Star Quest

At supper time, they brought him a bowl of worms.

He didn't eat them, even if, as the guard had said, they were the only fitting last meal for a pervert.

He contented himself, in the darkness of the night, with sitting and watching the stars blinking, flittering like so many consciences pinching the brain for penance. Dragon eyes. Sparks of dragon breath. Hellfires. He tried to think of as many metaphors and similes as he could, keeping himself awake and sharp. He was determined not to fall asleep on this, his last and only night alive.

The wind was cool through the bars.

He thought about Tarnilee. Quite often, the mind likes to torture itself by throwing up its mistakes, its wrong turns and blunders. He had misjudged the love of this woman. He tortured himself now. There had been tears when he first was thrown in the cell and realized what she had done to him, but all the tears had been wept now. He had come from a gentle world to a rough one. He had changed, and so had she. He had not, however, learned to expect that change.

He thought about Mayna, sleek and soft…

He thought about Hunk, twisted forever within his pitiful body…

He thought about Mayna, warm and smooth…

He wanted, somewhere deeply, to be nursed too, to crawl to her and be sheltered by her…

He wished she didn't hate him, or just hated him a little less…

He thought about Triggy Gop, the brain living after the body had perished. For what reason? So that he could, periodically, see how his child was growing. Twenty-odd years Triggy Gop had been floating through space looking for readers, people hungry for information, and found mostly warriors. He tried to remember what the librarian had said about seeing him again, a poem… Perhaps some… He tried to remember. Yes. Four lines the man had composed himself. He repeated the lines to the twinkling dragon eyes.

“Perhaps in some lonely cabaret,
some black night, some bright day
with snow upon the ground or grass
turned yellow with days gone past.”

“Very poetic,” a voice said almost directly in front of him.

He started, jumped up, stumbled over his chair.

“For goodness sake,” Mayna said, looking through the bars. “Be quiet! You want to have every cop in the world up here?”

“You again.”

“Shh!”

“But how—”

“Cats can go anywhere, Hero Tohm. Even up the sides of sheer buildings, accomplishing the impossible. If there's a convenient rainspout, that is.”

“Youll get caught,” he said, looking over his shoulder to the cell door.

“We will if you insist upon being so damnably loud,” she hissed, hooking a metal prong onto each bar where it met the sill at the bottom, covering each hook with thick, green putty.

“What are you doing?”

“Getting you out. Lay down on the floor. This isn't noisy, but there's one helluva lot of heat.”

He got down on his stomach next to the door and did not argue. Mayna backed away from the window, clinging to the wall by whatever impossible manner she had scaled it. There was a sudden pfft, then no noise at all. He could feel the heat on his back through the thin material of his shirt. Once he glanced up to see exactly what was happening. There didn't seem to be any light, unless… He looked closer. Yes, the flame was very dark blue, almost black. The room was stifling by then.

“Okay,” she whispered.

He stood up, reached out.

“No! Don't touch. It's hot yet.”

She took a small can of white crystals from the rucksack on her back, sprinkled them over the sill. There was steam, a crackle-snap noise, and ice began forming across the bars and on the cement.

“Okay,” she said again, putting the can away. “Now. Grasp the bars and bend them back, away from the sill. Only the bottoms are burned through.”

“Uh,” he grunted, straining at them.

“You can do it, Hero Tohm, if anyone can.”

He never knew, later, whether he could have done it without that goad. At the time, it smacked him in the pit of the stomach, churned up adrenalin. He twisted the bars back and up until he could squeeze through onto the wide sill. He sat on the window ledge, clinging desperately to the bars. A small ledge, only an inch wide, a decorative trim actually, broke the smooth facade of the building. It was that that Mayna perched upon, standing lightly on her toes, perfectly balanced.

“Do you have a flybelt?” he asked.

“They aren't as easy to come by for everyone as they are for you.”

“But I can't walk on that goddamn ledge!”

“Shh! We made allowances for that. We knew you were a poor, incompetent normal.”

He didn't say anything.

She took a strong nylon cord-rope from her rucksack, tied one end through the bars, almost knocking him from his perilous perch. “Use your feet against the wall to keep from sliding down and burning your hands. And please do be quiet — if that isn't beyond your meager talents.”

He grabbed the rope, swung away from the building, wriggling around to face it on the first outward arc, planting his feet against the wall when he swung back. As easily as possible, he moved down.

Swinging…

Jumping…

Swinging, jumping, swinging…

A human spider…

Mayna waited, watching him go.

Her eyes glinted green in the starlight…

“Very good,” a voice said below.

For a moment, he froze, imaging gestapos below. But then his mind cleared itself and he recognized the voice as Babe's. He dropped the last few feet, letting the rope slap against the wall. He looked up. Mayna still waited on the ledge, looking somewhat like a great vampire woman nestled there in the shadows. But now she was turning very adeptly and moving along the narrow ledge toward the rainspout.

“Here,” Babe said, tugging urgently at his shirt. “The shrubs.”

They ran, Tohm crouching to match Babe's height, and made the shelter of the bushes without incident. They turned and watched Mayna creep easily down the building, using the rainspout very little. She swung gracefully, down, down, down… Hitting the earth, she bounced on the balls of her feet, rocking back and forth for a short moment. Then, bent almost in two, hugging the ground and nearly blending with it, she ran across the courtyard to where they waited.

“C'mon,” she said, moving behind the hedge that paralleled the street, taking the lead.

Tohm followed her swinging hips, losing the dark form of her in the still darker night, recapturing sight of the vision when the lights of the street broke through gaps in the hedge and glimmered in her hair, trapped like fireflies in her silken cage. Babe brought up the rear, an unlighted cigar clamped between his teeth. They weaved along, skirting the rear of the House of Nubile Maidens, stopping suddenly at the edge of the main avenue.

“What's the matter?” Tohm asked her as she peered into the street from their hiding place behind a number of garbage bins in the alleyway.

“Listen.”