"Now," said the grand master, "art thou ready for the vigil. Therefore I command thee: strip to thy underwear!"
Wondering what he was getting into now, Borel did so.
"Come with me," said Grand Master Sir Juvain.
They led him down stairs and through passages, which got progressively narrower, darker, and less pleasant. A couple of the hooded brethren carried lanterns, which soon became necessary in order to see the way. We must be far below the ground level of the citadel, thought Borel, stumbling along in his socks and feeling most clammy and uncomfortable.
When they seemed to have descended into the very bowels of the earth, they halted. The Grand Master said: "Here shalt thou remain the night, O aspirant. Danger will come upon thee, and beware how thou meetest it."
One of the brothers was measuring a long candle. He cut it off at a certain length and fixed it upright to a small shelf in the rough side of the tunnel. Another brother handed Borel a hunting spear with a long, broad head.
Then they left him.
So far, he had carried off his act by assuring himself that all this was a lot of bluff and hokum. Nothing serious could be intended. As the brothers' footfalls died away, however, he was no longer so sure. The damned candle seemed to illuminate for a distance of only about a meter in all directions. Fore and aft, the tunnel receded into utter blackness.
His hair rose as something rustled. As he whipped the spear into position, it scuttled away; some ratlike creature, no doubt. Borel started pacing. If that damned dope Abreu had only let him bring his watch! Then he would at least have a notion of the passage of time. It seemed he had been pacing for hours, although that was probably an illusion.
Borel became aware of an odd irregularity in the floor beneath his stockinged feet, and he bent down and explored it with his fingers. Yes, a pair of parallel grooves, two or three centimeters deep, ran lengthwise along the tunnel. He followed them a few steps each way, but stopped when he could no longer see what he was doing. Why should there be two parallel grooves like a track along the floor?
He paced until his legs ached from weariness, then tried sitting on the floor with his back against the wall. When he soon found his eyelids drooping, he scrambled up lest his initiators return to find him a-sleep. The candle burned slowly down, its flame standing perfectly still for minutes at a stretch and then wavering slightly as some tiny air current brushed it. Still silence and darkness.
The candle would soon be burned down to nothing. What then? Would they expect him to stand here in complete darkness?
A sound made him jump violently. He could not tell what sort of sound it was; merely a faint noise from down the tunnel. There it came again.
Then his hair really rose at a low throaty vocal noise, the kind one hears in the carnivore cage of the zoo before feeding time. A sort of grunt, such as a big cat makes in tuning up for a real roar. It came again, louder.
The dying candle flame showed to Borel's horrified gaze something moving fast towards him in the tunnel. With a frightful roar a great yeki rushed into the dim light with gleaming eyes and bared fangs.
For perhaps a second (although it seemed an hour) Felix Borel stood helplessly holding his spear poised, his mouth hanging open. In that second, however, his mind suddenly worked with the speed of a tripped mousetrap. Something odd about the yeki's motion, together with the fact of the grooves in the floor, gave him the answer: the animal was a stuffed one pushed towards him on wheels.
Borel bent and laid his spear diagonally across the floor of the tunnel, and stepped back. When the coz>-traption struck the spear, it slewed sideways with a bang, rattle, and thump and stopped, its nose against the wall.
Borel recovered his spear and examined the derailed yeki at close range. It proved a pretty battered-looking piece of taxidermy, the head and neck criss-crossed with seams where the hide had been slashed open and sewn up again. Evidently it had been used for initiations for a long time, and some of the aspirants had speared it. Others had doubtless turned tail and run, thus flunking the test.
Footsteps sounded in the corridor and lanterns bobbed closer just as the candle on the shelf guttered out.
The Grand Master and the masked brethren swarmed around Borel, including one with a horn on which he had made the yeki noises. They slapped him on the back and told him how brave he was. Then they led him back up many flights to the main hall, where he was allowed to don his clothes again. The Grand Master hung a jewelled dragon insigne around his neck and welcomed him with a florid speech in archaic style:
"O Felix, be thou hereby accepted into this most noble, most ancient, most honorable, most secret, most puissant, most righteous, most chivalrous, and most fraternal Order, and upon thee be bestowed all the rights, privileges, rank, standing, immunities, duties, liabilities, obligations, and attributes of a knight of this most noble, most ancient, most honor-able…"
The long Krishnan night was two-thirds gone when the hand-shaking and drinking were over. Borel and Kubanan, arms about each other's necks, wove their way drunkenly to the latter's apartment, while Borel sang what he could remember of a Terran song about a king of England and a queen of Spain, until Kubanan shushed him, saying:
"Know you not that poetry's forbidden in Mikar-dand?"
"I didn't know. Why?"
"The Order decided it was bad for our—hie— martial spirit. B'sides, poets tell too damned many lies. What's the nex' stanza?"
IV.
Next morning Sir Felix, as he tried to remember to think of himself, began to press for consideration of his perpetual-motion scheme. He obtained an interview with Grand Master Juvain in the afternoon and put his proposal. Sir Juvain seemed puzzled by the whole thing, and Borel had to call in Kubanan to help him explain.
Juvain finally said: "Very well, Brother Felix, tell me when your preparations are ready and I'll call a general meeting of the members in residence to pass upon your proposal."
Then, since the working model was not yet ready, Borel had nothing to do for a couple of days except breathe down the neck of Henjare the Brazier and superintend the building of the lottery ticket booth. The printing job was nowhere near done.
Therefore he whistled up Yerevats to help him pass the time by practicing driving the buggy. After a couple of hours, he could fairly well manage the difficult art of backing and filling to turn around in a restricted space.
"Have the carriage ready right after lunch," he ordered.
"Master go ride?"
"Yes. I shan't need you though; I'm taking it myself."
"Unk. No Good. Master get in trouble."
"That's my lookout."
"Bet master take girl out. Bad business."
"Mind your own business!" shouted Borel, and made a pass at Yerevats, who ducked and scuttled out. Now, thought Borel, Yerevats will sulk and I'll have to spend a day cajoling him back into a good humor or I'll get no decent service. Damn it, why didn't they have mechanical servants with no feelings that their masters had to take into account? Somebody had tried to make one on Earth, but the thing had run amok and mistaken its master for a cord of firewood…
The afternoon saw him trotting down the main avenue of Mishe with Zerdai by his side, looking at him worshipfully. He could not get quite used to the curious sound made by the six hooves of the aya when it trotted.
He asked: "Who has the right of way if somebody comes in from the side?"
"Why, you do, Felix! You're a member of the Order, even if not a regular Guardian!"