The Warrior Within Page 3

  Karsman eyed the full bottles behind the bar. Kido brewed his own booze using food scraps bought from the Temple. It was crude stuff, raw and potent.

  “What are you talking about, Kido?”

  “Those guys. They’ve forbidden me to sell anything. They said that I had to keep everything I had for them, and only them.” Kido pointed an accusatory finger at Karsman. “You were the one who told us we should do what they said.”

  “I didn’t say that you were to let them tell you to cut off your best customers,” protested Karsman.

  “So what are you going to do about it?”

  Karsman said nothing. After a moment, Kido relented.

  “Because it’s you, Karsman,” he said. “But no one else can hear about it.” He took a bottle down from the shelf and pushed it across the bar toward Karsman.

  Probable audio and video bugs, said Warrior.

  Karsman stopped in the act of reaching for the bottle. He shook his head. “No, Kido,” he said loudly. “It’s best if you do as they say.” He shrugged his coat back on. “Give them what they want. If we don’t give them any trouble, they’ll go on their way and everything will go back to normal. Got it?”

  “Got it.” Kido sounded puzzled as he set the bottle back on the shelf.

  Coward, said Warrior.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The trouble Karsman had been anticipating came faster than he expected.

  He was resting after a day spent in the packing yard, heaving salvaged tiles and piping onto pallets, ready to be loaded onto the next road train and trucked down the Road to the capital. It was punishing work, but he was glad to be able to lose himself in it, his mind empty while his body labored.

  A rapid knocking roused him from a light doze. He rolled over, doing his best to ignore it. Finally, when the knocking showed no sign of stopping, he got up and went to open the door.

  Little Alya, Dijah’s youngest child, looked up at him. Her face was pinched with fear. “Those men,” she said. “They’re at my mam’s place. I think they’ve killed Doro.”

  Karsman muttered a curse under his breath.

  “Will you come?” Alya asked. “I’m feared they’ll kill Mam and Suli next.”

  “I’ll come,” he told her. “But I need you to run to the Temple and fetch the guards. Tell them what happened. Tell them more people may die if they don’t come with everyone they have.”

  She nodded but didn’t move.

  “Well, go on then,” he said. “I’ll look after your mother.”

  He counted time, watching her run toward the Temple.

  I’m ready, said Warrior in his head. Karsman could feel the combat persona’s eagerness to take control. He pushed him back firmly.

  Not yet.

  He took his time getting ready and then walked slowly across the Road to Dijah’s shebeen. His best bet was to draw this out as long as he could, giving the Temple guards time to get there. If the fight did escalate, the Temple guards might not stand much of a chance against the soldiers, but at least they would serve as a distraction. And perhaps the soldiers would hesitate to challenge a recognizable civil authority. Perhaps.

  When he pushed open the door of Dijah’s, one look told him that Alya had been right. Doro was still breathing, but Karsman had seen enough critically injured men to know that he did not have long to live. He lay on the floor with his back against the wall, his head at an unnatural angle, eyes unfocused. His chest rose and fell unevenly as he struggled for breath. A trickle of blood ran down from one nostril and his face was very pale.

  Karsman felt a surge of anger. It was not that he liked Doro. No one liked Doro. The man was a bad drunk and a bully. Karsman had been forced to fight him more than once, and it was never a pleasure. Doro fought dirty and never seemed to know when he was beaten. He felt a fleeting relief that he would never have to fight Doro again, then immediately felt guilty for thinking it.

  But Doro was one of his people. In an odd way, Karsman felt no less responsible for him than he would for any of the others.

  He forced himself to look at the dying man, feeling sick. He had known that sooner or later the townspeople and the soldiers would clash, but he had hidden his head and hoped that the problem would go away. Now Doro was dead and it was Karsman’s fault.

  The three soldiers stood in a loose group by the bar. There were a surprising number of empty bottles on the table closest to them, but Karsman could tell they were not drunk. They measured him with their eyes, watching to see what he would do.

  He looked slowly around the room, evaluating the scene. Behind the bar Dijah and her older daughter were still frozen in shock. As far as he could tell, neither was hurt. The other drinkers had retreated to the far end of the room. Some of the bolder ones had their fists clenched, but none of them made a move toward the soldiers. Karsman dismissed them from his thoughts. A few might join the fight, but only when it was clear which way it would go. If the soldiers got the upper hand, they would stand back and watch him get pounded.

  I don’t know if we can take all three, said Warrior, sounding unusually cautious.

  We’re not going to, Karsman told him.

  “Is there a problem, big man?” the long-haired soldier asked him. His voice was neutral, but there was no mistaking the threat.

  “What happened here?” Karsman asked.

  The soldier gestured to the dying man on the floor.

  “Your friend attacked me,” he said. “Came at me with a knife.” He held out his hand palm-up to show Karsman a chisel that he must have taken from Doro.

  Karsman had little doubt that Doro had been the aggressor, but he also suspected that he had been provoked. The whole thing reeked of a setup. Assuming it wasn’t simply casual sadism, there must be a plan behind it.

  They’re trying to identify the power relations, said a voice in his head. Stage an incident, then see who steps up to confront them, who everyone else defers to. Congratulations, you’ve just been made.

  So what do I do now?

  The same thing that you are already doing, said Strategist. Defer, defuse, deflect. They are looking for anyone who might be a threat to them. If you take them on directly, they will cut you down.

  Thanks for nothing, Karsman thought. I could have worked that out for myself.

  “What’s your name?” he asked the soldier.

  The man blinked, as if surprised by the question.

  “Flet,” he said. “And yours?”

  “Karsman.”

  “So,” the soldier said. “Do we have a problem, Mr. Karsman?”

  “Not with me,” Karsman answered. “But you’ll have to explain yourself to the Muljaddy.”

  The soldier performed a quick little motion with his hand, flipping Doro’s chisel from one finger to the next. He brought it down point first on the bar, left it quivering in the plastic surface.

  “And where do I find this Muljaddy?”

  “Their guards are probably on their way here already.”

  The door of the shebeen opened as if on cue. The Temple guards showed signs of having been turned out hastily, armor jackets thrown over their black half-dress uniforms. Karsman was relieved to see that the patrol was led by Curinn, the older and more cautious of the two guard captains. He was also glad to see that only Curinn carried a pistol. It was no part of his plan to start a firefight in the crowded shebeen.

  Flet smiled. “How convenient.”

  Curinn looked around the room, taking in the standoff and the dying man on the floor. Behind him, his men fanned out in a half circle, hands gripping the butts of their holstered shocksticks.

  “Karsman, what’s happening here?” Curinn asked.

  “Fight,” said Karsman. “Between Doro and this . . . visitor.”

  Curinn looked again at the dying man. He gave Karsman a look that promised nothing good. Now that Karsman had made the incident his problem, he would make sure to repay the favor.

  “Who started it?” he asked.

&n
bsp; “He attacked me,” said Flet. “I defended myself.”

  “Is this true?” Curinn said, looking around the room. A few of the drinkers nodded. “Karsman?”

  “I didn’t see the fight,” said Karsman. “It was all over by the time I arrived.”

  On the floor, Doro made a snoring noise. His head tipped forward onto his chest but his eyes remained open, now focused on nothing at all. Curinn looked down at the body and came to a decision.

  “You three,” he said. “Come with me.”

  Now, Warrior said.

  Karsman let his own consciousness recede, allowing the other persona to expand to fill his brain. He held on to just a thread of control, enough to block Warrior if he tried to move too soon. He shifted his weight imperceptibly, ready for a first strike.

  The soldier smiled again. “Of course,” he said. He lifted his glass from the bar, and Warrior tensed. Instead of attacking, however, Flet simply drained off the finger of liquor left in it, made a face, and set it back down on the bar. He nodded to his two companions and started to walk toward the door. The half circle of Temple guards opened to let them pass, then closed behind them again.

  The fragment of consciousness that was still Karsman reasserted control. Warrior resisted for a moment and then yielded. Karsman put his hand against the doorpost to steady himself, waiting for the moment of dizziness to pass.

  On the Road, the guards flanked the three soldiers in a double line. As Karsman watched, Flet turned and looked back at him. He nodded to Karsman and then looked away again.

  That went well, said Strategist.

  Karsman said nothing. He could not shake the feeling that something had happened he did not understand.

  * * *

  When Karsman awoke in his shack the next day it was still early. He slid the blackout shutters on the window open a crack and peered out. The Road was empty and all the shacks that he could see were still shuttered and dark. For the rest, the view was the same as ever. The bloated orange disc of the sun hung in the same part of the sky that it always did, casting its muted light over everything. On either side of the road, the gray towers stood like silent sentinels, their outlines softened by the perpetual haze. Nothing moved.

  He looked at the clock by the head of his bed. The glowing wedge marking the time showed it was a little before Morning 6. That was earlier than he usually rose, but he was awake now and he knew that there would be no going back to sleep. He shook his head. It had been after Morning 1 when he had gone to bed, which meant that he had slept less than five hours. Oddly, he felt as if he had been asleep for much longer, and he was intensely hungry.

  He pulled himself reluctantly out of bed and splashed some cold water from the demijohn in the kitchen over his face. He thought about taking some of the better pieces of salvage he had gathered over the past week down to the Temple and cashing them in. Then he remembered that Kido’s was no longer serving food or drink, so he would have nothing to spend the money on. For the time being, the Temple and its rituals were his only option if he wanted to eat.

  He put on his coveralls and jacket and walked slowly toward the Temple, passing in and out of the permanent shadow cast by the buildings on either side of the Road. The wind had picked up while he was dressing, blowing red dust and scraps of dried plant matter from sun to dark and making the prayer flags stretched between the towers snap and ripple. He pulled his goggles down over his eyes and hunched his shoulders against the gusts.

  He was still a little ways from the Temple when he heard the first notes of the early service, rebroadcast by the speakers mounted on the four corner towers. The music this morning was more strident than the hymns to Arinna of the day before, with a martial quality to it. He recognized the opening bars of the dawn hymn to Sabava.

  He stopped, frowning. It could not be Sabava’s day. Yesterday’s service had been dedicated to Arinna. Normally, Teshub followed Arinna, and Sabava followed Teshub. That was how it had been for as long as Karsman had been alive. That was how, if the Muljaddy were to be believed, it had always been.

  Had he remembered it wrongly? Perhaps it had been two days ago that he had gone to the Temple to earn his day’s food by turning the prayer wheel. But then how would he have eaten yesterday?

  He wondered if he was simply confused. He might have mixed up his memories of the service that he had heard. In the shock of Doro’s violent death and the face-off with the strangers, maybe he had lost track of time and run the days together.

  Or perhaps, exceptionally, the Muljaddy had authorized a change in the order of the services. Rarely—very rarely—the otherwise immutable order of services could be changed. During a Passing, for example, prayers might be offered to Rundas, the god of new beginnings. In times of emergency, two days might be switched so as to dedicate a day of prayers to a particular deity. A day of prayers to Sabava, the most martial of the deities, would make sense if the town was threatened by bandits. Or—an unpleasant thought—it could be intended as a gesture of respect to the visitors. Karsman did not like the idea of that. If it were true, it would mean that the alien soldiers were being treated as honored guests. That did not bode well.

  As he stood in the center of the Road and listened to the swelling strains of the hymn, a third explanation occurred to him. Despite the warm wind, he felt himself grow suddenly cold.

  He had not mixed up the days. Doro had indeed died on Arinna’s day. Today was Sabava’s day. There had been no change in the order of worship. He had slept for an entire day, right through the day normally dedicated to Teshub.

  At least, he hoped that he had slept.

  * * *

  Was it one of you? Karsman asked.

  His personas remained resolutely silent. Karsman was not surprised. Some of them could become positively garrulous whenever anything related to their specialty came up, but they seldom responded to more general questions.

  I never wanted any of you, Karsman reminded them. I never asked for this.

  He sat down with his back against the metal wall of a building. As always, the surface was cool to the touch, a few degrees below ambient temperature. It was just one of the curious things about the Builder structures. So long as they were intact, they were always a little cooler than the air around them. Strip off a piece, however, and it quickly warmed to the temperature of its surroundings. Sometimes the city seemed to Karsman less like an artificial construct than a living organism, with all its parts interlinked in some manner too subtle to understand.

  To his left and right, the Road stretched away, a broad black line pointed at the horizon. Follow the Road in either direction, and you’d eventually come back to where you started, assuming you didn’t starve to death first. But before you reached your starting point, you’d pass through the capital, the largest human-built city on the planet and the home of the Muljaddy family.

  Karsman had grown up in the capital. When he was still in his teens, his parents found a place for him as a servant to a Muljaddy. Not a minor provincial Muljaddy living in semi-exile in an isolated Temple along the Road, but a member of the inner family with a palace-tower of her own and a permanent staff of more than a hundred servants and retainers. She also had friends in high places. A few years after Karsman entered her service, she embarked on a tour of twelve neighboring worlds under the auspices of a friendly Intelligence. A handful of chosen staff accompanied her. Karsman was one of them.

  For the first six stops of the tour, his duties consisted of little more than looking smart in a uniform and running minor errands for the Muljaddy and the more senior servants. Then, abruptly, everything changed. The sponsoring Intelligence’s priorities shifted and it lost interest in its erstwhile protégée. The scheduled onward trip was canceled and the travelers were left stranded on an unfamiliar world. Lines of credit dried up. The Muljaddy, for the first time in her life, was threatened not just with poverty but irrelevance. Far from home on an unfamiliar star world, the fact that her family were absolute rulers of a back
water cut no ice at all.

  The Muljaddy improvised. Spending the credit still available to her, she bought her way into a new network of patronage ultimately backed by a different tribe of Intelligences. With the help of her new friends, she mapped a route home. The only problem was that the new offer was open to at most three people. To get home at all, the Muljaddy would need to abandon most of her entourage, including her guards and her ladies-in-waiting.

  To his surprise, Karsman was not among those abandoned. A Muljaddy of her rank could not travel without an entourage to serve and protect her, to smooth the obstacles in her path and negotiate on her behalf. If she was allowed only two retainers, then those two retainers would have to fulfill all the required roles.

  No one asked Karsman for his consent. The Muljaddy made another deal, and people he had never seen before came to take him to a hospital, where he obediently allowed himself to be scanned and probed and subjected to a long series of tests. When all the tests were finished, they led him to a tiny waiting room and gave him a paper cup of orange liquid to drink. His last thought was that the liquid was unpleasantly sweet. Then all his thoughts went away.

  He had had basic modification surgery when he first left home, to give him a greater tolerance for conditions on other worlds. What the surgeons did to him now was far more radical and invasive. While he slept, they remapped the structure of his brain, splicing in artificial neural complexes that gave him the ability to play host to a dozen or more different personas. Each one was a specialist, a constructed personality that was less than completely human but that compensated for its limitations with a profound knowledge of some useful skill. To make room for the new personas, they took away most of his memories from his childhood, a certain amount of his learning ability, and a large part of his own identity.

  When he went to sleep, he was a callow boy from a backwater world with no particular talents beyond a strong back and the willingness to make himself useful. When he woke again, he found himself sharing his mind with a crowd of experts.