Mindar begins...

     The messenger was not a slave, but an urchin of the streets, a boy of about nine or ten. Such children sometimes supplemented the income of their families, small tradesmen, by running errands and carrying messages for a copper tarsk. They were nameless, untraceable, ubiquitous as the urts that swarmed through the poorer sections of Ar. Perhaps that was the reason I felt uneasy about the message from the very beginning.

    "Yer called Valerus, then?" the boy said truculently. "Green caste blighter?"

     "Indeed I am," my Master said. He seemed amused by the boy's insolence. "You have a message for me?"

    "Show us yer money," the boy said.

    My Master reached into his belt pouch and flipped a copper tarsk to the boy. He caught it one-handed and withdrew a folded square of rence paper from his none-too-clean sleeve. My Master took it, opened it, and began to read. It did not seem to be more than a few lines long.

    "Icarion!" my Master exclaimed suddenly. "Here, in Ar!"

    "Yer got an answer, then, Sir?" the boy said. At the thought of another copper he was suddenly much more respectful.

    My Master laughed and took out a silver tarsk. The boy's eyes widened and his grubby fingers closed around the coin greedily. "No," my Master said. "At least, not for you to carry. Off with you, boy. Heel, Minda."

    The boy vanished through the gate. I snatched up my Master's leather Physician's bag, which was never far from his hand, and followed him. He was walking quickly, eagerly. He was smiling. I had to skip with every other step or so to keep up with him.

    I do not know why I had such a sense of foreboding. Perhaps it was because I mistrusted the boy. Perhaps it was because I loved my Master so much that I could feel the threat in the air from the moment he unfolded that bit of paper.

    I loved him, and I followed him at heel, as he walked quickly, walked eagerly, walked smiling, into betrayal, dishonor, and ignominious death.

Valerus takes up the story...

    It had been many years since I had seen Icarion, my childhood friend, my caste brother, my true brother in a way only Physicians can understand. The Warriors have their way of claiming blood brotherhood, the brotherhood of the sword. Physicians... well, I will say only that we also deal in blood, and we also vow brotherhood to each other.

    Icarion and I had fought back to back at the siege of Ar, when a rogue cadre of the Assassin's forces had attacked our makeshift surgery outside the double walls. We had killed together. More importantly, to our own Codes, we had saved lives together. And when the forces of Marlenus had retaken the city, we had roistered through a hundred paga dens together, swilling oceans of drink and astonishing the paga sluts -- or so we fondly imagined at the time -- with our prowess.

    After the siege I had remained in Ar, practicing my craft, and in the past year or two occasionally indulging my taste for what my friend Titus liked to call 'irregular matters.' Icarion had gone adventuring, first to Turia, the Ar of the south, then deep into the Tahari, then to Ko-ro-ba. Who knows where else he had gone, or what else he had seen and done? The last I had heard from him had been a much stained and frayed scroll from Port Kar, the teeming pirates' city at the mouth of the Vosk, sometimes called the scourge of Thassa.

    Then, for many years, nothing.

    Until today.

    The address he had given me, in his scribbled note, was in the Anbar District, near the Plaza of Tarns in the southern part of the city. It was not a good area. He had also written, without explanation, that he needed my help.

    Nothing more was required. However long it had been since I had seen him last, I would have gone anywhere, given anything in my possession, for my brother's sake.

    The door of the shabby house in the Anbar District was open. There were no slaves. The rooms were empty, a little dusty. But of course Icarion had only just arrived in Ar. And if I knew my friend, my footloose, happy-go-lucky brother, furnishing his house would be the last thing on his mind.

    Perhaps I would lend him Minda for a hand or two. She could clean the house and arrange for suitable furniture, cook for him and tally his accounts and warm his furs at night.

    A useful slut, Minda. Even with old Sophia in the kitchen, and Chispa and Lita about the house to tend to me, I would probably miss her from time to time.

    She was, after all, the only one who could write.

    "Icarion!" I called.

    "In here."

    His voice came from a room to my left. I went in.

    He was sitting beside an improvised bed. He did not look older, of course -- not on Gor. But he looked gaunt, and despairing, and desperately tired.

    A woman in stained and crumpled Robes of Concealment lay on the bed. She was covered with a thin sheet. I could not see her face.

    "Icarion," I said. "My brother."

    He stood up. He said, "Valerus," in a husky voice. We embraced.

    It was as if the years had never been.

    "How can I help you?" I said, after a moment. "What can I do? Do you need money? A better place to stay? A word in the right place with the Caste Council?"

    "No," he said. "I need... Valerus, I have not practiced my craft in many years. And my... my heart clouds my reason. I beg you... examine my Companion. We have travelled so far together, and in just the past hand, just when we were finally to come home to Ar, she has... She has become so ill. Tell me... tell me if..."

    His voice broke. He sat down again, heavily, and buried his face in his hands.

    I bent over the woman on the bed. She was unconscious. The lower part of her face was veiled. But her eyes... the lids were thickened, discolored in a characteristic way. My heart sank within me.

    "I must remove her veils," I said.

    Icarion did not lift his head.

    I put my hand out without thinking. My Physician's bag was placed in it. I had forgotten that Minda was in the room. There was no need to expose a useful piece of property to the contagion that I suspected, and so with a curt snap of my fingers I sent her out into the hall.

    I did not turn to see if she had obeyed. It was not necessary.

    I opened the bag and took out a pair of thin silken gloves, especially treated with a substance I myself distill from a combination of natural antiseptics and protective agents. I gently removed the woman's veils, and the sheet covering her body.

    I do not happen to believe in the Priest-Kings. It expands my intellectual horizons but rather limits my oaths. I swore softly by the half-mythical Hipokrates, who was said to have invented the scientific practice of medicine on Earth, about the time that the Voyages of Acquisition began.

    Over her throat and shoulders and arms, the woman's skin was thickened, lumpy and scaling in patches, discolored with a yellowish tinge. Her hands were cramped into claws. Her nose and lips had begun to atrophy.

    Dar-kosis.

    The virulent, highly contagious, invariably fatal wasting disease of Gor. The Holy Disease, as it is stupidly called, in the mistaken belief that it is sacred to the Priest-Kings. It is sacred to nothing and no one. It destroys a human being while they yet live. The woman on the bed... perhaps she had once been beautiful. It was impossible to tell what she might have looked like before the disease struck. As it progressed, her nose and lips would rot away, her fingers and toes would drop off, joint by joint, her skin would thicken and peel and putrefy. She would be effectively dead, long before she died.

    She was effectively dead, now.

    I replaced her veils. There was nothing I could do for her.

    "It is dar-kosis," Icarion said in a muffled voice.

    "Yes," I said.

    "She will have to go to the Pits."

    "The Pits are voluntary."

    He looked up at me. He did not look like himself at all. For a fleeting moment I wondered if the contagion had already transferred itself to him.

    "I will go with her," he said, as if he had read my mind.

    "It is certain death," I said. "Slow death."

    "I do not care," he said. "I will not leave her."

    I looked at him. I was not surprised. My brother had always been passionate in his loves and hates. He had always been willing to go to any lengths to cherish and honor those he cared for, to vanquish and utterly destroy his enemies.

    "Valerus," he said. "My brother. Do not make me beg you."

    I had only found him again, it seemed, to lose him forever. He would not be needing Minda after all.

    I took the necessary forms and seals out of my Physician's bag. I wrote the certificate for the woman first. Her name, Icarion told me in a husky voice, was Isabetta Lavinius of Port Kar. Wearing my gloves, I flattened her poor shriveled right hand, inked it, and pressed her palm print to the paper. I signed it, imprinted my official Caste seal into the wafer of wax, and put the certificate on the table beside the bed.

    "Icarion," I said. "Are you certain that this -- "

    He cut me off with a gesture.

    I wrote another certificate for admission to the Dar-kosis Pits, in the name of Icarion of Ar. I sealed it, signed it. Icarion inked his own palm and pressed it to the paper. It was a curiously triumphant gesture.

    "I will carry her," he said. He folded the two certificates and put them in his belt pouch. "There is a House of Initiates not too far away. We will go there. Perhaps they will provide a wagon to carry us out to the Pits."

    "I will provide a wagon," I said. "If you are determined to do this insane thing, my brother, I will see that you have everything you need."

    Icarion bent and kissed the woman full on the lips, almost as if she were not diseased at all, or as if he were anxious to share her contagion and be done with it. Then he looked up and smiled at me. He had an open, blunt-featured face and a singularly engaging smile.

    "I do not wish to say farewell to you on the edge of the Pit," he said. "Wearing the yellow cerements of the Afflicted. I wish to say it now, while I am still a free man, breathing free air."

    He stood up. I embraced him again, wordlessly.

    "Thank you," he said. "Farewell, brother."

Mindar resumes the tale...

    Two hands after that strange afternoon when my Master went to see his friend Icarion, and signed the certificates consigning his friend and a woman to the Dar-Kosis Pits, my Master was summoned to the Central Cylinder.

    The sense of foreboding had been building inside me ever since my Master's visit to the District of Anbar. He had been grim and rather more forbidding than usual. I had striven to lighten his heart in a thousand ways, but he had been beyond my reach.

    I was, after all, only a slave.

    It was not unusual for my Master to receive a summons to the headquarters of the city's Administration. It was not unusual for him to snap his fingers to me to take up his Physician's bag, and the small bag with rence paper and marking sticks, and follow him.

    It was unusual for him to be met at the colonnaded entryway to the Central Cylinder by a phalanx of armed Guardsmen wearing the personal colors of the Administrator himself. It was highly unusual for him to be disarmed of the wicked little throwing knife that he always carried in his boot.

    "Come along," the leader of the Guardsmen said. "You're to see the Administrator himself."

    My Master did not offer any resistance. He seemed more wary, and mildly on his guard, than afraid. No one paid the slightest attention to me, and so I followed as they took him through a long hall, and down a series of stairs.

    In a large, windowless room, with a heavy curtain drawn across what appeared to be an second room or alcove at the back, there were two men waiting. One of them I recognized. He was the Chief Magistrate, who had adjudicated one of my Master's irregular matters -- and saved his friend Titus's life, in the nick of time -- about four months before. The other man was shorter, more heavily built, and unlike any of the others his robe bore wide stripes of red and gold on both shoulders. There was an indefinable air of power, of ruthlessness about him. Even my Master, whose own force of character was not inconsiderable, bowed slightly.

    "Tal, Excellency," he said. His voice was crisp and calm as always.

    So this was the Administrator of Ar, Lycaon Symaethius. Even slaves knew his name. I knelt silently, just inside the door, clutching my Master's Physician's bag to my breasts. I might have been a speck of dust on the floor for all the attention anyone paid to me.

    "Valerus of the Physicians," the Administrator said. He did not use the customary greeting of 'Tal.' "I have not seen you since before Se'Var."

    My Master inclined his head. "That is true," he said.

    I suddenly remembered that it had been this man's sister, the Lady Ianthe Symaethia of Ar, who had been proscribed as a traitor and a fugitive at the Sardar Fair of Se'Var, through a stratagem of my Master's.

    Lycaon stepped back, and drew a tasseled cord. The curtain whispered to one side.

    A woman's body lay on a bier, draped with violet velvet. She was shrouded in violet silk, although it had been turned back to expose her face. She was fair-haired, fair-skinned, beautiful as a dream in death.

    If she had opened her eyes, they would have been the violet of the desert veminium. If she had parted those lush, sensual lips and laughed, it would have been a silky, ruffly sound, like flower petals gathered together in a bouquet.

    It was the Lady Ianthe.

    I knew my Master so well. I saw his very faint start of surprise. I doubt that the others saw it. He was very good at disguising such things.

    "She wished to come home," the Administrator said, in a hard cold voice. "She offered to betray her Cosian confederates, to bring us information beyond price about the machinations of Cos, if she were to be given amnesty for her previous... misdeeds, and my permission to kiss the home stone of Ar again."

    "And you agreed?" my Master said.

    "Yes," Lycaon said. "I agreed. The information she had, in our hands, could have set the Cosians back twenty years in their intrigues against Ar."

    My Master nodded.

    "And," Lycaon added, "she was my sister."

    "She dishonored your name," my Master said slowly.

    "She was my sister," Lycaon repeated.

    My Master sketched a shrug. "And now she is dead," he said. There was an indefinable note in his voice. Somehow it made me remember that however much he had hated her, he had taken her once, in her dark, decadent perfumed pavilion at the foot of the Sardar.

    "She is dead," Lycaon agreed. "By the vilest and most dishonorable of devices. And more importantly, she has been silenced. Whoever killed her is not only a murderer, but a traitor to Ar."

    My Master frowned. He said, "Do you wish for me to find the one who killed her?"

    Lycaon looked at him expressionlessly for a few ihn, then made a gesture. The guards stepped forward on either side of my Master. My heart stopped.

    "Oh," Lycaon said. "I know who killed her."

    "Indeed?" my Master said.

    "Yes," Lycaon said. "You did."

To be continued...