He marched purposefully past them, swinging his cane. Robinson Crusoe blinked after him, asking again, “Ralph?”
As they rose from their seats, Grant said in an aside to Kane, “He and Lakesh must’ve attended the same schools.”
Overhearing, Brigid shook her head disapprovingly, touching a finger to her lips. Kane felt a flash of annoyance. The oddly dressed little man displayed polished manners, but he was still an enigma and they were still, regardless of what he said, his prisoners.
Brigid’s concern that Sindri might take offense at one of Grant’s sarcastic asides seemed to be a fairly low priority at the moment.
Flanked by a retinue of trolls, they followed Sindri out into the warehouse. He flung his arms out wide, pirouetting on his toes. “What you see here is all that the Cydonia Plains of Mars yielded in the way of wonders. Hundreds of people labored over the final, pitiful handful of years of the twentieth century digging them out of oxidized soil. They were collected, dusted off and transported here for final identification and conveyance to Earth.”
Dropping his arms to his sides, Sindri added dolefully, “Of course, after the month of January 2001, nobody on Earth was too interested in picking over the leavings of a long-vanished race. I imagine the subject struck a bit too close to home.”
“Mars was inhabited?” Brigid asked, voice holding a note of excited interest.
“It was indeed, Miss Brigid, although nothing very exact was ever established about who the original inhabitants were or what happened to them.”
Sindri strode over to a trestle table and picked up a bizarrely fashioned piece of sculpture. “They were evidently humanoid with a high level of civilization and technology. Philosophically it appears they lived by a certain moral duality, an integrated dichotomy between enlightened self-interest and a readiness, if not a facility for war.”
“What makes you say that?” Grant asked. “You found weapons?”
Sindri turned to face him. “Devices. Instruments that could deal death and bring life, that same moral duality incorporated into one mechanism.”
Kane shook his head. “I don’t get you.”
“Perhaps you should have a demonstration so you can, as you say, ‘get it.'” A thin, bleak smile creased the little man’s mobile lips as he turned toward the female troll. “Elle, if you could play a lively air for Mr. Kane?”
The woman grinned and pointed the elongated neck of her harp at Kane’s chest. Her fingers strummed the stiff, double-banked strings. Soft notes sounded, weaving and dancing in the air.
Kane received the startled impression that responding notes sounded deep within his body, but disharmonious with the ones struck by Elle.
Like a bolt of lightning, agony ripped through his nervous system. His nerves were aflame with it, and he fell on his face and lay with his mouth opening and closing against the hard deck, too consumed by pain even to scream.
Chapter 17
Over the roaring sleet storm of agony that filled his head, he distantly heard Brigid’s and Grant’s voices raised in furious, demanding outcries.
The harp song drowned them out, and again he had the impression of his body ringing with answering musical notes. This time, they seemed in harmony, complementing and blending together. He tried to understand how this could be. At the same time the pain left him, his strength and balance were restored.
Elle struck one final note, and Kane levered himself up to a sitting position, astonished by how physically good he felt. Brigid went to one knee beside him, hands on his shoulders, eyes full of questions and anxiety.
“I’m fine.” He sounded surprised. He probed the knife wounds in his shoulder and rib cage and felt no twinge, not even a stinging sensation. He stared at Sin-dri wonderingly. They were nearly face-to-face.
Sindri raised his left hand, palm outward. “Quite remarkable, isn’t it? On the one hand, the instrument produces pain so intense you prefer death to tolerating it.”
He flipped his hand over, showing the back of it. “And on the other, music so beautiful it heals and restores health. That was the duality I spoke of.”
Grimly Brigid said, “You might have told us what you had in mind.”