Chapter XIII

For a moment, after the spinning stopped, Kesley imagined he was back on the sands outside Wiener. Then, gradually, his eyes began to shift into focus. He looked around.

He was in a room. That was the first thing to grasp.

His senses told him he was in a room, high, with bare walls that glowed of their own inner luminescence.

Good. He was in a room.

He was no longer in the _same_ room that he had been in in Mutie City. He was sure of that, too. The big-skulled mutant named Edwin had lifted him--_teleport_, Spahl said?--and had sent him somewhere.

He was somewhere else than Mutie City.

Patiently, his quivering mind reassembled the world of sense-constructs and data from which he had been hurled.

He was not alone.

He made out the other figure clearly: a tall, old man, sitting upright in a webwork chair halfway across the room. The old man's eyes were closed; he grasped a small object, unfamiliar looking, in one hand. His skull was hairless.

Kesley assembled the data.

"The mutants finally found you," the other said. His voice was deep and musical, a rich basso with an underlying harmonic tremolo. "They were searching quite diligently, you know."

"Yes, they found me," Kesley said. "I'm here. Where's _here_?"

"Antarctica," the old man said.

Nodding, Kesley absorbed the fact and added it to those he had already. The jolting shock of the teleportation was beginning to wear off now; having been plucked from the spatial framework, he was returning to it, somewhere else. His mind emerged from its numbness.

"You're Daveen the Singer," he said calmly.

"I am Daveen," the other admitted.

Kesley studied the old man, realizing with a shock that he had almost forgotten the contours of Narella's face until seeing the girl's features mirrored here on Daveen's untroubled face.

A tense silence prevailed in the room.

Finally Daveen said: "Five years has changed you, young friend. You've lost your youthful face; I see beginning wrinkles where smoothness once was."

Kesley frowned. "How do you know? You're blind, aren't you?"

"The blind have ways of seeing. Besides, it's not a difficult matter to guess that after what you have been through--"

"Just what do you know about me?" Kesley interrupted. "Who are you, anyway?"

"I was," Daveen said softly, "for many years, poet and singer to the Court of Duke Winslow. Five years ago I participated in the first of your many rescues--the first time Winslow attempted to have you killed." He chuckled musically. "Poor slovenly Winslow. Every time you fall in his clutches, some blind man comes along to lead you to safety."

"You rescued me? From what?"

"That I cannot tell you yet. The Duke warns me that I must be very careful with you, that I must not swamp your mind with too much information at once."

Kesley looked around at the bare, luminescent walls, at the smiling figure of the gaunt-faced, old, blind man sitting opposite him. "Which Duke?"

"The Antarctican Duke. The man who has searched so long and patiently to bring both of us together. You see?"

"Yes," Kesley said faintly. "_He_ brought us here. But where were you?"

"I fled from Winslow, five years past, after doing what I did. I sought refuge in Scandinavia and sang for the Duke there until Winslow's men found me and forced me to fly. I returned to North America, lived for a while at the Colony--I believe _your_ odyssey brought you there as well--and when life there became unbearable, I vanished."

"Where? How?"

"There are ways," Daveen said. "When one knows the arts of the mind, one can do many things. I went into hiding. It was the only way for me to remain alive. Winslow sought me with desperate urgency, for I had betrayed him. Miguel had my daughter."

"I know."

"I continued to live in North America under Winslow's very nose. It was a good joke; now that I'm free, I must let Winslow know about it. He has a fine sense of the ironic."

"Where did you stay?" Kesley prodded.

"I lived in the ghetto."

"Among the _mutants_?"

"I _was_ a mutant. You knew me as Lomark Dawnspear."

For a moment Kesley rocked crazily in his chair; things seemed to wheel in a dizzy arc around him.

"What?" he finally asked, recovering himself.

"Mental projection, complete; constant hypnosis."

"Dawnspear was blind, too," Kesley recalled suddenly.

"Yes. It pleased me to retain the image of the blind man who saw so well. Dawnspear was blind. Otherwise, he was a complete fabrication. I invented a false background for him, persuaded people that he had always lived in that house in that part of Chicago. And they believed it. Unable to do anything else, I lived camouflaged, not knowing how urgently I was sought."

"And then I came to Chicago."

"Then you came. And stumbled into Winslow's grasp exactly as you had done before. And once again reached the dungeons. Again, it was necessary for me to rescue you."

"I did it once before, as Daveen. Five years ago. You came to Winslow's court, and he delivered you to the headsman. I intervened."

"Why? How?"

"You loved my daughter. Furthermore, I thought you should not die."

"I loved her even then?" Kesley asked, astonished.

"Yes. She does not remember, nor do you--but you loved each other. When Winslow ordered you killed, I determined to save you. I hypnotized your jailers, slipped into the dungeon, freed you, led you out. It was a gross violation of my oath to Winslow."

Daveen paused, and Kesley stared intently at him, waiting for him to go on. There was something grotesque about this calm, matter-of-fact relation of actions he had been involved in and yet remembered nothing about. Reality seemed to slide yawingly from moment to moment. He had loved Narella five years ago? He had been at Winslow's court, and been sentenced to death?

Possibly. But it was as if those things had happened to someone else.

"Go on," Kesley said hoarsely. "What was I doing at Winslow's court? For God's sake, Daveen, _who am I_?"

The singer shook his head slowly. "No. Not yet. Let me go on, and you'll learn the rest in proper time."

"Very well," Kesley said, mollified.

"I took you from the prison, as 'Dawnspear' did just recently. I attempted to contact those who would receive you safely, but could not. Failing this, I had to make provision for your safety. I therefore placed you in full hypnosis, wiped out all knowledge of your past background, and substituted a pseudo-biography in which you had been born in--Kansas Province, I believe. It was a slipshod job, but I was in a hurry. Were there inconsistencies?"

"Yes," Kesley said. "There were."

"I feared as much. But it was the best I could do, at the time. I took the precaution of webbing in a pain-threshold that would keep you from probing your own past too deeply. Then I had you transported to Iowa Province, safely out of Winslow's way, and established you as a farmer there. It was a secure, rhythmic life; tied to the soil, you would remain healthy and unmolested. Later, perhaps, I would be able to take you from the farm and restore your identity.

"I returned to Chicago. My daughter asked where you were; I found it necessary to block her memories of you to prevent unhappiness. They can be restored as well, when the time comes. Curiously, you and she came together again later, neither knowing who the other was--and the result of the meeting was the same as before." Daveen smiled. "This, I think, should amply prove the strength of your love, at any rate."

Kesley coughed. Nervously he said: "So you left me in Iowa. You never came to get me--or were you van Alen, too?"

"No. I was not van Alen. My plans were interrupted; Winslow discovered how you had been freed, and in anger ordered my execution. I fled; Narella was given to Miguel as a plaything."

"He calls her his daughter," Kesley pointed out.

"Fortunately. Miguel is going through a paternal cycle; for the moment, he no longer feels fleshly desires. Narella was sent to be his mistress--but became his adopted daughter instead. Dukes are difficult to fathom in advance."

"I know that well."

"To continue: I fled. You remained in Iowa Province. Those who loved you sought you, finally found you."

"You mean van Alen? He tried to bring me here--to Antarctica."

"Yes. He failed; you and he were separated. Once again you drifted into dealings with the Dukes--and when they realized who you were, they immediately desired your death, both Miguel and Winslow."

"_Why?_ Why'd they turn on me like that?"

"For that," Daveen said, "the simplest answer involves the lifting of the first of the psychic blocks I laid upon you. Are you ready?"

"I've been waiting for this since you started talking."

Again Daveen chuckled melodiously. "In all your wanderings you've learned but little patience. Now you will begin to understand."

He held forth the object he had been holding. Kesley now saw that it was a musical instrument of some kind, fashioned of a dark-hued, glossy plastic. It had three hair-fine strings running its length; at the top, above the bridge, were three white buttons.

"My music-maker," Daveen said. "My constant companion always. It holds the keys to your mind, my friend."

"What do you mean?"

"Listen."

Daveen touched the three buttons lightly with his long fingers, and a tone appeared, shimmering delicately, followed by a second and a third. They hung in the air, meshing their subharmonics, quivering and blending. It was, thought Kesley, like no music he had ever heard.

Daveen began to play--a slow, mournful, lingeringly lovely melody. Melodic lines intertwined in complex polyphony; Kesley found himself following the music with breathless excitement. It soothed and tensed him at the same time.

Daveen sang a deep, lulling, wordless chant. Beneath his voice the music swept to a gentle crest of subdued excitement, and Kesley felt his nerves quivering with expectation.

The music, strange, atonal now, shifting keys with impossible rapidity of modulation, held suddenly.

Daveen stopped.

There was complete silence.

In that silence, Daveen said, "_One!_"

And Kesley felt light flash numbingly through him.

He huddled in his chair while the frozen brain-cells at last discharged the information they had stored for nearly five years. The words went rumbling over his synapses, repeating themselves endlessly.

Finally it stopped. Hesitantly, he looked up at the calmly smiling Daveen.

Then he looked down at his hands--his own hands, the hands he had farmed with and killed with.

The hands of an Immortal.

"Me?"

It was almost impossible. But he knew it was true.

"You will never die," Daveen said.

"I will never die."

"_Two!_" said Daveen suddenly.

Kesley was thrown back in his seat by the unexpected, second data-release. When it was over, he looked up again, smiling.

"An Immortal and the son of an Immortal. Small wonder Miguel and Winslow wanted to kill me!"

The words of Winslow's sentence came drifting back now: "_... you represent as great a threat to the Twelve Empires as has ever been born, my young friend._"

Of course! Twelve sterile Dukes, blessed with eternal life but cursed with the inability to reproduce--what would they do, how would they react when they knew that one line of Immortals, somewhere in Earth, bred true? That they were faced with the prospect of a gathering race of Immortals threatening their powers as the years rolled on?

"You see?" Daveen asked.

"I understand now," Kesley said. "They _had_ to try to kill me. I was a menace--an Immortal who wasn't a Duke, and whose children could breed true!"

He stared at his hands as if they were covered with suddenly alien flesh. "I wasn't a Duke, was I?" He asked cautiously. Anything was possible now.

"No," Daveen told him. "You were never a Duke."

Kesley smiled, thinking now of the centuries stretching endlessly ahead. "A king without a kingdom, then. Well, there's plenty of time for me to find one. But you still haven't told me who I am, Daveen."