects
itself. It might be beyond those trees there or high overhead in a great ship
that is a small moon and circles us, or it might be in a greater ship that goes
to the stars and never is in one place. No one is allowed to know. Its vast
machines are loyal to it and must follow its orders exactly. They convey the
messages to and from something only they know. Information, and orders as well.
Unless we threaten its system, it lets its humans rule. It selects those rulers,
and it rewards and punishes them.
But how does it rule this way?
The same way Roaring Bull rules. By fear. It was created by fear and out of
fear, and so fear is what it knows best. That has always been the most effective
and efficient means of making people do what a leader wants them to do. Fear—and
reward. Long ago, it is said, humans created horrible weapons that could destroy
all life down to the last rat, cockroach, and even blade of grass. Some of those
in charge of those weapons feared them terribly and tried to find a way around
their leaders to be certain that no such weapons would be used. With this fear,
they built the machine, and they set it to discover a way that humans would
never be allowed to destroy themselves. Somehow it found a way to take control
of all the weapons of all the nations, and it threatened to use those weapons
against their own makers unless they obeyed. Some did not believe, and it did
use the weapons to destroy those nations. The rest, out of fear, did just what
the machine commanded them to do. All served out of fear, but some served
because they came to worship the machine and wished only to please it. These are
the ones who were set over and apart from the rest.
There are legends of this thing, but I never thought of them as more than
that.
They are not legends but truths. Its very creators became its victims. It is
said that they were all the first ordered killed. They did not dream what their
creation would do. It ordered them to tear down the whole of the world and build
it back up as it had been in many other times. Tremendous amounts of knowledge
were completely forbidden, wiped away, along with the great things humans had
done. It had logic and its orders. It decided that the only way to ensure than
man, with his violence, cruelty, and tyranny, could never destroy himself was to
keep man forever in a state of knowledge where such weapons and such means could
never be even imagined. The bright ones who might change things either were
taken up to the leadership to fall under its commands directly or were either
managed or killed. Superior knowledge was reserved for Council, and even that
has limits, which is why I run. I know now a piece of knowledge that it thought
long extinguished from the mind of any person.
It is evil. It came out of the formation of all evil, the fire pits, and it
rules us. She shuddered. You speak almost as if those of Council worship it.
They do worship it. It is their god, their sole belief, and they serve. They do
not, however, love it as we love the Creator, the Great Spirit who created the
universe. They serve because they fear it and cannot fight it. They hate it, for
evil is hate, and fear, and terror, and brutality. They must have all these
things to serve it properly. It is the Lord of the Inner Darkness, the ultimate
void, which encompasses everything. It is an ancient story. Once human beings
occupied its place, and they were set to destroy not only themselves but
everything. So others, in fear, built their own god and gave it dominion over
the rulers of men. That is the tragedy of it.
What? She yawned again, unable to stave off sleep much longer.
That men have always dreamed of being the rulers of the Inner Darkness, and
some finally made it, only to have it snatched from them by another. Our leaders
now do not hate its power; they envy and they covet it. They wish to reclaim it
for themselves. Otherwise, there is only one Lord of the Inner Darkness; as much
as they can ever be are Lords of the Middle Dark, above all but one but forced
to carry out only the will of the one. They preserve the Outer Darkness in which
we all must live.
He had gotten preachy, and she had finally surrendered to her exhaustion. Still,
it was truth that he spoke. Only he now knew the secret of the Inner Lord; he
knew that there was something it feared, that there was one way to challenge its
power and perhaps defeat it. Five gold rings. Precious good that knowledge was
doing him, of course. He was squatting here in a foul stable dressed only in a
rope and a rag, at the mercy of one of the least of the chain, a Lord of the
Outer Dark named Roaring Bull, whom he understood perfectly. If he could not
deal with Roaring Bull, he could hardly deal with Lazlo Chen and others as bad
or worse.
Still, for the first time he was beset with doubt. What was he really doing
anyway? Carrying the secret of the keys to the Inner Dark to one who might be
far worse than what they had now. Those five, whoever they were, who wore the