am well paid. I have much gold, and some power, and my pick of Red Silk Girls. What man could ask for more?'
'Flaminius,' I said.
He looked at me, startled. Then he laughed and shook his head. 'No,' said he, 'I have learned to despise men. That is why this is a good house for me.' He looked at me, drunkenly, with hatred. 'I despise men!' he said. Then he laughed. 'That is why I drink with you.'
I nodded curtly, and turned to leave.
'One thing more to this little story,' said Flaminius. He lifted the bottle to me.
'What is that?' I asked.
'At the games on the second of En'Kara, in the Stadium of Blades,' said he, 'I saw the High Initiate, Complicius Serenus.'
'So?' said I.
'He does not know it,' said Flaminius, 'nor will he learn for perhaps a year.'
'Learn what?' I asked.
Flaminius laughed and poured himself another drink. 'That he is dying of Dar-kosis,' he said.
I wandered about the house. It was now past the twentieth hour, the midnight of the Gorean day, yet still, here and there, I could hear the revels of Kajuralia, which are often celebrated until dawn.
My steps, as I was lost in thought, brought me back to the hall of Cernus, in which we had sat table. Curious, I opened the door off the hall, through which the slave taken to the beast had been led. I found a long set of stairs, and I followed them. I came to a landing, and there was a long corridor. At the end I saw two guards. They immediately sprang up, seeing me. Neither was drunk. Both were apparently perfectly sober, rested and alert.
'Kajuralia,' I said to them.
Both men drew their weapons. 'Do not pass this point,' said they, 'Killer.'
'Very well,' I said. I looked at the heavy beamed door behind them. It was not locked on this side, which interested me. I would have thought it would have been bolted shut, for fear of the beast locked within. There were, however, the means for shutting it at hand, two large beams which might be placed in iron brackets.
Suddenly I heard an enraged roar from somewhere behind the door.
'I was wounded,' I said to them, 'in the sport of hook knife.'
I shoved back the sleeve of my tunic, revealing the bandage. Some blood had soaked through it.
'Leave!' cried one of the guards.
'I will show you,' I said, drawing down the white cloth, revealing the wound.
Suddenly there was a wild cry from behind the door, of almost maniacal intensity, and I thought I heard something moving on the stones behind it, uncontrollable, clawed.
'Go!' cried the second guard. 'Go!'
'But it is not a serious wound,' I said, pinching it a bit, letting some blood move from it, trickling down my forearm.
To my horror I heard something behind the door fumbling with a bolt. It seemed to draw it open, and then, wildly, to thrust it back, keeping the door locked; and then I heard the bolt rattling in its brackets as though something had seized it and trembling was trying to hold it in place. The door I then realized had been locked on the inside, and could be opened from the inside.
There was another wild, eerie cry, an uncanny almost demented roaring noise, and the bolt on the other side was dashed free of the door, and the two guards, with a cry of fear, hurled the beams in the two brackets, fastening the door, which was made to swing outward, shut. The two guards leaned against the door. Behind it I heard an enraged, frustrated roaring, weird and terrible; I heard clawing at the wood; I saw the heavy door, as if struck with great force, buckle out against the beams.
'Go!' screamed the first guard. 'Go!'
'Very well,' I said, and turned and walked away down the corridor.
I could hear the guards cursing, and hear the door being thrust against the heavy beams. Then, when I was far down the corridor, I fixed the bandage again in place, shoved down my sleeve, and looked back. The thing behind the door was no longer making noise, and the door was no longer pressing against the beams; from where I stood I could hear the bolt on the inside being thrust back in place, locking it from the inside. Then, after a minute or two, I saw the guards remove the beams. What was inside was then apparently quiet.
I continued to wander about the House, here and there bumping into inebriated guards or staff members, who would invariably hail me with 'Kajuralia!' to which greeting I would respond in turn.
A given thought kept going through my mind, for no reason that I was clearly aware of. It seemed unrelated to anything. It was Caprus saying to me, outside the Cell for Special Captures, 'You, Killer, would not make a Player.' His remark kept burning its way through my brain.
But as I walked the halls it seemed to me that, on the whole, things were not proceeding badly, though I regretted the amount of time lost, apparently necessarily, in the House of Cernus. Elizabeth, and Virginia and Phyllis, by tomorrow at this time, would be free. And Caprus, now that Cernus was often in the Central Cylinder, attending to the numerous duties of Ubar of the city, had more time for his work. By Se'Var he hoped to be finished. Caprus, I said to myself, a good man. Caprus. Thought well of by Priest-Kings. Trusted. He himself had arranged for an agent of Priest-Kings to purchase the girls. Caprus who seldom left the house. Brave Caprus. You, Killer, would not make a Player. Brave Caprus.
I turned suddenly into the kitchen in which the food for the hall of Cernus is prepared. Some startled slaves leaped up, each chained by one ankle to her ring; but most slept, drunk; one or two, too drunk to notice me, were sitting against the wall, their left ankles chained to their slave rings, a bottle of Ka-la-na in their grasp, their hair falling forward.
'Where is the Paga?' I demanded of one of the girls. Startled, I saw, now that she stood forth from the shadows, that she had no nose.
'There, Master!' said she, pointing to a basket of bottles under the large cutting table in the center of the room.
I went to the basket and took out a bottle, a large one.
I looked about myself.
There was the odor of food in the kitchen, and of spilled drink. There were several yards of sausages hung on hooks; numerous cannisters of flour, sugars and salts; many smaller containers of spices and condiments. Two large wine jugs stood in one corner of the room. There were many closed pantries lining the walls, and a number of pumps and tubs on one side. Some boxes and baskets of hard fruit were stored there. I could see the bread ovens in one wall; the long fire pit over which could be put cooking racks, the mountings for spits and kettle hooks; the fire pit was mostly black now, but here and there, I could see a few broken sticks of glowing charcoal; aside from this, the light in the room came from one small tharlarion oil lamp hanging from the ceiling, near the side where the kitchen slaves were chained, presumably to facilitate the guard check which, during the night, took place each second Ahn; the other lamps in the room were now extinguished.
I took another bottle of paga from the basket and tossed it to the girl without a nose, who had directed me to the paga.
'Thank you, Master,' said she, smiling, going back to her ring. I saw her nudge the girls on the left and right of her. 'Paga,' I heard her whisper.
'Kajuralia,' I said to her.
'Kajuralia,' she said.
Again the thought went through me. You, Killer, would never make a Player. You, Killer, would never make a Player. Grimly, the Paga bottle in my hand, I went back into the corridor and found the stairs that took one to lower floors in the cylinder, and eventually to its depths.
Lower and lower I went into the cylinder, the thought pounding in my brain: You, Killer, would never make a Player.
I was beginning to feel sick with fear, with anger. A realization that horrified me seemed to claw at the back of my brain, as the beast had torn at the door, unseen, in the corridor far above. You, Killer, would never make a Player.
Now, paga bottle in hand, I was passing guards and found myself walking down the narrow iron runways over the pens below, now filled with drunken slaves, some sleeping, some sitting stupefied in the center of their pen, some singing brokenly to themselves, some trying to crawl again to the trough to lap there at the paga mixed with their water. I saw one girl, drunk, putting her hands through the bars which separated the cage which she shared with other female slaves, from the cage adjacent to it, filled with male slaves. 'Touch me,' she begged. 'Touch me!' But the males lay in drunken sleep on the stones.
I passed through the level on which interrogations take place, the level of the kennels, and went lower in the cylinder, now far below ground, past even more iron pens and levels. When I would pass a guard I would hail him with 'Kajuralia!' and pass by.
Always the thought burned through me, You, Killer, would never make a player, and always I seemed driven by the black fear that would not speak itself but whose presence I could clearly sense.
Descending a last spiral of iron stairs I came to the lowest level of the cylinder.
'Who goes there?' cried a startled guard.
'It is I, Kuurus, of the black caste,' said I, 'on the orders of Cernus bringing paga to prisoners on Kajuralia!'
'But there is only one prisoner here,' said he, puzzled.
'The more for both of us then,' I said.
He grinned and put out his hand and I bit the cork from the bottle, which was a very large bottle, and handed it to him.
'I have spent Kajuralia,' he grumbled, between guzzles, 'sitting here without paga-they did not even send a girl down to me.'
I gathered from what he said that the guard was intended to remain sober, and from this that he had valuable materials under his care, and gathered also that the guard, from his disgruntlement, was ignorant of their value. It could of course be that he had merely been forgotten, overlooked in the general revels of Kajuralia.
Then the guard sat down heavily, not willing to try to remain upright longer.
'It is good paga,' said he. He took two or three more swallows, and then simply held the bottle, looking at it.
I left him and looked about. There were several corridors lined with small cells with iron doors, each with an observation panel. The corridors were damp. Here and there some water had gathered in recesses in the flooring. They were dark, save that each, at intervals of some thirty yards, was lit with a small tharlarion oil lamp. I picked up a torch and lit it in the light of a lamp near the swirling iron stairs.
I heard the guard take another swallow of the paga, a long swallow, and then he sat there again, holding the bottle.
I walked down a corridor or two. The cells were locked but, by sliding back the panel, and holding the torch behind me I could see dimly into the cells. Each seemed piled with boxes; I recognized the boxes as being of the general sort which I had seen unloaded from the Slaver's ship in the Voltai. I gathered that most, or a great many
