The Ladder in the Sky Read Free Page A

floor. His face went pale as death, and he began to shake from head to foot.
    “For the love of life!” he forced between his teeth. “What have you done to me? What have you done to me? ”
    Accusing, his eyes sought Yarco’s. The stout man met his gaze unflinchingly, and after a moment gave a sorrowful shake of the head.
    Behind Kazan there were footsteps on the stairs leading from the upper story. Not changing the direction of his gaze, Yarco said, “He has not harmed me. Nor will he. You may come here.”
    It was Bryda. Her face showed the ravages of tiredness when she moved into Kazan’s field of view, but her eyes were keen and searched his face eagerly.
    Under her breath she said, “To think that this—this ragged wretch will be his salvation and mine.” And then more sharply to Yarco, “What’s to be done? Have you learned yet?”
    “Did the conjurer say nothing?” Yarco countered, sounding puzzled.
    “No! He said that the—the devil, if it was a devil, had entered into him and would know what needed to be done.” A flash of dark suspicion crossed her face. “If he should try to trick us—!”
    “What will you do?” Yarco broke in. “He’s powerful—not one of these rune-casters and gibberers. I have not seen a devil before,” he added in a lower tone.
    Bryda shot out her hand and swung the unresisting Kazan to face her. She said, “What’s to be done? How do we rescue the prince?”
    Eyes haunted, Kazan returned her gaze. The unnatural calm which he had felt on waking from his faint was gradually returning. Yet in a detached way he was still frightened. To himself, the strange episode of the thing in the circle felt like a nightmare—unreal, and over now. But this was impossible, for here Yarco and the Lady Bryda were speaking of it as a reality.
    “If you don’t speak,” Bryda spat at him, “I’ll send for Hego and make him beat you till you do!”
    “Hego won’t come,” Yarco said. “It will be days before he can recover his wits.”
    Bryda, a prince’s mistress, waiting for his word. His! Kazan’s. Who spoke of devils? Were a man to be filled with a devil, he would know it for sure! And here he was, himself, thinking like himself, talking like himself—Kazan, the waif of the Dyasthala, self-taught thief, hungry, despised. With the calm, a cunning thought was entering his mind. Why not, for a while at least, make the pretense? Why not make Bryda for all her rank and airs squirm on his hook? He turned the idea over, as it were to taste it, and it tasted as sweet as honey.
    He gave a little crooked smile. He said, “Of course I know what must be done. But I’m a ragged wretch, Lady Bryda. I’m a starving wretch, too. You get nothing without paying for it, Lady Bryda, not unless you’re a thief like me. You’ve tried it, and you’ve failed. You’ve got to pay. You don’t like it, do you? But that’s the risk you run if you take without asking.”
    He threw his hand out in front of him, palm up, not in the beggar’s gesture, but as a merchant would wait for payment.

III

    Hate him she might— did, Kazan corrected himself smugly—but pay him she must, until the day she found out how she was being fooled. And the payment he was taking was not small.
    For the moment he was alone. He could let himself enjoy it. From sheer jubilation he jumped in the air and spun round through half a circle to land without a sound on the soft warm floor.
    By the wyrds, though Bryda could complain of this house as a place of misery and squalor, for him it was luxury unimaginable. Space! Thirty feet on a side, the room, and the ceiling so high he could not touch it if he jumped straight up; light always on call—not as it was in the few houses in the Dyasthala where there was a supply, an unreliable glimmer, but a steady brilliant glow; warmth unceasing and color. Almost, the color mattered more than anything; the greenness of the walls, the rich tan of the floor, the sunlight-yellow