Interlude
Nearly one hundred and twenty years ago the October Ones had raged out of the Sculptor’s star-blotch and reached the outer arm of the main galaxy. Their first landfall had been the world later called October, and from there each had set out and taken a piece of the galaxy, a pie sliced ten thousand times. And they had begun to rule, but only a little at first, only a tiny piece of each slice because the galaxy was so large and populated by so many beings; a hundred billion inhabited planets with life forms swarming in their abundance and adaption to the inconceivable in environment and lack thereof. The effect of October was like a drop in the ocean, a sand grain on the beach, a single cell in the human body.
But they would not expand their own numbers, would not create new October Ones. Alien, they were a race that was ultimately paranoid, and they not only feared one another (which was why there were so few) but could feel no rest until they knew that they controlled, directly or indirectly, the actions of the billions in their sectors and ultimately in the entire galaxy. They would never rest easy until they had complete control, and for that they sought and fought. And they sometimes remembered the self-effacement of the Teacher whom they had deceived, and wondered at it, and thought it weak and stupid.
Perhaps, once they achieved complete collective control, they would eliminate one another.
But for the moment, the only way their influence could spread was by teaching Skill to members of other races whom they could easily control. To their collective annoyance, they found that few among the trillions had any aptitude at all for the Power.
Certainly the October One herself had found it so, in the human segment of the galaxy. She had been the One to remain on that first planetfall; she had considered her environment and found it wanting. Its inconsequential human government disappeared when she devoted a millionth of her attention to it.
Perhaps the Ones should have penetrated directly to the central galactic government; but there had been no way of telling in advance whether any rival Power existed among the myriad swarms of sentient beings that they found. They well knew that if a Power did exist to challenge them, it would be able to conceal itself.
And so, at first, the Ones hovered in the backwaters of the galaxy, waiting and probing. But in 120 years of siphoning information to the One in the human sector, they had felt not the slightest whiff of alien movement in the Power, not the tiniest ripple in its etheric embrace that they did not cause themselves or account for among the lesser beings who touched, feebly, one or another of the lesser Skills.
They then formed a “Guild,” a legal entity in which, in theory, gathered the body of a particular learned profession. Guilds were among the few institutions of any influence among the chaotic jumbles of races and economic interests and potential conflicts that the galaxy represented, the Galactic Police being another. The influence of October began to spread more and more rapidly.
As for herself, within a year after settling on her world the One had been named Guildmaster and had begun human recruitment—and found it hellishly difficult.
The human race seemed to have but the rarest and most unpredictable grasp of Power of any race that the other Ones described to her. But she set up a testing network on each planet she consumed, and found those few who had Skill potential; and as she gained followers one by one, planets in her sector fell under her Influence. She absorbed each government and, if there existed any people of intuitive discernment, she destroyed them. That she was thereby eliminating the most creative and talented of the human race did not interest the October One.
Eighty-nine years after she had taken the October World, the October One sent a newly passed Adept named Cor-Reed to the planet Edom. It was his first mission. He was to take over a planet.
Bribing his way up the highly stratified social ladder, he reached the chamberlain of the third son of one of the most powerful dukes.
“I represent the new faction in the Guild of Personal Protectors, about which you have heard,” the sour young man intoned. “You have only to consult the Galactic Database to read of our ascension.” He stood at ease, his face reminiscent of a carnivorous rodent’s.
The chamberlain consulted the database and found this note appended to the description of the Guild of Personal Protectors, also called the Bodyguard Guild: “While known and respected for its careful adherence to an elaborate code of ethics, internal dissension has arisen in recent years. The older Guild leadership is currently under challenge by a new group which seems destined to assume control; for at every test of professional skills so far arranged, the younger challengers have humiliated their superiors. It is assumed that the next Guild election will see a change of command.”
The chamberlain pondered. The world on which he lived was ruled by forty-six noble families, among whom wealth and power were concentrated. Attacks on them were common, but the nobles controlled the in-planet police too.
Everything is a question of being seen, the chamberlain thought. Of no distinguishing characteristics, he well knew that he owed his present post to personal public relations and a great deal of luck. But he was chamberlain only to his duke’s third son, and there were layers above him to which he aspired. Visibility . . .
“Would you,” he said in his best convivial voice, “consent to a test? I have to tell you that our Bodyguards have proven adequate to this point, and this is a violent society.”
“Were I or my designees to serve as m’lord’s bodyguards,” the gaunt man said, “nothing and no one would ever come near him.”
The chamberlain smiled wearily. The duke’s first son, second daughter, and third wife had all been assassinated. In turn, the duke had ordered the deaths of scores of actual, potential, and imagined opponents.
“I will see what I can do,” the chamberlain said.
Cor-Reed smiled. This greasy sycophant was annoying him, and Cor-Reed wondered when and where he could take revenge. For the moment he would use him, for even in this stratified society in which family members were often hostile and isolated from one another, the duke would hear from his third son now and again. . . .
At length, an auditorium-in-the-round was set aside and the duke and his family, surrounded by bodyguards and their families, assembled to see what promised to be a private and enjoyable show.
After long and florid obeisances to those in the audience, an impressive feat of memory because he had not only to name each one, but list their titles, the chamberlain came to the point:
“And as we have, in effect, a challenge, the Fifteenth Duke of the Scarlet Flame, His Honorable etc., etc., has commanded that the local members of the Guild of Personal Protectors choose a representative to face, in full and fair combat, this newcomer from off planet, who represents a controversial faction within the Bodyguard Guild itself.”
From one side of the stage came a woman, stepping just within the circle of a spotlight. Everyone in the crowd knew her. She was Tessa Fyrestall who, with her husband and children, shared the round-the-clock protection duties of the duke himself. She had personally foiled sixteen separate attempts on his life. Her husband, older daughter and son had accounted for another twelve among them.
She was a tall woman, handsome in a grim sort of way, with close-cropped hair that seemed to be of alternating blond and brown strands. She moved like a dancer.
But she was not dressed like one. She wore soft leather boots, from each of which the hilt of a dagger protruded. In her belt were a blaster and a needler, and the ceremonial sword of her Guild hung with polished scabbard and functional hilt. Loops of apparently ornamental leather were studded with the gripping ends of a short, dagger-like shuriken, or throwing knife.
The people assembled knew that she practiced the deadly skills at her command for three hours a day. She was an expert among experts. In the crowd, her husband Ast and three of their children watched. The youngest was Miri, six years old.
From the other side of the platform, Cor-Reed appeared, and the crowd gave one long, collective gasp. For his only weapon was a metal billy club like police of old used to carry.
“Begin,” said the duke, a heavy man in flowing embroidered robes seated on a raised chair. The chamberlain, mouth still open, looked wildly around and then leaped for safety. For already Tessa’s needler was out and she was firing at Cor-Reed. But she was unaccountably slow, and his club, flung at her, knocked the weapon from her hand. Its beam flashed momentarily, and Cor-Reed, seizing the opportunity, caused it to catch the chamberlain before it winked out, hitting him low on the spine. The chamberlain was dead before he felt the attack.
Later this would tell against Cor-Reed; the duke would reason that the beam could just as well have hit him. But at the moment no one paid much attention, not even the duchess, For Cor-Reed’s club had taken an incredible bounce on the floor and knocked Tessa’s blaster out of her holster even as her hand was grabbing for it. In the audience, Ast Fyrestall was on his feet.
Her sword was out now as she leaped at the rat-faced man, but the club was there on the floor and she couldn’t seem to avoid stumbling over it. With catlike grace she recovered in a single step, kicking the club away from her. It flew through the air—and Cor-Reed reached out one hand and, again incredibly, had it.
Sting. One of the little shurikens was, all at once, sticking out of Cor-Reed’s club as he held it before him. Sting! Sting! Another and another. And then she was upon him, and no one in the audience, save Ast, believed that Cor-Reed had a chance.
To Cor-Reed, who had nudged each weapon with his mind as he had needed to, this was the hardest part. He could blast the woman’s brain to jelly with a quick mental blow, but he knew that it would reveal too much of his Skill. Ast in the audience, was being hauled to his seat by other members of the Guild. It would he highly unethical to interfere, they yelled at him over the din. Tessa would be disgraced if he did.
The sword descended on the club, and the steel, folded and tempered thousands of times in its manufacture, should have cut through the apparently softer metal like butter. But Cor-Reed seemed to twist the club at just the right moment, with the descending sword just between two of the imbedded shurikens. To Tessa, it felt as if she had hit concrete. Something seemed to seize the sword by its blade, and at the same time she lost all strength in her fingers. The sword flew out of her hand toward the rear of the stage, and Cor-Reed, for his minor amusement, caused it to fall point-first into the back of the fallen chamberlain.
He swung the club against the side of Tessa’s head and, at the same time, delivered that shattering mental jab.
She fell. He clubbed her two more times before she landed, just for form. Everyone could see her eyes, open and fixed, as they stared at nothing and everything, looking into infinite distance without fear or pain.
The crowd was transfixed. A sort of moan came from it, of ecstasy and pain, the corrupt society mixing with the members of the Bodyguard Guild. Cor-Reed, panting, stood looking out at them, keeping a close watch on Ast.
“Since the honored chamberlain can no longer speak for me,” the Adept said then, between gasping intakes of breath, “I do hereby submit that you replace your old and inept bodyguards with . . . ah!” A sharp, involuntary gasp of pain bunt from him as a tiny shuriken imbedded itself in his calf.
Just in time, he threw up a personal mental Shield, something he should have done before, but he was as yet young and with little experience; it caught an incoming shuriken and bounced it aside, to fall harmlessly on the platform.
Everyone, not the least Cor-Reed, looked to see where all this was coming from. Cor-Reed had thought that the rigid, self-sufficient ethics of the Bodyguard Guild would have saved him from attack, except possibly from Ast, who, in his grief, might forget himself. But he had been watching Ast.
A little figure stood on the stairs, a figure not even half grown, but every eye could see the resemblance to the corpse on the stage.
“You cheated! You killed my mother!” the little girl screamed. She flung another shuriken, scrambling up the steps, and dove for the fallen blaster. Cor-Reed suppressed the impulse to blast her brain too; but how could he have concealed the obvious use of psychic Skill from this distance?
“Miri, no!” the little girl’s father was yelling frantically, uselessly. The girl had hold of the blaster now, and was raising it, pressing the firing stud.
The club had been aimed at her head, and Cor-Reed, wanting it to touch her so that he could kill her, was dismayed to see her twist aside. But he whirled its end against her arm, and as the bone shattered, the blaster tore a hole in the auditorium ceiling, The girl staggered, and then other bodyguards had her, and were hauling her away.
“I’ll find you!” She was screaming and crying at the same time. “I’ll find . . .”
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Cor-Reed’s “faction” failed to win the ducal contract. After the demonstration the duke rose, his old bodyguards clustered around him, and declared with an air of cultured bombast, his florid face grinning at the crowd:
“A little girl defeats him.” The group roared.
“The chamberlain regrets him.” Such wit, the crowd acclaimed.
“And I don’t like him!” This time, the crowd was carried away in delirious enthusiasm.
Cor-Reed, enraged, had nearly blasted the brains of everyone in the room, but caught himself at the last moment; it would have been too dangerously public. Instead, he withdrew with ill grace and set about converting a rival duke, whom he convinced by assassinating the first one.
After a time, Cor-Reed’s Bodyguards had all of the ducal contracts, and violence lessened on Edom—one of the few planets where the rule of October resulted in even temporary good.
Ast Fyrestall had agreed with his raging daughter that something had been wrong. That last shuriken had seemed to bounce off of nothingness itself and others among the bodyguards in the audience had remarked on it. But Fyrestall’s efforts at raising an inquiry ended when, just two days after his wife’s death, he was seized by a massive heart attack. It was as if something had grabbed hold of the muscle and held on tight, the doctors had said. The family was dispersed; Miri was sent to an obscure uncle off-planet, and Edom lost track of her.