Masters of the Maze by Avram Davidson Read Free Book Online

angles to the fire. Picking up an iron implement, Bellamy swung out to him the covered iron kettle which had hung close to the fire ever since it had been brought up from the kitchen by Keren at least an hour ago. Or perhaps it was more. His life was not one in which minor graduations of time counted for much, nor, for that matter, major ones.
    The contents of the kettle were at about  .50 on the scale running between soup and stew. Keren was a good cook, a rare thing (he understood, rather vaguely) in these days of things called TV dinners. Bellamy himself had never set eyes on either a TV dinner or the device which inspired it. He began to eat, slowly, and with small bites.
    “Your name is Karen?” he had asked, that long, long ago day, his first at Darkglen.
    “It is not,” she said, sharply. “It’s
Keren.
From the Bible.”
    “I don’t — ”
    “Jemima, Keziah, and Keren-happuch, the three daughters of Job there, at his latter end, which the Lord blessed more than his beginning. Don’t know that? You a heathen or something?”
    No. No, he was not a heathen. No one held a deeper respect for the Great First Cause than he himself did. But not even Keren, good servant though she was, would stay on overnight any more — an any more dating back a good many years. Darkglen was too far away from anywhere in these times to keep overnight servants — not if they were enlisted from among local residents, anyway. They all had families and the families had no intention of living in servants’ quarters on an isolated estate. From time to time the idea of hiring a foreign staff had occurred to him. But it was doubtful if foreign servants would long remain here in this vast anachronism of a house off in the deeps of the woods, either. Furthermore, he had grown used to being alone at night. The solitude of his prison was grown sweet to him.
    He considered the clean lines of the chair in front of him. The ‘People called Shakers’ had made it — at least a century before. In a way they had been prisoners, too, although none of them, from Mother Ann Lee, who founded the order, on down, would have admitted that. They considered that their rule of communality and celibacy had set them all free from the prison of the flesh. They had long been numerous. Now they were reduced to a handful of ancient old women, living off the rents of the broad fields they were too feeble to till.
    In a way, Bellamy considered, there was a certain parallel (he forced himself, ruthlessly, to consider it) between them and the Esquires of the Sword. For what were these last, nowadays, but a handful of old men? Sick, many of them, as he himself was. Grown rigid and ingrown, incapable of even holding their own, let alone expanding. Worse off, perhaps, because their particular vigil brought them no money. Worse off, perhaps, because the old Shakeresses, as they died off, did so in the serene content that they merely passed on to Heaven and that all remained well; whereas the thought that the Esquires of the Sword might die off, unreplaced, sent a chill into Bellamy which was not to be explained by the falling temperature of the room.
    He came out of his reverie with a shiver which was more than half a shudder. Rising, he put on a sweater and an overcoat, loaded onto the wheeled cart (which had earlier brought kettle and supper setting from kitchen) his tray of medicines, books, and paper, and the two things called
ward
and
sword
, and pushed it out into and down the long hall.
    There wasn’t far to go. Five years ago he had given up his old bedroom with the four-poster bed and fireplace only a little less huge than the one in his office, and had had a nearer, smaller room partitioned into a tiny two-room apartment for night use. He switched on the light. The original ornate brass gas fixtures were still in place, but the tiny gasworks behind the house, with its engine to convert gasoline into illuminating gas, had long since gone.
    It had been chill