PROTECTORATE

Mick Farren

Copyright © 1985 by Mick Farren

Cover art by Dan La Mountain

ISBN: 0-441-68680-X

e-book ver. 1.0

1

The guard pulled the collar of his tunic close around his throat and hunched his shoulders against an involuntary shud­der. There was a damp chill coming off the Blackwater and from the Great River beyond. It was the kind of drifting cold that flowed over rooftops and curled between buildings; it pen­etrated clothing and seeped through to one's very bones. With the chill and the damp came the smell of brackish, dark green decay, the smell of water that has lain too long and has had too much drowned in it. The stench drifted in from the long-dead waterfront with its rotting piers and its ancient hulks sunk in the shallows. It was the smell of a city that had been neglected almost to the point of death.

The guard turned and walked with a measured stride. One pace, two pace, three pace, four, turn again, and start back across the platform in front of the huge, ornate bronze doors. Once across, once back, thinking all the time of the party going on behind those doors, inside the main hall. The hall was not for him, though. He wished he were down in the big kitchen, basking in the cozy orange glow, boots off, warming his feet in front of the bread ovens. He'd be drinking hot broth with maybe a shot of something strong in it and flirting with the cooks and the serving girls. Guard to the household of Proprietor N'Ssad was hardly an arduous or dangerous post now that the proprietors were prevented from warring. He knew that he would be the envy of many who scratched for a living on the lower levels, but that knowledge didn't ease the ache in his feet, keep out the damp, or make the watch pass any faster.

On a warm, clear night the city could be beautiful in its decline. Its shimmer and glow spread all the way to the horizon and far beyond. It was not without cause that they called it The City That Went On Forever. On a warm night he could stand for hours, following the pinpoint riding lights of drifting carriages, imagining the games of the wealthy behind the gem windows of the tallest towers. To the west was the pale, cold radiation that leaked from the forbidden areas where the Wasps had their compounds. The guard avoided looking to the west for long; the Wasps were too much of a fear and a puzzlement. On a night like this, when the air was opaque with mist, the only view was down, down to the dull, red glow of the man-made canyons, to the poverty and squalor of the lower levels. The guard also avoided looking down. He didn't like to be reminded that, but for a small accident of fate, he, too, would be down there.

The guard eased the strap of the pulser that hung from his shoulder. The weapon was starting to grow heavy. There was still a third of the watch to go. His old leg wound was starting to nag, and he wanted nothing but to be relieved right then and there. Better than the big kitchen, he wanted his own warm bed in the soldiers' quarters. The new woman would be there waiting for him. At least, she had better be there waiting for him, if she knew what was good for her. Many of the soldiers' women were dull, sullen trollops, going with soldiers but be­lieving they deserved much better, seeing themselves as fallen on hard times. This one was different. She was a vigorous little strumpet, eager and perverted, always willing for games. Oh, yes, she'd better be waiting for him when he came off watch.

The small postern set beside the huge bronze gates opened, letting a narrow band of light fall across the platform. There was the distant sound of music and chatter. They were enjoying themselves inside the hall. A figure stepped out through the postern, black and unidentifiable against the light. The guard's hand went down to the pulser and he moved it to the ready position. The gesture was one of habit and routine rather than necessity. The Proprietor N'Ssad lived a quiet life, and there was rarely a problem that required weaponry.

"Halt and make yourself known."

A weary voice answered, "I'm the poet who's been enter­taining your master."

The guard nodded. He had been told when he came on watch that there was a visiting poet in the hall. Proprietor N'Ssad favored the occasional poet. For his part, the guard couldn't see the attraction. He'd far rather listen to a raucous balladeer with a suitably dirty mind.

"They didn't ask you to stay the night, then?"

The Poet shook his head a little ruefully.

"No such luck. I must have been off form tonight."

The guard could see him a little better now. He was slim and reasonably tall. His curly black hair hung down to his shoulders, and a gold hoop earring dangled from one ear. The lines on his face had been formed by worry and calculation, punctuated by bouts of laughter. There were the clear signs of prolonged dissolution around his eyes. He was dressed in a black tunic with flowing sleeves. His high-top boots had seen better days. A black cloak was folded over his arm. He shivered in the night air and threw the cloak around his shoulders.

"It's turned chill."

The guard nodded. "That it has."

The Poet seemed uncertain what to do. "Did anyone say anything about a carriage?"

"Carriage?"

"To get me out of here."

The guard shook his head. "Nobody's said anything to me all watch."

"Could you go inside and ask?"

"I can't leave my post."

"Then let me go back inside and make some arrangement."

"You can't go back now that you've left the hall."

The Poet was starting to grow angry. "How in hell's name am I supposed to get down from here?"

"To the lowers, you mean?"

The contempt in the guard's voice slowed the Poet's temper.

"Aye, to the lowers."

"And you've got no belt?"

"You can see I've got no belt."

"If you've got no belt and nobody has bothered to arrange a carriage, you've no choice but to climb down the steps. It's a long way down to the lowers by the steps."

The words a long way down were the understatement of someone who lived his life safe in a tower. As the Poet started to descend the steps he chanced to glance over the edge. The drop to the lower levels of the city looked as though it were infinite, as though a man could fall through eternity before he smashed into the ground. In that instant the Poet felt sick and dizzy with vertigo, and he all but plunged forward to test the illusion. For some minutes he leaned back against the wall with his eyes shut, letting the damp wind from the Blackwater whip past him. Finally his heart calmed and the strength came back to his legs. With great caution he started down, cursing the long-dead architect who, believing that all men would be per­manently equipped with flying belts, had designed such narrow, delicate steps so high in the air with only the skimpiest of safety rails.

Since the coming of the alien invaders, almost all of hu­manity's dreams and aspirations had either been modified or canceled. The flying belts were a perfect example. No new ones had been manufactured in two hundred years. When they broke or burned out, they weren't replaced. Those that re­mained were for the privileged, tower-dwelling few: the wealthy, the powerful, and the military. Technology was something the Wasps doled out grudgingly. They tolerated the minimum that would sustain a semblance of civilization and no more.

Although the Poet had no way of knowing beforehand, the descent, with its constant twists, spirals, and right-angle turns, took over an hour, including the three times that he stopped to rest. Even when he reached the bottom, he still had a long way to go to the tavern in the artists' quarter that he thought of as home. Walking through the lowers could be a hazardous busi­ness. In its days of glory the city had reared so high that it lost touch with its roots and its foundations. Great tracts had fallen into ruin and disuse; mazes of basements, cellars, and narrow alleys had been left to the spiders, the rats, the blind slitherers, and the armored cockarows.

In among the feet of the great towers the going was fairly simple. The worst the Poet had to fear was his own imagination and the temptation to make monsters out of the rustlings, the scramblings, and the invisible dartings that preceded his foot­steps. In the outlying areas there were worse and more repulsive dangers. There were the huge pits, excavated in the constant search for ancient artifacts from the city's golden age. There were whole neighborhoods abandoned to the flooding of the Black water. According to legend, these areas of swamp and ruin were the hiding place of ghoul and wampyr, but the Poet didn't dwell on those stories. A man walking on his own in the empty lowers did well to ignore legend and concentrate as completely as he could on the matter at hand.

The Poet stuck close to ways that were lighted by the low-key orange glow of everburn. Almost all the dark ways of the lower city were illuminated by the iridescent material. It was coated on the walls along streets and alleyways and on the roofs of the miles of tunnels that honeycombed the deeps of the city. Two hundred years in the past the light had been a bright yellow-white. Now it was faded and drab like a fire that had burned down. In some places it had failed completely. It could not be replaced. Everburn was one of the hundreds of secrets that had been lost since the coming of the aliens.

The Poet was confronted by a choice. He could take a well-lighted three-block detour around a massive and quietly throb­bing power conduit, or he could go under it, through a short but badly lighted underpass. The Poet was getting to be past caring. It seemed as though he'd been walking forever, and he chose the underpass. He started down the worn steps into the shadows. It was a neighborhood that had been virtually aban­doned by humans. It was an unlikely place either for thieves or for the kind that liked to kill and mutilate for fun. If they lurked there, they faced a long lurk between victims.

Slightly more than halfway through the underpass he en­countered the first living creature he'd seen since he'd taken his leave of Proprietor N'Ssad's guard. A cockarow, over a yard long, stood in the middle of the tunnel, facing him. The Poet flapped his cloak at it, but the big insect stood its ground. The Poet took a couple of steps forward, hoping that it would turn and run. All it did was wave its feelers at him. The Poet stopped. He had never had an unpleasant experience with a cockarow, but there were stories. A friend of a friend had lost a hand, another had had a baby carried away by a horde of cockarows. The Poet waved his arms and yelled. "Piss off!"

The feelers waved back. He tried again. "Piss off, you!"

One feeler went down. The other came up until it was almost vertical. The Poet started to feel distinctly foolish. He stooped down and picked a half brick from the garbage and rubble and threw it as hard as he could at the insect. It missed the cock­arow's head and bounced off the middle of its back. The feelers stiffened. The gesture was uncannily similar to a man's nar­rowing his eyes. The Poet blinked and waited to see what would happen next. For three or four seconds the creature didn't move, then it scuttled quickly backward, turned, and ran off. The Poet let out his breath. "Who's the dominant species, then?"

He emerged from the tunnel feeling more than a little pleased with himself. Sadly, the feeling was short-lived; within five minutes someone had thrown a half brick at him.

He had just passed a sign on a boarded-up basement that announced in crude letters: this is where krant lives—break in and he'll kill you. It told him that he was back in the habitation of humans. This was something of a mixed blessing.

He no longer had to worry about the shuddering possibility of ghosts, but on the other hand his fellow humans were an in­finitely varied bunch, and among them were those who, if they had the inclination, would do him more serious harm than any cold, wandering spirit. The lowers had more than their fair share of the crazy, the vicious, and the homicidal.

The half brick missed the Poet's head by scarcely a hand-breadth. He spun around. "What the hell's the deal?"

"Wampyr!"

Another brick spun toward him. The Poet danced back, his cloak flapping. Four small, pale faces peered over a section of broken wall.

"Wampyr!"

"Get outta here, dirty wampyr. We ain't afraid of you!"

The Poet was outraged. He was being attacked by urchins. "What do you kids think you're doing? I'm not a wampyr!"

There was a pause, but there were also no more bricks. One of the urchins stepped around the section of wall. He was maybe nine years old, with a dirty face and hair the color of damp straw. He was dressed in a torn tunic and thonged leggings. In one hand he held a rock and in the other a curved knife. "If you ain't a wampyr, how come you wearing a cloak?"

This was ridiculous. "I'm wearing a cloak because it's cold."

A second urchin had climbed up and was sitting on the fallen wall. "Wampyrs wear cloaks."

"Plenty of people wear cloaks."

A third urchin bobbed up. "My brother saw a wampyr over by the Blackwater. It was wearing a cloak. He told me."

"I'm not a goddamn wampyr."

The Poet was unwilling to be stoned to death because a bunch of kids had mistaken him for a legend. The first urchin abruptly changed the tack. "You got any money?"

"No, of course not, I'm a poet."

The urchin with the rock and the knife nodded. "You better get out of here, Poet. If Krant tries to rob you and finds you don't have nothing, he's liable to kill you, just out of spite."

The second urchin jumped down from his perch on the wall. "Make him stay and tell us a story."

The Poet shook his head. "I've got to be going."

The second urchin pulled a knife from under his tunic. "I want to hear a story. What else has a poet got to do 'cept tell stories?"

The first urchin waved the second one back. "Leave him be, there's no time for stories. Krant'll be back soon. We don't need that sort of trouble." He faced the Poet. "On your way."

Being ordered along by a child caused a twinge to the Poet's pride, but he didn't stop to argue. He was too tired and he didn't like the look of the urchins' knives. Another twenty minutes would see him in a brighter, more populated section of the lowers. His route led him through the quarter called Oldmarket. This was the center of the artifact trade. All over the city, men and women who had nothing better to do with their lives dug and delved into the buried foundations, searching for remains and relics of the old times. Most of what came out of the pits, quarries, and excavations was junk: rusted pieces of metal, shards of pottery and glass, strangely shaped plastics with no recognizable value. The burrowers were always hoping for the big score, a cache of jewelry, a sealed vault with un­disturbed books and papers that wouldn't turn to dust when the air touched them, or the biggest score of all, a machine that still functioned.

Only a tiny fraction of the burrowers ever hit even a small score, maybe just enough to create the rumors that kept the others digging. Even without a score, though, it was possible to scratch a bare living in the excavations. The people of the city attached an unreasonable importance to anything that was old. They looked on even the most humble, misshapen and corroded artifact as being to some degree magical. They were links to what was thought of as a golden age, the time before the Wasps arrived. The Poet wasn't a particularly strong be­liever; he saw himself as a pragmatist and prided himself on a healthy cynicism, but even he carried a small steel disk, which might once have been a coin or maybe a tiny part of a machine, sewn into the sleeve of his tunic. Where luck and magic were concerned, the Poet again saw no reason to take chances.

Even though it was well after midnight, the Oldmarket was still wide-awake. The wheeling and dealing, the seduction, and the crime never seemed to stop. Burrowers haggled with mer­chants, pitchmen harangued the passing crowds with offers of priceless treasures at giveaway prices. It all mingled with the whine of beggars and the shrieks and laughter of drunks and bawds. A whore stood in a lighted doorway, a hip-tilted sil­houette against a garish glow of scarlet. She was naked from the waist down. Even from a distance it was clear that she was no longer young. Her white, sunless flesh was doughy and pitted from too much bread, too much wine, too much waiting, and a lack of hope and protein. She noticed the Poet's cursory inspection and smiled at him. The Poet smiled back but shook his head and extended his hands in the age-old gesture of the penniless. The smile went out.

The most prosperous and successful of the merchants had whole shops to hold their wares; the lesser contented themselves with booths and stalls, down to a tray hung around the neck, a blanket on the ground, or the lone object clutched in an outstretched hand. One such thrust itself in front of the Poet; it was a brown claw belonging to a wild-eyed crone trying to catch his interest with a fragment of broken mirror still in a plastic frame. The Poet sidestepped with the skill of one who has spent a lifetime on the streets of the lowers.

The Poet was in no mood to be jostled, hustled, or solicited. He looked for a way out of the noisy, slow-moving crowd. Almost immediately he saw an escape. He ducked around the colorful canvas banner that was part of the display in front of one of the biggest artifact houses. He was making for the black entrance of a dark alleyway. For the second time that night he was taking a route that was dark, potentially dangerous, but short as opposed to the longer and safer. He had developed the unshakable courage of the footsore and exhausted.

The Poet was more than halfway through the system of alleys, passages, and tunnels that was his shortcut to the artists' quarter. All had gone without incident. The worst thing he'd come across was a large, overfed rat that looked at him inso­lently and waddled away. He was approaching a point where the alley intersected with a strip of usually deserted street. Without warning a swath of bright white light cut through the tired orange of everburn. The Poet halted and ducked back into the shadows. A white light in the lowers usually signified the presence of some kind of official from the upper levels. The Poet did his best to avoid all contact with officialdom.

They came past the end of the alley almost like a procession. In front were three of the Protector's Killers. They moved with the ponderous stride that seemed to come with the black-and-silver uniforms and the burnished helmets with their sinister, masklike faceplates. The Killers were the strong right arm of the Protector, the final enforcement of his will and, indirectly, the will of the Wasps. Each Killer cradled a lethal-weight pulser. They were the only men and women in the whole of the city, the whole of the Protectorate, who were legally entitled to bear weapons that killed from a distance. The pulsers em­ployed by the guards of the Proprietors and by merchants' minders could only stun or inflict pain.

Behind the Killers' walked a pair of petty Endents. They had none of the Killers' assurance and looked around anxiously as if quite distressed that they had been forced to come to this ill-favored part of the city. This was already a sizable entourage for anyone's stroll through the lowers. The Poet wondered what would come next. A picture formed in his mind of some ar­rogant, self-important mandarin from the Halls of the Protector. No sooner had the picture formed, however, than it was proved to be completely in error. To his shock and surprise, a Wasp walked into his field of vision.

The Poet could count the number of times that he had seen a Wasp on the fingers of one hand. Even though the alien creatures had now ruled humanity for over two hundred years, they kept themselves very much to themselves. They stuck close to their compounds in the areas that were forbidden to humans. According to rumor, only the utmost necessity drew them out into the habitations of men. The Poet observed the Wasp with curiosity and a good deal of fear. Rumor further claimed that the Wasps had the power not only to detect hostile thoughts in the humans around them but also to destroy those who harbored those thoughts. They did this by literally frying their nervous systems.

The Wasps were hardly well named. Their bipedal form made them appear less like any insect and more like a tall and angular caricature of a man. Legend wasn't clear about who had first dubbed them Wasps. Somehow, without benefit of logic, the name had stuck. The most insectlike parts of them were their elongated, ovoid heads that seemed too large for their spindly bodies. At the pointed end of the head there were two dull patches on the otherwise gleaming, patent-leather black of the rest of their skin. These patches were generally assumed to be some kind of eyes. The Wasps' bodies were laced with an interlocking network of flexible tubes, large major tubes with complicated ribbing that followed the structure of the limbs and the torso, fed into or were fed by clusters of smaller, smooth subsidiary tubes. One theory was that the Wasps' circulatory system was on the outside of their bodies. An opposing theory suggested that maybe the black skin and the tubes were some sort of suit that helped them survive in the native atmosphere.

Neither theory had gone beyond speculation. The Wasps vol­unteered absolutely no information about themselves.

The Wasp was directly opposite where the Poet was stand­ing, very still, in the shadows. It was framed exactly in the middle of the rectangle of light created by the end of the alley. Abruptly the Wasp's head swiveled. It didn't miss a stride. The head just swung around until the pointed end was directed straight at the Poet. The Poet froze. He prayed that fear would make his mind go blank. The head continued to point in his direction for two, maybe three seconds; then it swung back again and the Wasp was gone. The Poet remained perfectly still, doing his best to think about nothing. It wasn't easy; his heart pounded and he could feel cold sweat running down from his armpits. He didn't step out of the shadows until the white light had completely faded. When he did move, despite all previous weariness, he set off at a very brisk pace that didn't slacken until he was safe inside the long bar of Denhagel's Tavern.

As the tavern door closed behind the Poet he was suddenly in a new world. With its warm lights, crackling fire, and brew­ery smell it was a safe haven. It felt as if not even the Wasps could get him in there. Denhagel's wife was serving behind the bar. In her youth Denhagel's wife had been a celebrated beauty on the upper levels, until the scented and slightly unreal night when she had fallen for Denhagel's solid affability and joined him in a life of hosting the most accommodating tavern in the whole of the artists' quarter. Despite the thickening of age, there were still suggestions of her past glory in the way she moved, in the way that she carried herself, and in her violet eyes, which widened quite considerably when the Poet stum­bled through the door.

"Jeen Vayim the Poet, what's with you? You look like you've seen a ghoul."

The Poet leaned heavily on the bar. "I saw a Wasp."

Denhagel's wife raised an eyebrow. "Not something I'd wish to encounter on a dark night."

"It looked right at me."

Denhagel's wife shook her head. "That must have been unpleasant."

"You know what they say the Wasps can do if they think you're . . ."

"I've heard the stories."

The Poet mopped his brow as if the memory still made him sweat. "There were a couple of moments back there when I thought I was going to get my brain fried. You can't help it when a Wasp looks at you."

"What did you do?"

"Damn all nothing. I just stook there trying to keep the palpitations down."

Denhagel's wife nodded. "We had a fellow in here once who claimed he'd been there when this woman tried to take out a Wasp. She was trying to get near it with a homemade bapgun, but the Wasp somehow sensed her and did it to her. He said how her eyes . . . I can't repeat it . . . it was really dis­gusting." She pushed a tot of brandy toward the Poet. "You'd better have this, you look like you could use it."

Vayim the Poet raised it gratefully to his lips. "Damn right I could."

Denhagel's wife leaned on the bar. "What did the Wasp look like? I've never seen one."

The Poet spread his hands. "It was black."

"A poet lost for words?"

"You start to think about them in terms of people, in human terms, even animals or insects, but then you realize that none of it works, you just can't think that way. It's the black glittering skin and those slithering . . . I don't know. . . they kind of pulse, all those tubes. The way the head swivels." Vayim swallowed the rest of his brandy. "They don't belong on this world."

"They run this world, Jeen Vayim."

Vayim the Poet pushed his glass forward toward Denhagel's wife, who refilled it. He quickly drained half of it. Denhagel's wife smiled at him.

"You feel better now, Jeen Vayim the Poet?"

The Poet grinned. "You're calling me Jeen Vayim tonight. Usually it's just Poet."

It was something of a ritual. Denhagel's wife tossed her black curls. "Think nothing of it, Poet, think nothing of it."

She moved away to serve a customer at the other end of the bar, and the Poet turned to see who else was in the place. With a brandy inside him, the fright was starting to fade. He was relieved to see that the usual pretentious riffraff were fairly thin on the ground. The night was late and most of the drunks had hauled themselves away, leaving pools of ale on the uneven flagstones and a litter of mugs, bottles, and assorted debris on the tables, which were being slowly cleared by the ancient, arthritic potman. A young man came through the door, unpeeling a flying belt from around his waist. He didn't look the kind who belonged in the lowers. His red leather tunic with its silver studs and buckles was a prize to tempt any one of a hundred street and alley thieves. The Poet hoped that the young man could protect himself. Already a previously sleeping dead-beat, who called himself a musician but who had long sinc...