Nightmare journey

ted to know. “They're everywhere in the hotel.”
    The bear laughed. “Release me, and I'll show you.”
    “Tell me your plan first.”
    “And have you use it and leave me here?”
    Jask was shocked by the suggestion. “I am a Pure. I have my scruples, my dignity.”
    “Sure. Right.”
    “What's that supposed to mean?”
    The bruin said no more.
    It was Jask's turn to be angry. “Are you honestly suggesting that a Pure cannot be trusted?”
    The bruin was quiet.
    “Pures,” Jask informed him hotly, “are the ultimate of human evolution, untainted by impure genes, the sacred vessels of the primary creation, Nature's most excellent design. It is therefore clear that a Pure would not attempt to deceive you-''
    “Bullshit,” the bruin said. His gravelly voice was perfect for invectives.
    For a time they were stalemated. Spiders crawled in the dark corners of the stone room, and mice scampered along the floor searching for chinks in the mortar. Overhead, the Pure soldiers cried out to one another as they searched the inn.
    “You would kill me and leave by yourself,” Jask protested.
    The creature's simmering anger metamorphosed into something else altogether; bitterness and distaste. “I'm no killer. Leastwise not by preference. If you want to die here because you are too goddamned good and pure to help me, that's your affair.”
    Jask heard footsteps on the stairs from the second floor, more shrill commands, the General's imperial voice thundering like a call to judgment. A table in the common room crashed out of the way of the soldiers, eliciting a cry of anguish from Belmondo.
    “What can I do?” Jask asked.
    Perhaps even death was worse than putting himself in the hands of a quasi-man. If the General and the soldiers were correct. Jask had already been denied salvation and everlasting life-after-death. A little bit of consorting with the beasts could hardly make his situation any more dire than it already was. Having lost immortality, his mortal life had far more value than before, was worth the breaking of a few taboos.
    “I'm chained,” the bruin said. “The key to these manacles is on the shelf behind you, near those jars of pears.”
    Jask found it: a big metal skeleton key corroded and pitted with age. He returned to the bruin, his spine cold, his hands trembling. Even with Belmondo, a comparably mild mutant, he had kept his distance, the distance prescribed by holy writ. In the kitchen, last night, he had prepared his own meal, preferring not to have the innkeeper place fingers to his food. Now, with the musky odor of the animal-man all about him, his mind teetered on the brink of total revulsion.
    He wanted to run.
    Only: he had nowhere to go.
    A man left without a course of action is a man who will discard his dearest morals to find or create a new path.
    In a moment he freed the manacled right wrist. At the same spot on the left wrist, however, he encountered only a slickness without the restraining band. The slickness was blood.
    “I broke that manacle,” the bruin said. “But I couldn't manage the rest of it.”
    “Who chained you here?” Jask asked.
    “Later,” the bear-man said.
    Jask wiped his bloodied hands on his slacks, knelt and freed one of the chained feet. He found the other unencumbered and rose quickly so that he would not be kicked in the face and then trampled by the beast's heavy feet.
    The mutant chuckled.
    “You read minds better than I do,” Jask said. “You're reading mine right now, without any trouble, and I can't really feel you doing it.”
    “True enough, though that isn't what amuses me. You forgot that if I had wanted to kill you just then, I could have broken your neck with one blow while you were getting up fast to avoid my feet.”
    Jask shuddered but said nothing. He would not permit himself to be terrified by a quasi-man.
    The bruin chuckled again, then said, “If we're going to get through the next couple of days together-and I think it might be that long until we can safely split up-you're going to have to develop some cunning-a quality most of you Pures sadly lack.”
    “What makes you think we have to stay together once we leave here?” Jask asked. He had slowly begun to accept the fact he was not going to be killed immediately.
    The bruin shook his head. “A real lack of cunning,” he said sadly, much as he may have commented on another man's status as a cripple. “You don't, for a minute, think they'll stop looking for you when they find you gone from the inn, do