The Third Eagle Read online

  Mimi gave his fellow a suspicious glance. He never knew when Wanbli was serious and when he was making fun. “You shouldn’t joke about the Protectors, Wanbli. It’s very bad luck.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t.” Wanbli was trotting across the room. He stuck his head in the bath. The private chamber was closed. “He’s finally curled his knees up?”

  “Half dec ago,” answered Mimi as he turned to go. “He tottered away and left the screen on. It’s still that way.”

  Mimi didn’t know how to operate the arena projector. He had never tried. “Okay,” said Wanbli. “Have good dreams.”

  This batch of cheapies involved feet. Sex and feet, of course. Wanbli caught the gist of the entertainment as it flashed on the wall in a hurricane of fast forward. The others had feet in their titles: Pretty Pink Peds, Between Your Toes… Had he not just woken up, Wanbli might have been tempted to browse through; after all, what else had he to do but prowl the house and watch his employer sleep? But he had just woken up, and though it was not too early for sex, it was far too early for feet. Besides, he did not share Tawlin T’chishetti’s fondness for the peculiarities of flat-image projection. The man said it gave him remove and a godlike superiority to the action. Godlike superiority. Wanbli snorted indulgently, feeling a little Godlike superiority himself.

  Wanbli himself preferred a good Arena Theatrical, even if it meant clearing a room of furniture. He had spent whole days watching AT behind Tawlin’s chair or, more likely, couch. It was all in the call of duty. He was interested in all types of AT, because they gave him new insights into people, and even better, into the places they came from. (Wanbli had never been off Neunacht; only a handful of Wacaan had been out for one hundred and fifty years.) Most of the ATs contained some episodes of fighting, which was Wanbli’s clan destiny and his occupation. From what he gathered, the standards of personal combat on New Benares, where most of the entertainments originated, were either much lower or much higher than those on Neunacht: lower because the actors moved so slowly and with so much useless flailing. Higher because the moves were so complex, and because it seemed to take so very much punishment to drop them. Considering the matter reasonably, Wanbli thought that probably the local standards were high, but that the actors were not sufficiently trained to carry out the technique.

  He preferred the sex-oriented shimmers anyway. Wanbli prided himself as much upon his bedroom games as he did upon the gold tattoo under his breechclout—and wasn’t that often called the seducer’s eagle? Not that a Wacaan had to try very hard to seduce anyone; all the world knew they were good.

  Romantic ATs were a puzzle to him, and perhaps his favorite for that reason. He liked to try to imagine himself in the grip of an unbreakable passion, living or dying for the touch of some woman’s hand, like Paovo in The Garden of Grief It was a very foreign and exotic mental exercise to Wanbli: strange as floating off into the air. Someday, perhaps, he would find within himself the roots of a deep passion for some uncaring female who would be cruel to him, and then his understanding of life would reach new levels. (He would also be sent back to the clan hospital in Hovart for ritual cleansing and reeducation, which would look very bad on his record, but what was life for?)

  The humidi-field, the deep windows and the white walls turned the bright morning sunlight into a cooler, more crystalline illumination. Wanbli put the wound cords of the cheapies into their thumb-size plastic sleeves and wondered what there was about feet to attract Tawlin. The T’chishetti’s own tended toward bunions.

  A darter whirred against the window screen. Perhaps the frustrated individual that had missed the ratchett a few minutes ago. Wanbli yawned again, irritated that he had let Tawlin’s party disturb his sleep. He disconnected the machine; it was very simple.

  Late alios were still popping and the daygrass cut into the breeze. The ferns whispered together as though they were dry, which (the Nine Protectors knew) they were not. A barefoot scuff, sounding lazy on the stone floor among them. Repeated.

  Mimi coming back. He would strap him to the chair and force him to learn the controls of the cheapie projector.

  No. Mimi would not come padding on his toes like a dog: not after all night standing and watching other people debauch. No energy for it.

  No one but the Wacaan walked barefoot at Tawlin Estate.

  A car, gliding nearer out of the west. Two-seater, he remembered.

  A barefoot scuff, sounding lazy on the stone floor. Repeated. Wanbli was in the air and flying. He was down again on bent knees, silently, pressed against the doorjamb to the long fern hall.

  As he was aware of the intruder, the intruder was aware of Wanbli. They faced each other through the doorway of white mud and shining mica. They were three meters apart and so neither put his guard up. The other Wacaan had his hands in fists at his sides.

  “Heydoc. Welcome to Tawlin. You should have let me know. I could have saved you the trip. The T’chishetti is in his sealed bedroom and will probably stay there half the day.”

  Heydoc grinned, not as smugly as Wanbli but with a lot of teeth. His eyes did not exactly wander from Wanbli’s face but they were very aware of the right side of the room around him. “Not so, cousin. In his room, yes, but not sealed. I’ve already counted coup on your degenerate employer and now I’m on my way out. You can either let me go or get hurt for nothing.” Heydoc shuffled smoothly back into the ferny chamber. He glanced right and behind him.

  Wanbli stood unmoving, slack-shouldered. He scratched his hip under the waistband. His smile was not fierce at all. “‘Docs, you’ll only get in trouble using your mouth; it’s a weapon you haven’t studied.”

  “And you have? You do tongue-training exercises maybe? You can touch your nose maybe?” Heydoc had taken one more step back, and now he slowly raised his guard.

  “I know very well you haven’t counted coup on my old man. He’s such an accident of birth no one would stoop to giving him a warning, and he wouldn’t take it anyway. And I know the door is sealed.” Wanbli moved toward Heydoc. The round-arched doorway was in front of him now.

  “And I know, by the way you refuse to look left,” he continued, still scratching an old bite under the waistband, “that you’re…”

  “… not alone!” The hidden woman beside the doorway snapped a chained stick down at Wanbli’s head. He did not bother trying to block it; any way it hit it would hurt badly. He shot out of the way, toward Heydoc and around him.

  He was between Heydoc and the sealed bedroom door. Heydoc was between Wanbli and the woman with the sticks. “Punch him out, Hey,” she called out. She was angry. She had let the flail snap her on the knuckles.

  Heydoc moved in with a left guard forward. This was fine—better than tea with sugar for waking one up. Wanbli wasn’t afraid of a little fist and kicking work with Heydoc. The Wacaan of T’chishett knew each other, and Heydoc was fast but not deadly.

  He was also left-handed, though, which Wanbli remembered well. Left-handed fighters were boxes of surprises and he had memorized the left-handed Wacaan as part of his Second Eagle. Why would Heydoc come on with his left first? Most fighters kept their strong hand behind. And that rear hand of his was cramped in against his chest: not even a proper fist. Wanbli let the left come, and true to prediction, it was only a feint. Here came that odd right, with Heydoc’s hip and foot moving forward with it, in a punch to the chin that would just barely miss.

  Wanbli did not have to see that little flash of metal to know that there was an inch of blade trailing behind Heydoc’s little finger, but see it he did. The unfocused punch to the chin was actually a very accurate knife stroke across the throat. But halfway along its trajectory that punch developed a rider, as Wanbli put one soft hand over the front of it and guided it out. As this was happening, the throat in question was very busy going elsewhere. Wanbli ducked and went left, still with his hand glued to the hand with the knife. That right arm of Heydoc’s would not get in the way of his good hand. There would be a kick coming soon, bu
t for now, here was Wanbli staring in at Heydoc’s crotch, and such a gift of the Protectors could not be rejected. He reached in, not too fast—not fast enough to engage the seat belt—and squeezed. Not waiting to see the effect of that strike, Wanbli straightened up and his soft grip persuaded the knife hand backward. His flattened right hand struck into the elbow joint, collapsing the last resistance, and Wanbli had Heydoc’s arm locked beside his head.

  Of course, there was another opponent, and this second and a half had given her time to get around her partner. She held the chained sticks in her hand but did not use them again. Instead she lifted her knee up so sharply it clapped against her chest and brought the weight of her leg and the weight of her whole body down in a bone-crushing kick at Wanbli’s knee.

  Sensible move. No dramatics. There was no room to get out of the way of this, either, while holding the knife man. Need brought Wanbli’s right leg up in a deflecting strike that sent her thrust kick shooting out into the air beside him. His own foot came down on the inside rear of her supporting knee and the woman went down flat. He kicked the sticks out of her hands.

  Not quite three seconds had passed since Heydoc had thrown his first punch.

  “I want you to think, before you move again,” said Wanbli to the woman, whose name he seemed to remember was Susan, “…where the knife is at the moment, and how much this flyer means to you. Maybe nothing, but think about it.”

  Where the knife was, was under Heydoc’s chin, over the carotid artery, where it bounced and glimmered with every pulse. Heydoc, whose own helpless hand was holding it there, was staring blankly at the sealed door to Tawlin’s room.

  The woman lay on the floor and looked and looked at the tiny knife.

  “Now, you can both take Tag and get out of here, or Susie can try me again, and maybe I’ll be slowed down enough killing Docs here that she can dust me. I don’t think it’s likely but it is a possibility. The alternative is that you walk back to Hovart and start looking for another job: both of you.”

  Heydoc said nothing. “I’ll take Tag,” said Susan on the floor. Her partner slowly let his breath out. “Tag,” he said. “Of course.”

  “And the keys?” Wanbli held his hand out. “Remember—you walk out?”

  Susie opened her mouth as though to make some objection, but at last she pulled from her waist pouch a star of turquoise-colored plastic on a flimsy chain. He snagged it from her.

  The attackers left as quietly as they had come, Heydoc still with the little bright knife in his hand.

  For a few minutes Wanbli stood where he was, his gaze fixed on the floor, fingering the car key in his hand.

  He was twenty-four, and despite a lifetime of training for battle, nobody had ever really tried to kill him before. His own people too. Well, who else but a Wacaan would dare attack a Wacaan?

  He felt a bit of shock, and waited for that to fade. It was vanity that cheered him up in the end; the Third Eagle—not universally well regarded among conservative Paints—had proven its usefulness. Tongue exercises, indeed.

  And how many young Wacaan, not even sire-promoted, had estate cars of their very own? How many Wacaan ever got so much wealth together? He slipped the pretty key into his wallet.

  It was very difficult to wake up Tawlin, and not even his Wacaan could break the seal on a night-sealed, windowless bedroom. He pounded with his flat hand. He used a great deal of cursing.

  “If you don’t want to know, then…” he shouted (the Wacaan were very good shouters), “then gut you. Then to sizzle with you, Ake Tawlin! You might have been crawling with hungry, happy bugs by now. You might have been spindleworm food. Darters in your eyes… Maggots. Mealworms…”

  The slate-heavy door slid open. “Progenitors, how you talk to me!” said Ake Tawlin, who was a head shorter than Wanbli. “Are you on drugs, redman?”

  As Wanbli was red, Tawlin was yellow, but nowhere near as decisively colored. “Who would believe it’s I who pay your salary?” He was blinking fast. He used the door to lean on.

  “There were two Wacaan here just now to kill you, Tawlin.”

  Now the little man’s attention was locked.

  “To kill me too, by the bye, but you were the target. Of course.”

  Tawlin’s eyes, already dilated by stimulant, widened further. His hand shot to the switch and the door began to close again. Wanbli jumped through, knocking the T’chishetti into the wall in the process. Both were sealed into a small room of which the walls were red-and-blue paisley,” like a rather florid sort of shawl.

  Tawlin sat down on the bed. “But… but they couldn’t. I was sealed in.”

  Wanbli admitted the force of that. “Lucky for you. But how could those poor flyers know, when they planned it, that you had chosen today to exchange day for night?”

  Ake Tawlin leaned against his headboard, which, misinterpreting the gesture, glowed for reading. He wrapped himself up in his own thin arms. “I must say, ’Bli, you show an unexpected sympathy with my attempted assassins.”

  Wanbli sank down on his heels, using the door for support. “Sure. One of them is my cousin. I very much doubt that this assault was their idea. And after all, they lost a lot.”

  Tawlin cleared his sleepy throat. “You… uh… took care of them?” Wanbli nodded, with a rakish grin, but his employer’s response was to push deeper into the padded headboard. He ran his hand through his unnaturally thick black hair. “Oh, why did we ever let you people in?” His sigh was deep and rattling.

  “It has to remind me of the evolution of the combative male.”

  Now it was Wanbli’s turn to blink.

  “Yes, the combative male,” continued Tawlin, and he glared. “Some time or other, some wee little vertebrate—a fish or like that—was born with the male of the species outsized and outstrength to all the others. I’m sure it didn’t take long before that fish learned to bully all the rest. Miserable for the whole lot of them, except the outsized male. But he managed to reproduce his mutated genes, didn’t he? Didn’t he, hey?”

  “I guess.” Wanbli was wondering whether the little man was even capable of reason at the moment. Perhaps he should have let him sleep.

  “Soon the only way a female fish could reproduce at all was to find a big bully male…”

  “I don’t think fish really think like that,” said Wanbli, knowing he was wasting his breath.

  “… And all the ordinary, decent, forward-thinking male fish were dead! Dead!” He sat up for emphasis.

  “You’re not dead,” Wanbli reminded him.

  “… Never much good for the species, except for muskoxen and the rare thing like that. But it outcompeted within the species and that was what evolution was all about, eh?

  “Almost destroyed the human race a number of times. You think we’d have learned. We do not have to give way to that particular evolutionary twitch. And poor as we are on Neunacht too.”

  Wanbli took a lungful of very close air. “Then who was it talking about sending Vy and me out against Rall Estate last spring? A very bad idea too.”

  Tawlin seemed not to have heard. “This wasn’t in the Founder’s Plan, my bully. Whatever your synthetic legends say. We were sixty happy years on Neunacht with you primitives to yourselves in Southbay…”

  “To ourselves, all right.” Wanbli broke in, but calmly. “Starving by ourselves. No money.”

  “Whose fault was that? All societies are mercantile, given the latitude to be so. And believe me, with cartage fees for everything imported increasing by mile all the way from Hovart to the string intersection, we have little enough to spare for people playing unrealistic games.”

  Now it was Wanbli’s attention that began to fade. He had been hearing about cartage fees all his life.

  “It is ever to be regretted that Siering Mo opened the door to you. It was mere ambition on his part.”

  Wanbli listened to him denigrate the First Protector tolerantly, but added, “It’s true, you flyers did pretty well butchering each othe
r without us. In fact, the assassinations of the early years cut the number of incorporated houses in half. I think you’re safer now.”

  Tawlin’s small, bunioned feet sought concealment under the covers. “Safer, yes, as long as we subscribe to your damn protection racket. Keep a dog to protect myself against the other man’s dogs.”

  Wanbli laughed. “Do you prefer your blue dog with all the curlicues?” Abruptly, his face sobered. “Tawlin, my mother died defending your life.”

  The feet went still. “I know,” said Ake Tawlin. There was a short, complete silence in the room. “And now these two red friends of yours are dead attacking it. I don’t like the whole thing.”

  “They’re not dead.”

  Under the silk sheets, one could see Tawlin’s toes curl. “They’re not? They’re still out there… bleeding?”

  Wanbli laughed with real humor this time. “No, no. I said I took care of them. They’re Tagged. They won’t come back.”

  “Tagged? Tagged?” As Tawlin leaned forward, the unintelligent bedstead put out its light. He squeaked at the sudden dark and slammed back against the. headboard. “Dongs, man! They came to kill me and you just let them go?”

  “They came a lot closer to killing me than you, Ake,” answered Wanbli. His employer’s rising hysteria inspired in him a contrasting mood of self-confidence. “And Tagging is the same as dusting a person, at least where you’re concerned. They can never, never, as long as they live, lift a hand to do you harm. Nor can they return to their old employers. They might as well be dead.”

  “I know the theory!” Tawlin’s emotions would not let him remain still any longer. He rose from the bed, waved the ceiling light alive and began to pace. Sealed chambers were by their nature small, and so his pacing involved stepping over Wanbli’s knees.

  “It’s not theory,” the Wacaan countered. “It’s our way of life.”

  “Hah! Way of life. Then who killed Felix Mo but a Wacaan who had already been spanked and sent away once?”

  Wanbli lifted a stiff set of shoulder blades and let them drop again. He stood up to allow the T’chishetti more room to pace. “That man was mad. Besides, when he broke Tag, he was no longer a Wacaan.”