the castle at its weakest point, the highest window in the tallest turret, and his plan was to explore the building by night and hide by day. If he got into any kind of difficulty, all he had to do was step out the nearest window and walk around on the outside of the castle or perch on the roof until the uproar diminished. For the ultimate emergency, he wore a Winged Beast amulet like those of Darzek and Riklo.
Ten Synthesis agents had vanished on Kamm, several from the province of the Duke Merzkion. These inexplicable disappearances had further fueled the rumors of a pazul. Wenz was to search the castle for traces of the missing agents, while Darzek and Riklo combed the surrounding countryside on the same mission. On the previous night, they had seen Wenz signal his safe arrival at the upper level of the castle. Tonight, he was to signal how much longer his search would take.
It was the metal detector that worried Darzek. He wondered what other instruments of detection guarded the duke’s stronghold.
When finally they reached the edge of the forest, they stood for a long time looking upward at the looming castle. It perched on the cliff high above them, silhouetted against the richly starred sky and looking like a bulgy, many-pronged finger pointed at the infinite.
It was a finger rising from a sewer. The foul odor that clung noisomely to the foot of the cliff left both of them gasping, and above them the cliffside was a smear of lights. The nobility of Kamm was no more fastidious about its environment than the nobility of Earth had been in earlier times. It built its castles on the edge of hills or chasms or cliffs and disposed of waste and refuse by pitching it out of the appropriate windows. What they were seeing and smelling—luminously delineated by the night creatures that came to gorge on it—was the Duke Merzkion’s garbage heap.
They waited, watching Kamm’s swift-moving small moons, and each time an inner moon come into conjunction with an outer moon, they stared intently at the castle. But no light flashed in any window.
After the third conjunction, Darzek stirred uneasily. “Is it possible that he’s finished and left already?”
“Maybe he’s signaling from a window we can’t see from here,” Riklo said.
“Then let’s move.”
They walked along the edge of the forest on a path that took them directly under the garbage heap, and the overpowering stench enveloped them like a corrosive cloud. It became a tangible thing, and Darzek wanted to seize it with his two six-fingered hands and shove it aside so he could breathe. They stumbled forward, keeping their eyes on the castle.
Suddenly Riklo halted. “What’s that?”
There was a scraggly sponge growth at the foot of the cliff, and something had crashed into it and was caught there. A limp arm dangled perpendicularly; a twisted leg was entangled in the sponge fronds. They hurried toward it, ignoring the foul squish of garbage underfoot. Carefully, tenderly, they lifted the body down and carried it to the concealment of the forest.
The soft bark had cushioned its fall, and most night creatures had found it not yet ripe enough for their liking. Darzek and Riklo stretched out the body and examined it with a hand light, flicking the beam from time to time to make it look like one of the night creatures scurrying among the sponge stalks.
Wenz, agent of the Galactic Synthesis. Young, good-looking, intelligent, well trained, skilled, highly capable. The Duke Merzkion had inflicted upon him the final indignity that the Dukes of Storoz reserved for enemies and victims alike: his body had been thrown out with the garbage.
At least that final indignity had been painless. The evidence of what came before it sickened Darzek. The teeth were set; the face was twisted gruesomely; the hands and even the feet were clenched; every body muscle was tensed—not from rigor mortis, but from torture.
And yet the body was unmarked except for the trickle of blood that had caked in the nose and eyes and mouth.
Darzek and Riklo exchanged glances.
Wenz had remarked jokingly that if the Duke Merzkion actually possessed a death ray, he would find it. The duke did, and Wenz had found it; and it had killed him.
At the same instant, it had doomed a world.
CHAPTER 2
Jan Darzek first heard of the world of Kamm at a meeting of the Council of Supreme.
It was Interstellar Trade Day at the council. Supreme, the world-sized computer that governed the galaxy, gave birth to a mountain of economic statistics every ten cycles; and the Council of Supreme, which liked to think that it governed the galaxy, felt obligated to meet and consider them.
Old E-Wusk, the Second Councilor and the council’s expert on trade, had achieved a formula of condensation that almost capsuled Supreme’s report out of existence; but first he felt obliged to perform a statistical analysis. “The balance of trade in the neighboring sector, in contrast to the two sectors just cited—”
Darzek, the First Councilor and, under the name Gul Darr, a well-known interstellar trader himself, cared nothing for either statistics or economics. He suppressed a yawn and amused himself by watching his fellow councilors.
The large ball with an upper hemisphere bristling with eye stalks was THREE, the Third Councilor. When bored, its eye stalks twitched and intertwined. When bored to distraction, they began to tie themselves into knots. At the moment it was plaiting the stalks into rather complicated braids, the final stage before knot tying.
SIX, the Sixth Councilor, a gaunt, angular, nocturnal triped, was performing an involved plaiting of her own. Her three looping arms twined and untwined incessantly. Her expression was invisible behind the shaded translucency of her light shield.
FIVE was equally capable of fanciful plaiting, but she kept her multifingered tentacles in a state of perfect relaxation. Her massive, conical head was bent forward slightly in a posture of attentiveness; her twig of a body was concealed by the drooping tentacles. The Fifth Councilor always maintained a guise of polite interest, however boring the report.
SEVEN was listening silently, which meant that it was asleep. It was a massive lung in a slug-like body, and its regular wheezes were disconcertingly audible when it was awake. When it slept, its metabolism slowed almost to zero.
FOUR probably was asleep. He was the council’s enigma, a faceless life form with a row of sensory humps located across his shoulders. He rarely spoke, and the only evidence of consciousness was the twitching and jerking of the humps as he focused and refocused his organs of sight and hearing to follow a discussion. Now the humps were motionless.
Darzek turned his attention to EIGHT, Rok Wllon, the council’s Director of Uncertified Worlds. He had been watching the Eighth Councilor intermittently through the meeting, but now he scrutinized him with concern.
Rok Wllon’s usual listening attitude was one of poised alertness as he waited to pounce on a contradiction or interrupt with a question. His knack for transforming an orderly meeting into acrimony with a well-placed interruption or two was exceeded only by his remarkable talent for interminable debate on inconsequential issues.
But today he was leaning far back in his chair, and his half-closed eyes seemed to be focused on the infinity of the jace-vaulted ceiling. This entirely unwonted silence worried Darzek. There was no visible sign of illness—the Eighth Councilor had a decidedly blue set to his complexion, but that peculiar hue was his normal color, just as his normal but unlikely looking silhouette was massively broad when seen from the front and improbably narrow when viewed
