Vernor Vinge: The Witling

“Stand back—back!” Tru’ud pitched against him and a thin line of red appeared across the king’s throat. For a moment Tru’ud’s men glared silently at the prince. Pelio’s face turned pale and Yoninne realized that the Snowmen had tried to scramble his insides. But Samadhom was protecting him—just as Yoninne had been protected when King Shozheru had attacked her.

She stepped quickly to the table, and swept up the maser. The needle on its power supply rested dead on zero. No matter. She turned and leveled the stubby tube at her erstwhile guards. “You heard Prince Pelio. Move.” The men slowly obeyed. Leg-Wot glanced at Tru’ud’s advisers by the far end of the table. “And you people. Stay away from those.” She waved the maser at the machine pistols.

As Bjault retrieved the weapons, Pelio relaxed his hold on Tru’ud a fraction and gave Yoninne a triumphant, mocking smile. “I guessed you two would fly whichever way the wind was blowing,” he said.

What could she say to that?

Ajão peered into the magazines of the two pistols. “One’s empty and the other is hopelessly jammed,” he said in Homespeech.

“The maser’s dead, too,” Yoninne replied in the same language. “But they don’t know that.”

“Well?” Pelio broke in angrily. “Do we return to our original plan? There’s no other choice now, you know.”

Yoninne nodded. Death might be seconds away, but somehow she was happier now than before—when life had depended on sucking up to the Snowmen; now it depended on fighting them. “But how?”

Pelio looked over his shoulder at a craft in the transit pool. “We’ll take that speedboat,” he said abruptly, carelessly. Tru’ud twisted in his grip and Pelio bore down slightly with the machete. “We’ll go all the way to County Tsarang—with Tru’ud as our hostage!”

It was an insane plan, thought Leg-Wot. They were thousands of kilometers inside Snowman territory; any road they followed could be blocked by whole armies. Then she looked around the vast hall. Everyone—the servants, the troops, the advisers—stared in horror at the knife held on Tru’ud’s throat. Perhaps this dictatorship was not quite as modern as Bjault thought. She guessed the Snowmen would do anything in exchange for their king’s safety. Besides—as her father had often said—it’s far better to act on a bad plan than to wait for a good one to come along.

She turned to Bre’en. “All right, Snowman. We want passage north. Put that”—she waved at the skiff—“aboard the boat there, and give us a pilot who can navigate to County Tsarang.” Bre’en spread his hands. Of all those present, he seemed the only one who had recovered his composure. “Such men are rare. Besides myself, I know of no one in the palace who could take you as far as the county’s border. You could, of course, change pilots along the way … Or you could reconsider. We still bear you no ill feeling.”

Leg-Wot smelled a rat. Changing pilots en route would be an invitation to disaster. And the alternative—taking Bre’en along with them—was almost as bad. The man was slippery. “Why would you, of all people, know the way?” she asked. The Snowman seemed almost relaxed now. He ignored the supposedly deadly maser pointed at his thick waist. “As a young man, I served in His Majesty’s army. I worked with Desertfolk between here and County Tsarang. I learned every road I could, so I wouldn’t have to depend on always having the right pilot available. Of course, most officers wouldn’t take the trouble, but I—”

“Be quiet, both of you,” said Pelio. “You’ll pilot us to County Tsarang, Bre’en. But if you’re lying about your skill—” He pulled back hard on Tru’ud, half choking the man.

Ajão seemed on the point of raising some further objection, but Pelio silenced the archaeologist with a look. It was going to be hard to make even the most reasonable suggestions to the prince from now on. “Samadhom. Here!” Pelio called the watchbear out of the skiff. The animal landed heavily on the fur carpet and padded slowly across to his master’s feet.

Bre’en shook his head in wonder as his eyes followed Sam across the floor. “An amazing animal!” His tone was almost conversational. “He’s protecting all three of you at once. We have no watchbears that Talented.” Yoninne looked out at the pale, staring faces. Witling slaves aside, anyone in that crowd could kill her and Pelio and Ajão in a fraction of a second—if it weren’t for Samadhom. And if it weren’t for the knife at Tru’ud’s throat, that crowd could beat them to death in scarcely more time. Bre’en must have read the expression on her face. “Without great good luck,” he said, “you would not now be alive. Such luck can’t hold, you—”

“I said to be quiet,” Pelio repeated, and Bre’en fell silent. “Get the magicians’ sphere onto yonder speedboat… Quickly!”

King Tru’ud gargled apoplectically, and in his rage admitted what the witlings had guessed: “You three… never will live for this.” The words were jumbled, both by anger and Tru’ud’s unfamiliarity with the language of the Summerkingdom. “Your death will be pain, much more pain than we gave your crew to die.”

League after league, Bre’en teleported the witlings and King Tru’ud northward, yet only the service buildings around the transit lakes seemed to change. Beyond their tiny boat’s windows, the sky remained a deep, cloudless blue. From thirty degrees off the glare-white horizon, the sun cast long, bluish shadows across the jumbled madness of the antarctic ice. It was way too bright to look at, though Yoninne’s wrist chron said it was early morning, Summerkingdom time. Here the night was more than one hundred days away.

For the moment, the Snowking’s forces were letting them proceed toward County Tsarang. If they could make it to that vassal state of Summer, they might yet have a chance to carry out the scheme that had once seemed the most dangerous part of Ajão’s plan, the scheme that would take them to Draere’s Island.

The boat they had stolen was small and its hull was strong, strong enough so they could safely skip every other transit lake along the road. They were making good progress even though they rested five or ten minutes between each jump: time for Bre’en to prepare for the next hop, time for Pelio to check the harnesses that bound the two hostages.

“I’m not taking any chances with our friends,” said Pelio. “No matter how highly trained, they can’t reng away from us as long as they’re tied down.”

Ajão said something about molecular bonding energies, but Leg-Wot already understood what Pelio meant: when Azhiri teleported, they took at least part of their surroundings with them; only Guildsmen had perfect control of the volume renged. In order to teleport themselves from the boat, Tru’ud and Bre’en would have to cut through the straps that held them—an act that was far beyond the power of the Talent. Yoninne looked at Pelio with new respect. The trick was one that she—and perhaps Ajão—would not have thought of. For that matter, they wouldn’t be heading north right now if it weren’t for Pelio’s guts and initiative. Was it simply desperation that drove him, or had he been a man all along—all the time she treated him like a weak-willed adolescent?

“I think we’re being paced,” Ajão said abruptly, two jumps later.

“What?” said Pelio.

“Look around the lake. Several of those boats are awfully familiar.”

“Yes,” the prince said slowly. “And every lake is a bit more crowded than the last. I’ll wager the Snowmen messaged ahead, calling up every available army boat. In effect, we’re as tightly surrounded as we were back in their palace.” He grinned at Bre’en and Tru’ud. “But it won’t do you any good.