Part 3 (1/2)
”Who? Do I have to shake it out of you?”
He reached across the desk and caught the thin, dry throat between his fingers, forcing Gormalu back into the chair. Gormalu fought and tried to rise but Dalroi threw him back again savagely and increased the pressure. In a paroxysm of frenzy Gormalu threw up his hands. Dalroi released him as he felt the body slacken. A small object clattered on to the desk and Dalroi stooped to pick it up.
A small black knight.
”That was very foolish, Dalroi. There are some things it's better not to know. You're caught up in a tide of affairs more complex than you can imagine.”
”I want answers, not double-talk. Was it the Black Knights who killed Dever?”
”I warn you,” said Gormalu, ”you're treading on unholy ground.”
”h.e.l.l, I was born on unholy ground! Now talk - for I'm quite prepared to kill you if you don't.”
”I don't think you will,” said Gormalu quietly.
Dalroi sensed the pay-off and dived for his gun. Not fast enough. A blow on the neck from behind dazed him momentarily, and before he could react his arms were pinioned and forced up behind his back until he knew the bones must break at any second.
Unashamedly he screamed and the hold relaxed very, very slightly. He knew Gormalu's henchmen, Timoshu and Matshee, and he knew they would not hesitate to cripple him at the slightest provocation. A blind tide of anger rose within him and leaked impotently away with the realisation that he was completely powerless.
”Let me give you a little advice,” Gormalu said, fingering his throat. ”The Black Knights have something big lined up for you. Something big and brutal - something to do with Failway. Don't try to fight it. Just accept whatever comes.”
”One day,” said Dalroi, ”I shall probably kill you. Human failings, the l.u.s.t, the greed and the cowardice, I understand, but you are a scowling enigma. I don't know what black principles motivate you, nor what ghastly solace your twisted longings crave. Knowing you is like the kiss of death!”
”You're a man of many talents.” Gormalu's voice was a mere hiss between his teeth. ”You're a fool, a prophet and a poet all in the same breath. The only reason I don't have you killed now is because somebody is waiting for the privilege who will make an immeasurably better job of it.”
”I don't suppose,” said Dalroi, ”you've ever seen a shaft of sunlight breaking through a winter's sky?”
Gormalu nodded to his henchmen. ”You know what to do.”Dalroi tensed his muscles, waiting for his antagonists to move, ready to take advantage of any opportunity. He never stood a chance. He only dimly felt the deft blow as darkness flooded over him.
When he awoke it was only a tenuous return to consciousness. He was in a ditch, his face propped on one arm, clear of the filthy waters. He was soaked to the skin, and above him rain lashed from a pitiless, muddy sky. Survival demanded that he move, but only the force of survival had the power to override the pain that racked his body. Gormalu's henchmen had done a thorough job.
Despite the numbing of the bitter cold, every movement produced a pain too cruel for fort.i.tude. In a state of near delirium he attacked the slimy bank not caring or knowing what it cost him in pain or energy, nor how many times he fainted before he made the crest. After a time his mind withdrew from the struggle and pure, blind instinct forced him on, then deserted, leaving him helpless and exhausted on a bank of yellow clay.
The next time he woke the sun was high and warm and his clothes were steaming as they dried on his body. Painfully he rolled over, drinking in the warmth hungrily, dimly recognising that his life might depend on it. An eternity seemed to pa.s.s while he lay thus, then, feeling stronger, he attempted to rise to his feet.
The pain flooded back, but he fought it grimly. His back was a thousand aching segments and each rib was a band of agony cramping his breathing. His limbs responded as though the joints had been carefully misplaced. He lay still for a moment longer summoning his will to overcome the thousand cras.h.i.+ng signals from his splintered nerves. Then he stood up and walked, his body burning with fire and his mind as cold as ice.
As he walked something elemental stirred within him, something which transcended pain and the bitterness of his plight. It was hatred, sheer, unbounded, naked hate, coupled with an endless determination to survive. It was part of the raw energy of the universe, the terrible will which ordained creation, the naive spring of the life force common to all things animate. Yet it was more than this, for it channelled and charged through a mind of more than ordinary awareness and cunning; a mind shaped in the corrosive shadows of Failway, already bitter and familiar with the darker things which men do to each other. It was a shaft of black forked lightning which played terribly through a brain already inflamed with dreadful resolution, and it spat like an angry arc in the tense no-man's-land between consciousness and the dark side of the mind.
FIVE.
The surge of blood was strong in his ears and a blinding headache lanced through his skull like the forced insertion of a blunt penknife. And something else ... a whisper, a ghost, a flash of memory or delusion ...
of a long corridor with doors of surgical whiteness; the macabre c.h.i.n.k of instruments on a tray out of sight; an oscilloscope trace like a green eye burning into eyes too hypnotised even to blink; the insane knowledge that one was undergoing something too terrible to be admitted to conscious recognition. And it was gone ...
He groped frantically through his mind, trying to recapture the fragments and to correlate them with experience. No success. Whatever nightmare he had recaptured had withdrawn again into the dark whirlpool of the forbidden. Even the headache trailed to a dull, nagging pulse.
He staggered at length into the bar of a fifth-cla.s.s motel. The bartender noted his appearance without undue alarm, poured unordered cognac into a tumbler and pushed it forward.
”Smashed my car,” said Dalroi by way of explanation. ”Been unconscious in a ditch. I need a washroom and a phone.”The bartender nodded. The world was full of nuts and anyone who arrived under his own steam in as bad a state as Dalroi had a right to invent his own lies.
”You'll find the bathroom through there.”
Dalroi cleansed the blood from his face and arms and examined the bruises and abrasions. They were painful but not particularly dangerous. Gormalu's thugs had exercised a morbidly scientific restraint in their brutality. He was still wondering what to do about his bloodstained s.h.i.+rt when the door opened behind him. The bartender put his head in.
”Looks as though you could do with a change of clothes?”
Dalroi nodded. ”Got anything handy?”
”At a price.”
”I'll pay it. This stuff of mine needs burning.”
The bartender shortly reappeared with a suit of cheap cloth and a woollen s.h.i.+rt. He looked quizzically at Dalroi's battered face.
”Boy!” he said. ”That car must have hated you.”
Dalroi ignored him and made for the phone, obscuring the index as he dialled.
”Dalroi. Any news of Zdenka?”
”Not a hope,” said Brian Regis. ”The boys are fighting shy. Rumour has it that you killed Harry Dever.”
”I didn't,” said Dalroi. ”He was dead for hours before I got to him. Anyway, how does it happen that everybody's suddenly developed consciences?”
”I know how you feel,” said Regis. ”You're having a rough time. But you can't blame the boys for keeping their noses clean while the Black Knights are poking around.”
”The Black Knights don't want me,” said Dalroi. ”I don't fool with stuff on that level.”
”No? Seen the television lately. There's an appeal out for you and I don't think it's just to help the police with their enquiries. Sorry, Dalroi, but unless things cool off a bit you're strictly on your own. It seems as though you're a stranger in town.”
”That was all I needed,” said Dalroi bitterly. ”G.o.d! If ever I catch up with the joker who set this up for me I'll start with the catalogue of Offences Against the Person and work right through the whole b.l.o.o.d.y list!”
”Can you let me have a room for the night?”
The bartender nodded. ”You in trouble? I know a good lawyer who ... ”
”Do me a favour!” said Dalroi. ”The way my luck runs I'd need a whole ruddy army.”
”I only thought ... ”
”Don't,” said Dalroi. ”Thinking's a thankless occupation. It's bad for the brain and makes you a bad risk for life insurance.””I see your point, Mister. I've a room out at the back. It has a good view of the best ways to get out in emergencies.”
”You're a bright lad!” said Dalroi. ”Anything else about it?”