Read The Avengers of Carrig for Free Online

city, Belfeor reflected with grim satisfaction, he felt he had made a most impressive entry. Of all the incredibly bad luck, to fall in with a Galactic agent—to find themselves in his very house! When there could hardly be a dozen agents on the planet, and probably half as many.
    Still, things had not turned out too badly. Though Pargetty was inclined to panic at first he’d had to agree that if Heron—or whatever his real name was—had charged in wearing nothing but a towel, and moreover forgotten himself sufficiently to address them in Galactic, he could have had no previous inkling of his guests’ off-planet origin. Which in turn implied that they had disguised themselves well. And further meant that he had had no chance to report their presence to the authorities. All was not lost, therefore. But they had to move quickly.
    The servants had panicked only because of the energygun. Given a few minutes in which to grow angry at their master’s death, the bravest of them would return. They snatched up the communicator and replaced it in the native wooden case which disguised it as a “shrine”—an obvious cover, because many of the indigenous cults venerated ancestral relics and protected their containers with elaborate curses aimed at thieves and despoilers—gathered what few of their belongings were absolutely indispensable, and hurried out of the room. As he left, Belfeor launched two more bolts at the body of Trader Heron and saw the wooden floor beneath his corpse crackle into a blaze.
    “We’ll burn the house!” he snapped at Pargetty. “We’ve a good chance they won’t believe the servants’ story—they may think them crazy at least until tomorrow, and by then we should be out of their reach if what you’ve told me is true.”
    Pargetty, pale-faced, gave a nod and fumbled his own energy gun out from beneath his shirt. Sighting to the other end of the long passage, he started a fire there also to block the door of Heron’s private suite. When they had descended the external staircase to the stableyard behind the house, they completed their work with two more shots through windows, and coils of smoke began to pour from the rooftop.
    “That’ll occupy their minds,” Belfeor said grimly. “It’s good dry timber—it’ll be a furnace in no time. And now we’d better get lost in the city.” He spun on his heel and began to set a fast pace through a maze of back alleys; there was no risk of literally getting lost, however, so long as they could see the crest of the rocky citadel which dominated Carrig.
    “How long until the assembly in the fortress?” Pargetty panted, struggling to keep abreast of his companion.
    “It starts as soon as the evening star appears—two of this system, presumably. Blast Heron for interrupting! I wanted an accurate time-check from the ship.”
    “How long before they start worrying up there?”
    “They’re probably worrying already, damn it. Your first job is to find a place where you can set up the communicator again and explain what happened. Make sure they don’t panic, above all. Emphasize that Heron can’t possibly have passed the word to anyone and there’sno reason not to go ahead as planned. Presumably Heron used his caravan journeys as cover for a regular beat, and that means you were right when you told us there wasn’t a permanent agent based in Carrig. By the time news of what’s happened to him filters through to another agent on this planet, we’ll have had months to get dug in.”
    Pargetty nodded doubtfully. “But for all we know he was scheduled to make a report directly he got here. Won’t the Patrol investigate at once if that’s the case?”
    “You’re asking
me?”
Belfeor countered. “You’re supposed to know the answer to questions like that, I thought!” And, before the reddening Pargetty could reply, he went on: “Anyhow, that’s a risk we have to take. Here, I think we’ve gone far enough together; we’d better split up