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Chapter Thirteen: Exile

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They came out of the Tower, through the Veil, into dim red sunlight, the Bloody Sun rising over thefoothills far away to the east. Jeff walked with his hand on his knife, feeling strange and cold. At this hourthe streets of Arilinn were deserted; only a few startled onlookers in the street saw the three redheads,moving shoulder to shoulder, armed and ready for a fight; and those who did, suddenly discovered thatthey had urgent business in a couple of other directions.

They went through the outlying district, through the market where in a happier day Jeff had chosen a pairof boots, and into a crowded and dirty suburb. Auster, his hands still on the trap matrix, said in a lowvoice, “This won’t hold him much longer.”

Kerwin’s grin stretched his mouth, mirthless. “Hold him long enough for me to
find
him, and then let himgo any damn time you please.”

They went through a narrow alley, a filthy courtyard cluttered with rubbish, a stable with a couple ofill-kept animals. A half-witted stableman in rags, his mouth hanging open, watched them briefly, thenturned and fled. Auster pointed up a steep, crazy flight of stairs to an outside gallery with a couple ofrooms opening off it. As they climbed the stairs, a girl in a torn skirt and scarf came out on the gallery, her

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mouth a wide O of astonishment. Rannirl made an angry, abrupt gesture, and she bolted back into one of

the rooms and slammed the door.

Auster stopped outside the other door. He said, “Now,” and his bony hands did something to the trapmatrix that Jeff didn’t see. From inside the room came a long cry of rage and despair as Kerwin, leapingforward, kicked the door open and burst in.

Ragan, still in the held-fast posture of the trap matrix, suddenly broke free and whirled on them like atrapped cat, knife flashing from his boot. He backed off and faced them, naked steel between them,baring his teeth with a snarl. “Three against one,
 
vai dom’yn
 
?”

“Just one! ” Kerwin rasped, and with his free arm, motioned Rannirl and Auster to stand back. In the next moment he reeled under the impact of Ragan’s body crashing into his. He felt the slash of the point along his arm as he whipped his knife up, but it had only torn his sleeve. He countered with a fast thrust, shoving Ragan off balance; then they were locked into a deadly clinch, and he was struggling to keep Ragan’s knife from his ribs. He felt his own knife rip leather; it came away red. Ragan grunted, struggled, made a sudden swift feint—

Auster, watching like a cat at a mousehole, suddenly flung himself against them. He knocked Jeff offbalance, and Kerwin, hardly believing that this was really happening—
he should have known hecouldn’t trust Auster
!—felt Ragan’s knife rip along his arm and go in a few inches below the armpit. Numbness, then burning pain, spread in him; the knife dropped from his left hand and he snatched it upwith the other, fighting Auster’s deathgrip, dragging his arm down. Kerwin swore, brutally, kicking outwith booted feet.

“Get away, damn you—is this your notion of a fair fight?” And Rannirl ran to fling his arms around Auster from behind, grab him and drag him away, taking a slash from Ragan’s knife that tore along his forearm and down the back of his hand. He was swearing.

“Man, are you crazy?” he panted.

Ragan wrenched loose. There was a crash, the sound of running feet on the staircase, the clatter ofrubbish kicked loose on the staircase. Auster and Rannirl fell, still struggling, to the ground. Auster,somehow, had Ragan’s knife. Rannirl panted, “Jeff! Get the knife!”

Kerwin dropped his own knife, flung himself on the struggling bodies, and forced Auster’s hand back. Auster struggled briefly, then his hand relaxed and he dropped it, sanity coming slowly back to his eyes. There was a long slash on his cheek—Kerwin didn’t know from which knife—and his eye wasdarkening, blood streaming from his nose, where Jeff’s elbow had smashed at him.

Rannirl picked himself up, wiping the blood from his forearm. The knife had not gone into him at all; itwas a cut less than skin deep. He stared down at Auster in shock and horror. Auster started to get upand Kerwin made a menacing gesture. For two cents he’d have kicked Auster’s ribs right in. “Stay rightwhere you are, damn you.”

Auster wiped blood from his nose and mouth, and stayed where he was. Kerwin went to the windowand looked into the dirty courtyard. Ragan, of course, was gone. There wasn’t a chance they’d find himagain.

He walked back to Auster and said, “Give me one good reason I shouldn’t kick your brains out!”

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Auster sat up, bloody, but not beaten. “Go ahead,
 
Terranan
 
,” he said. “Pretend we owe you theprotection of our codes of honor!”

Rannirl stood over him, menacing. “Do you dare call
 
me
 
traitor?” he said. “Kennard accepted thechallenge; you did not speak to it then. And I have given this man my knife; he is my brother. By rights, Auster, I could kill you!” He looked ready to do it, too.

“Kennard gave him the right—”

“To murder his accomplice, so that we’d never know the truth! Didn’t you see he was set to kill the man before we could question him? Didn’t you see that he recognized him? Oh, yes, he put on a good show for us,” Auster said. “Damned clever; kill him before any of us could get at the truth. I wanted to take him alive, and if you’d have the sense of a rabbithorn, we’d have him, now, for questioning and telepathic interrogation!”

He’s lying, lying
, Kerwin thought hopelessly, but doubt had begun to cloud even Rannirl’s face. Asusual, Auster had managed to confuse the issue, to put him on the defensive.

“Come on,” he said wearily, “we might as well get back.” He felt weary and anticlimactic; his arm was beginning to ache where Ragan had stabbed him. “Help me get this shirt off and stop the bleeding, will you, Rannirl? I’m bleeding like a summer slaughterhouse!”

There were more people in the streets now, and more to stare at the three Comyn, one with his facesmeared from a bloody nose, and one with his arm pinned up in an improvised sling from Rannirl’sundertunic. Kerwin felt all the weariness of a night spent at matrix work descending on him; he felt as ifevery step was his last effort. Auster, too, was staggering with weariness. They passed a cookshopwhere workmen were clustered, eating and drinking, and the smell of food reminded Kerwin that after anight in the matrix screens they had eaten nothing and that he was starving. He glanced at Rannirl andwith one unspoken movement they went into the shop. The proprietor was awed and voluble, pouringout promises to set his finest before them, but Rannirl shook his head, caught up a couple of long loavesof fresh hot bread and a pan of cooked sausages, flung some coins at the cook and jerked his head at hiscompanions. Outside he broke the bread, handed a portion to Kerwin and, glaring, one to Auster; theystrode on through the streets of Arilinn, munching at the coarse food with wolfish hunger. It felt like thetiniest of between-meal snacks, a dainty morsel for a small and finicky child, but it did restore his strengthsomewhat. When they reached the Tower, and passed through the Veil, the faint stinging seemed to drainthe last of Kerwin’s strength.

“Jeff,” said Rannirl, “I’ll come and bandage that for you.”

Kerwin shook his head. Rannirl looked exhausted, too, and it hadn’t even been his fight. “Go andrest—” awkwardly, he added—“brother. I’ll manage.”

Rannirl hesitated, but he went, and Kerwin, relieved to be alone, went into his own room and flung thedoor shut. In the luxurious bath he ripped off sling and shirt, awkwardly raising his arm with a grimace ofpain. Rannirl had crudely stanched the bleeding with a heavy pad from his torn shirt; he worked it looseand examined the wound. A flap of skin had been sliced away, skin and flesh hanging down like a bloodyrag, but as far as he could tell the wound was simply a flesh one. He stuck his head into the fountain;raised it, dripping but clear-headed.

The furry nonhuman who served him glided into the room and stood dismayed, green pupilless eyeswide in consternation; he went quickly and came back with bandages, some thick yellow stuff he

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smeared on the wound; and deftly, with his odd , thumbless paws, bound it up. That done, he looked at

Kerwin in question.

“Get me something to eat,” Kerwin said, “I’m starving.” The bread and sausages they had shared on the

way back had only begun to fill the vast crater of emptiness inside him.

He had eaten enough for three hungry horse-breakers after a fall round-up when the door opened, and Auster came, unannounced, into the room. He had bathed and changed his clothes, but, Kerwin wasgratified to see, he had a splendidly black eye that would take a good while to heal. Kerwin wiped hismouth, shoved his plate away, and gestured at Rannirl’s knife on the table.

“If you’ve had another brainstorm, there’s a knife,” he said. “If not, get the hell out of my room.”

Auster looked pale. He touched his eye as if it hurt. Jeff hoped it did. “I don’t blame you for hating me,

Jeff,” he said, “but I have something to say to you.”

Kerwin started to shrug, found that it hurt, and didn’t. Auster watched him and flinched as if the pain hadbeen his own. “Are you badly hurt? Did the
 
kyrri
 
make sure there was no poison on the knife?”

“A hell of a lot you care,” Kerwin said, “but that’s a Darkovan trick; Terrans don’t fight that way. And what the hell are you worrying about, when you did your level damnedest to make sure I got knifed in the first place?”

Auster said, “I deserve that, maybe. Believe anything you want to. I only care about one thing—twothings, and you’re destroying them both. Maybe you don’t realize—but, damn it, it’s worse than if youdid!”

“Get to the point, Auster, or get out.”

“Kennard said there was a block in your memory. Look, I’m not accusing you of betraying us on

purpose—””

“That’s damn good of you,” Kerwin said with heavy sarcasm.

“You don’t want to betray us,” Auster said, his face suddenly cracking and going to pieces, “and you still don’t realize what this
means
 
! It means that
 
the Terrans planted you on us
 
! They put that block in your memory, probably before you ever left the Spacemen’s Orphanage, before you ever went to Terra. And when you came back here, they set it up, hoping that just this would happen—that we’d come to accept you, think of you as one of us, depend on you—
 
need
you! Because it was so obvious that you were one of us— ” His voice broke; in shock, Kerwin realized that Auster was fighting back tears, shaking from head to foot. “So we fell for it, Kerwin, and for you—and how can we even hate you for it— brother?”

Kerwin shut his eyes. This was the very thought he had been pushing away.

He had been maneuvered every step of the way, from the first moment when Ragan had met them in theshops. Perhaps Johnny Ellers had been set up to introduce him to Ragan; he would never know. Whobut the Terrans could have done it? Maneuvered into his experiments with the matrix. Maneuvered intoconfrontation with the Comyn. And at last threatened with deportation, to force the Comyn to move andreclaim him.

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He was an elaborate booby trap! Arilinn had taken him in—and at any moment, he might explode intheir faces!

Auster took Jeff gently by the arm, careful not to injure his wounded shoulder. “I wish we’d liked eachother better. Now you must think I’m saying this because we haven’t been friends.”

Kerwin shook his head. Auster’s pain and sincerity were obvious to anyone with a scrap of
 
laran
 
. “Idon’t think that. Not now. But what could they hope to achieve?”

“I’m not sure. Perhaps they thought the Tower Circle would disintegrate with you in it; perhaps they wanted information, leaked to them through the break in the barrier. I know they’re curious about how matrix science operates, and they haven’t been able to find out very much. Not even from Cleindori, when she ran away with your damned father. I don’t know. How the hell would
 
I
 
know what the Terrans want? You should; you’re one of them. You’ve lived with them. You tell me what they want!”

Kerwin shook his head. “Not now. I left them, didn’t I? I never was one of them, except on thesurface,” he said slowly. “But now that we have the spy, now that we know what they’re doing—can’twe guard against it?”

“If it were only that, Jeff,” Auster said earnestly. “But there’s something else; the thing I’ve been trying

not to see.” His face was set and white. “What have you done to Elorie, my brother?”

Elorie. What have you done to Elorie.

And if Auster knew, they all knew.

He could not speak. His guilt, Auster’s fear, was like a miasma in the room. Auster let him go and saidearnestly, “Go away, Jeff. For the love of any Gods you know about on Terra, go away before it’s toolate. I know it’s not your fault. You didn’t grow up with the taboo. It isn’t deep in your blood and bone. But if you care about Elorie, if you care about any of us, go away before you destroy us all.”