Simeon gave him a suspicious glance from under his bushy eyebrows, but said nothing.
His charioteers were waiting for him when he came out of the hospital. He was grateful to them for their foresight; the events of the past half-hour had filled him with a dreamy but not unpleasant tiredness. He told them to take him to the slave quarter, then, with a sigh of gratitude, relaxed into the cushions, wishing the journey ahead was longer.
In spite of the tiredness, he was in a curious state of inner excitement. The world around him seemed marvelously fresh and real. This, he realized, was because he had made a voyage outside his own body and into the mind of the unconscious girl; now his own identity seemed new and strange, like a suit of new clothes.
This excursion into the mind of a stranger had also made him aware once again of the odd mental vacuity of these citizens of the spider city. The spiders had gone to a great deal of trouble to breed all the imagination out of their human servants. Yet what had intrigued him about the girl was that, in spite of her lack of imagination, she was obviously happy — like the crowds of people who were now enjoying the sunlight in the main square, or strolling down the tree-lined avenue that led to the river, mingling freely with wolf spiders and a few bombardier beetles. She had never been outside the spider city, yet she was contented with her lot in life. And was he, in spite of his imagination, so much better off? He had freed his fellow humans from their slavery, and he was the ruler of this spider city. Yet in spite of this, he continued to experience an obscure feeling of discontentment, almost of anticlimax.
Oddly enough, these thoughts caused him no distress. On the contrary, as the cart crossed the bridge that led to the slave quarter, he experienced a curious feeling of satisfaction, as if he was at last coming to grips with the problem. If he was not to surrender to the mindless contentment of the spider servants, then he had to learn to develop his own deeper sense of purpose. And what had just happened seemed to offer him a clue: to leave his own body behind, to be able to float freely in the open space that exists around all human beings. . .
The charioteers paused on the far side of the bridge. “Which way, highness?”
Broadus had not given precise instructions, but he had said that the house faced the river. Niall said: “Turn right here.”
Half a mile to the east, the explosion of a vast underground ammunition store had destroyed a large area of the slave quarter, and the river flowed into the crater, forming a lake. Bloated bodies still occasionally floated to its surface, to be fought over by the razor-bill gulls who had now come to nest around its edges. These gulls, whose wingspan was more than two feet, occasionally attacked children, and had stolen at least one baby from its carriage, which had been left outside a front door; for this reason — and also because they were afraid of the rats, who were as big as small dogs — the slaves had moved away from the houses adjoining the lake. This suggested to Niall that men who wished to remain unnoticed might choose the roughly triangular area bounded by the lake to the east and the river to the south.
Most of the houses along this riverfront area were damaged; some had lost their roofs, most had broken windows. If the ammunition store had not been so deep and so well protected, the explosion would have destroyed half the city. Now, as they approached the lake, and a few curious gulls squawked and soared above them, Niall observed that one of the birds was behaving in an unusual manner. It was swooping upward, turning a backward somersault, then losing control and fluttering frantically toward the ground before it readjusted itself and soared again on outspread wings. When it carried out this strange maneuver a third time, the other gulls took fright and flew off toward the lake, leaving their companion to swoop upward and repeat the same clumsy and incongruous somersault, squawking with alarm. This time it failed to regain control and crashed into a chimney, then rolled, bumping, down the side of a roof. Niall observed the spot where it had disappeared from sight.
“Turn left at the next street.”
A few white feathers showed where the gull had hit the pavement; the bird itself was now in the mandibles of a wolf spider, which was standing guard outside a house a few yards down the road. Niall had guessed he would find it there; the gull’s behavior could only be explained in terms of a bored wolf spider indulging its sense of humor. (Wolf spiders were hunters who enjoyed swift movement, and lacked the immense patience of other species.) It was now so absorbed in its prospective meal that it failed to notice their approach, and started nervously as they moved into its field of vision. When it recognized Niall — telepathically rather than visually — it dropped its prey and made a clumsy gesture of obeisance; the bird squawked and fluttered feebly. Niall pretended not to notice the spider’s embarrassment, and hurried past it through the open front door.
He noticed immediately the tidiness of the hallway. Although large slabs of plaster were missing from the walls, and the floorboards were worn and uneven, the floor itself looked as if it had been scrubbed. For a house in the slave quarter, this was unusual; slaves were notoriously untidy, and even slave women were sluttish housewives. The next thing he observed was the smell — a smell that for a moment eluded him, because he had encountered it late in life. Then he remembered: it was the iodine-like smell of seaweed, and it seemed to blend naturally with the cry of the gulls above the rooftops.
He tried the nearest door, which should have led into the front room; it was locked or jammed. But the next door stood slightly ajar. He found himself in a large room whose floor space was almost entirely occupied by furniture — four beds, several chairs, and a chest of drawers. Otherwise, it was a bare, uncomfortable-looking room, like most other bedrooms in the slave quarter. It differed in only one respect; the beds had been tidily made up, and the floor space between them looked as if it had been scrubbed. Like the hallway, it had a distinctive sea smell.
He found himself unable to suppress a feeling of disappointment. The room seemed to contain no personal belongings, nothing to offer a clue to those who had lived in it. At this point, he recalled a remark of the bald-headed little councilor, Fergus: that these people could not have been slaves because they possessed too many clothes. He picked his way between the beds — there was barely space to walk — toward the chest of drawers in the corner. Halfway across the room, he halted and listened intently: a faint creaking of floorboards had sounded from the room above. A few moments later, soft footsteps descended the stairs. Niall groped in his pocket, cursing himself for not bringing the expanding metal rod or some other weapon. For a moment he considered lying between the beds, then realized that, in the silence of the house, the creak of the floorboards was bound to give him away. A moment later, alarm turned to relief as the huge body of a spider blocked the doorway.
“Dravig! What are you doing here?”
Dravig was able to sense his relief. “I apologize for alarming you. I was with the Death Lord when your message arrived. He ordered me to see what you had discovered.”
“This is the hideout of Skorbo’s killers.” Niall looked around the bare room. “Did you find anything upstairs?”
“Nothing. The rooms are unused.”
“Then for some reason, they all lived in this room. Probably because they didn’t want to draw attention to themselves. Look at the windows.” Dravig did so, but obviously failed to comprehend. “They’re thick with dust, yet the room itself is spotlessly clean. Clean windows might have given them away — slaves never clean windows.”
He crossed to the chest of drawers, and pulled open the top one. Inside, as he had half-expected, were slave garments, neatly folded. He pulled these out in armfuls and tossed them onto the nearest bed. The drawer contained nothing else. The second drawer also contained slave garments, and several pairs of sandals; Niall was intrigued to observe that, unlike the sandals usually worn by slaves, these were of excellent workmanship. They might have been made by the workmen of Dira.
Under these, at the back of the drawer, lay five small objects, wrapped individually in cloth. When Niall touched one of them, he observed that the material was damp. Inside the cloth was a layer of brown seaweed, like the fragments Niall had already seen on the flesh of the unconscious girl. When this was removed, he found himself looking at an object made of smooth green stone. It was about two inches high, and his first impression was that it was a carving of a frog or toad. It was a small, squat creature with bulbous eyes, a flat face and a large slack mouth. As a desert dweller, Niall had seen very few frogs or toads; but this one struck him as too humanoid for either. To begin with, the tiny feet on which it supported itself looked more like human hands, although they had webbing between the fingers. The fat little belly had a navel, and the chest had two diminutive nipples. What struck Niall as most intriguing was that both the bulging eyes had darker patches of green that might have been pupils. These seemed to be a natural part of the stone; it must have taken the sculptor a long time to find a stone with two such dark patches in exactly the right place.