Cosmonaut Keep Read Free

goblins, and left to ghosts long before people on Earth had laid so much as one stone upon another.
    Sounds and smells echoing or wafting from below intensified as the old couple descended. The arrival of the merchant ship might or might not have been expected, but the keep's staff planned routinely for such a contingency. For this first evening nothing much was expected but hot water, hot food, and a lot of drinking and some kind of bed to stagger off to afterward: merchants just off a ship were usually in no condition for formal negotiations or celebrations. The saurs would require even less.
    The exits from the spiral stair went past, their numbers as fixed in James's mind as the numerals on a lift's display. He and Margaret stepped out on the ground floor -- the stair still had many levels to go, down into the rock -- and made their way around several zigzag turns of narrow defensive corridor. Antique space-suits stood in artfully placed ambuscade niches.
    The corridor opened to the castle's main hall, a cavernous space hung with retrofitted electric lights, its fifteen-meter-high walls covered with carpets and tapestries, oil-paintings of members of the Cosmonaut Families, heads and hides of dinosaurs, and decoratively arranged displays of the light artillery with which these gigantic quarry had been sportingly slain.
    The wide doors stood open; the hall's blazing fire and more practical electric radiators did little to repel the chill inward swirl of evening air. The merchants, their saur companions, and their servants were already mingled with the welcoming crowd that had gathered from all quarters of the castle. Mingled, but easily distinguishable: for this evening at least, the castle's occupants -- Cosmonauts and stewards and seneschals and servants -- outdid the merchants in the style and spectacle of their attire. In days to come, the most senior of the Cosmonauts and the richest merchants in Kyohvic would be easily outshone by their visitors' youngest child or lowliest page; their present plebeian appearance, though partly dictated by the necessities of interstellar travel, was for all its apparent casualness part of a protocol -- setting themselves conspicuously below their hosts -- whose invariance James Cairns had observed many times before.
    Right now the new arrivals had discarded their protective clothing in a careless heap in the doorway's broad vestibule, and were padding around in woollen socks and likewise warm gear, shaking or kissing hands with all and sundry, smiling and laughing and slapping shoulders. Children scampered and scooted, chased by their own servants, tactfully redirected from the big room's many exits by swiftly posted stewards. Through it all the saurs drifted, their domed heads bobbing in the throng like stray balloons.
    Hal Driver, the Security Man, was in the center of the pressing crowd, already deep in hearty converse with a mature, burly man who had "merchant prince" written all over him, albeit he was dressed like a trawlerman. Red hair sprang in a great shock from his head; freckles spattered his broad-cheeked, flat-nosed face; his rich voice boomed above the babble, his asides to Driver now and again dropping to a confidential murmur.
    Margaret nudged James with a confidential murmur of her own.
    "Didn't take them long to figure out who's in charge here."
    "Aren't you going up to the keep?" Elizabeth asked.
    Gregor finished hosing the scales and slime off his oilskins and hung them in the locker. "Nah," he said, pulling his boots off. "Time enough for that when they have the big bash. Won't be for a day or two yet." He sat on the low fold-down bench, tugging off his thick socks and stuffing them in the boots, then carefully eased his feet into his leather shoes. "Fancy coming along yourself?"
    Elizabeth reddened. "Oh, that's nice of you -- thanks, but I just don't know if I can."
    "Well, the invitation's open," Gregor said, oblivious to her momentary embarrassment, and turned