Piers Anthony - Neq the Sword

"I'm doing this for you," she said, continuing. "The draft is bringing the fumes straight out. The flowers must be just beyond this refuse."

"I would not slay a woman," Neq said, his blade poised above her body. "But if I must--"

"In a moment I'll have it," she said. "Meanwhile, please don't threaten me with that thing. If you knew how many times I have been widowed, you woujd see that your sorrow is hardly unique. I don't care what you think you see; I have a job to do here."

He saw that she would not stop. But he could not allow Neqa's bones to be defiled.

He spread his arms so that the sword would not strike her and moved forward, shoving her aside with his body. His own torso would guard the sacred earth!

But Sosa's dirt-caked hands came up, striking him across the neck so that he choked. She got her little shoulder under him and somehow threw him back. "Please stay clear," she said quietly. "There may be danger, and I have to get this junk out."

Now he remembered what Vara had said about this woman. She was skilled, circle-skilled, with her bare hands! She had taught the Weaponless his art. It was folly to attempt to wrestle with her.

Numbly, he watched the hole deepen. It was not mere bones she was searching out. He had no idea whether anything at all remained of Neqa after all these years. It was the associations of Neqa--the manner she had died, the way he had acted then. The nightmare portion of his nomad dream, that he had tried to put aside. Rape, murder, anguish, vengeance, futility....

She struck solidity. Horrified, Neq shone the light as she reached down, grasped, and hauled up--

A hooflike foot.

Appalled, Neq stumbled back. This was the cairn of Var the Stick--the other nightmare!

The foot stirred, the gross blunted toes twitching. Earth showered off as the hairy leg kicked out of the ground.

"Oh-oh," Sosa said. "I didn't expect this'" She scrambled away from the hole.

An arm came up, levering against the surface. The body heaved. The corpse sat up.

The shock of it sobered Neq momentarily, and he realized that he was under the influence of the narcotic vine-flowers, as Sosa had tried to tell him. They must have seeded here, for the fumes were actually pollen, and there had been some leakages. If there were earth here, and moisture, and occasional light, the vines could have sprouted and bloomed.

The corpse was neither Neqa nor Var, but some living thing climbing out of the partially stopped passage. Something manlike--but what? Already his vision was becoming distorted again, for the fumes were heavy in this semi-confined space.

Neq tapped on the glockenspiel with his pincers, but could not think of a suitable song for the occasion. "I thought you were dead!" Sosa cried at the shape. A grotesquely formless head swiveled to cover her. "Hel-Helicon dead!" it growled.

"Helicon lives!" Neq cried, discovering suddenly loyalty after his recent, drug-strengthened doubts. He brought up his sword--and hesitated, knowing that so long as he saw it as a sword, the narcotic was ruling his mind. "Stop those flowers!" he cried at Sosa. "Use my flashlight--"

She came immediately and took it from him. She could use it far more effectively than he could with the pincers. She flashed it into the hole, searching for the vines that had to be near.

Neq faced the creature. "Who are you?" he demanded.

"Dead!" the thing repeated. It stood near the hole, as tall as a man, but with a scarred, hairless head.

"It's Bob," Sosa said. "Master of Helicon."

The former master! So he had escaped Sol's vengeance!

"I am master now," Neq said. "You and I must settle."

"Get out of here, Neq!" Sosa cried. "He's a real killer, and you're under the influence of the--"

"This way," Bob said. His voice was barely intelligible, as though it had not been used for years.

"Don't go there!" Sosa cried. "He's mad!"

The men ignored her. Bob descended into the grave and Neq followed, feeling with his pincers to locate the perimeters. He crawled along on elbows and knees, keeping his sword clear of the rubble. Sosa did not follow.

They emerged into a palatial cavern whose floor angled down into a steaming river: the Helicon water supply. It was hot here, and there was light: electric light from bulbs set in the ceiling.

"You've had power here--the whole time?"

"Certainly." Bob's voice was clearer now that he was in his own territory, and the flower fragrance was fading. "I prepared this refuge well, in case of need.There's a vent to the summit of the mountain, with a ladder and escape hatch."

"Why did you stay here, then?"

"It's cold up there." That was an understatement. The top of the mounatin was always covered with snow, and death lurked in the form of countless cliffs and crevasses and avalanches. Mighty storms spun off the glaciers, feeding the melt-rivers of the snowline whose waters plunged into these atomically heated interior caverns. It would take a desperate man indeed to leave comfort like this to endure that.

"You are alone?" It was hard to believe that any man could endure seven years in complete isolation.

"Of course not. I have a most obliging and disciplined tribe. Come--you must see. I have no envy of your position." He showed the way along the river to a series of offshoot caverns.

There were animals here--mutant badlands creatures of diverse shapes and sizes. Some slunk away as the men approached, but others seemed to be tame. "These?" Neq asked.

"This is part of it. These are workers and gatherers-- illiterate, of course. They do an excellent job of tending and harvesting the hydroponics, but they aren't very intelligent."

Neq saw that the ratlike individuals were nipping bits of fungus from crevices and carrying them away. "Hydroponics," he agreed.

"You really must meet my wife," Bob said expansively. "One thing about the life of the Helicon master: no woman to yourself."

"I know." So one of the women had come there tool

"That forced objectivity, when there are constant decisions of life and death, and no personal life--it isn't Helicon you've inherited, it's Hell."

Neq had learned about Hell through his songs. The parallel seemed apt enough. "I saw your traces in the dining room. I wondered who had visited."

"Traces? Not mine. I blocked up the passage with refuse and never used it, until you started burrowing from the other side just now. I had to investigate that commotion, of course."

Refuse--and the vine-flower spores had rooted there, downwind from Bob's caverns but upwind from Helicon. They had grown and blossomed, betraying the secret.

Sosa had not been excavating Neqa's grave or Var's cairn, but Bob's refuge.

"Why did you try to kill the child Soli?" Neq asked as though it were a matter of mere curiosity. Once he had a clear answer coinciding with what he already knew of the matter, he could consider his action. This time he would make no precipitous mistake!

"I never tried to kill her. I tried to save Helicon."

"You failed."

"The failure was not mine. I knew that no nomad would kill either a woman or a child, especially one as fetching as little Soli. I knew that the barbarian warrior, meeting her in the secrecy of the mesa, would either allow her the victory or hide her unharmed and claim the victory himself. In either case, Helicon was safe."

Bob, sealed in these caverns, could not have known the story of Var and Soli. He had calculated correctly-- except for the human factor within Helicon. "Safe?"

"If she had the victory, the nomads were honor-bound to lift the siege. If she were announced dead, my revelation of her identity would neutralize the nomad leader and have the same effect. Sos knew how to put pressure on the mountain; he was a superb military tactician, and he had studied our defenses from inside. He might have won--but no other nomad would have had either the motive or the ability."