“My lady,” I confessed, “only the coming of this new peril and the destruction of our ship allows me to speak as I do. And I say, with no intent to natter, but with open honesty, that only to you and a handful of others have I revealed what I have. What then do I want of you, for obviously I do want something. Tis simply this: that you follow me in all things until this deadly game is ended—one way or the other! After? Well, then, you may take your choice of the roads I offer you… . You may go to the stars if you wish, and return, too; or, you may stay here freely. The last is offered because if you refuse the stars, though that possibility will always remain open, I cannot believe that you would do so for the old ‘negative* reasons. The very idea of such should by then be as alien to you as they are to us. Again—do you understand me, my lady?”
She deliberately ignored everything I’d said to ask, “How old are you, Collin?”
“Thirty.”
She smiled. “And you’d wed my niece, that bouncy-haired little vixen; that epitome of insufferable female arrogance. Why, sir, they tell me that she’s killed a hundred men or so; that she lives by the sword, with you—when she’s not exercising the royal prerogative. Now how, indeed, does that meld with the philosophy you preach?”
I smiled right back at her. “If you’re suggesting that she in. no way compares with you in intellect, why yes, you’re right But there’s no contradiction there. You remain the same in terms of values. They are simply expressed in different life styles, different needs. I speak of basics, my lady. In that area you’re alike as two peas in a pod. Aside from that, you’re worlds apart As to her sword-work, why she’s killed a hundred enemies, my lady, who’d have killed her had she not nicked them first Moreover, she did this in battle for her country, for her life, for her people, against enslavement.”
“But with such relish, my lord, such enthusiasm. A princess of the royal house?”
“Why not? Because no princess heretofore has done so?”
“Perhaps.” Her smile had returned. She studied me.
“What then of myself?”
“‘Tis known that you’ve been in blood up to your neck, so they say. But you’re a man, sir; indeed, you’ll be queen’s consort You are and should be honored for your prowess.”
I laughed. “One then is honored, the other condemned— and for the same thing. Moreover, a point could be made that I have four times the strength of Murie Nigaard, yet still I’m praised where she is not—though she. takes four times the risks. Nay, my lady, within the context of what we’ve done, ‘tis she who should be admired, acclaimed. I, frankly, would ask for no other at my side in onset or melee, unless, perhaps, it were my lord, Sir-Fergis….”
Elioseen said, “You are loyal, my lord, above an else. I do envy my niece.” She managed a smile then so that her beauty seemed suddenly as bright sunshine through tempestuous clouds.
I asked curiously, “How old are you, my lady?”
“The same as you. You’ve said,” she returned to the question, “that after, if we win, I’ll have my freedom either to stay or go, as you put it, to the stars. But that in any event, I will be free.”
“That is true.”
“Then I ask that you free me now, for I can no longer stand the presence of my jailers. You read me well, sir, and I know it and accept your judgment and your charge. For that very reason then, you must know that I die a little bit each day, and will surely die completely soon. I am a woman, my lord”—-and here she stared at me long and ultimately—”but I am also more than that. I’m a person, too, a human, as you so strangely put it, who needs her privacy above all else. I beg of you again: Release me now. Clear me this room so that I may breathe air that no one else has breathed. I would be free now, my lord!”
“Of myself too?”
“Yes….”
“Elioseen,” I told her softly, ” Tis said that since time began women have cozened men and vice versa, and that this is inevitable and that one or the other will always prevail…. I tell you now that such is not the case. Where you will go— to the stars if you choose—it is not like that. There’s an easy equality, a respect for life between the sexes. The differences remain, but the war is over.” I reached out, took her hand and enfolded it in the warmth of both of mine. “There’s indeed been a truce,” I told her solemnly, “that will last for as long as time. Tis the truce that I offer you now, the one of trust. And there’s an end to it. You are free, my lady—in every way.”
I arose to bow briefly. I then called to her companions, “From now on,” I told them, “you will obey the orders of our Lady Elioseen, sister to Marack’s king. She is free. She will tell you if she wishes you to continue here or no.” I turned to our sorceress. “I will call upon you after noon tomorrow, for we’ve much to do. Ill try to come between two and five. I’d know better except that I must be away and then return, and there are always problems. Forgive me then, if I’m delayed. I can say only that what I do is important Indeed, I’d ask you now to think also on that trick of yours wherein you lifted myself, our princess, the good Dame Malion and Sir Rawl Fergis from the high road southwest of Glagmaron. We may need it all too soon. … Ill leave you now and I’ll ask our comrades, the sorcerers and witches too to withdraw.” I bowed again with the formal sweep, swirl and dip, from the hips. “My lady!”
She arose, tall and slender, to bow her golden head in turn and whisper softly, “My lord.”
I’d been in my quarters but fifteen minutes, just long enough to divest myself of boots and light armor, when the node at the base of my skull began its buzzing. I pressed the belt stud to say wearily, “Okay. What’s up?”
Kriloy yelled excitedly, “I finally did it. I rigged an energy tap for the scoutship’s transmitter.” His words came thick and fast, all jumbled with the odd admixture of euphoria and fear. The contriteness remained too, a point in his favor. But the fear we didn’t need, not with the job ahead.
He was yelling, “But it’s all screwed up. Get this: I put a crosstie on the secondary phaser-converter outlet from the CT geodyne fusion power-packs; you know, the outlet constant, for heat, light, servo-mechanos, etc. Well the linkage was shaky at best, which scared the hell out of me because the question was not so much whether it would work or not, but what would happen if it did. Well it worked! And the measure of output was exactly the amount I’d tapped for intro into the transmitter power-pack—except no input showed on the banks. Output from the CT pack, yes. But no input to the transmitter pack. In effect, Kyrie, old comrade, there’s a drain somewhere. The question is where? I say drain because there’s no buildup anywhere along the line, just output flow—enough to send the scoutship to Alpha and back, which means that the flow will have a life expectancy of at best, two weeks. Then we’re dead all around. It’s crazy, Kyrie, spooky, too. I’ve been at it all afternoon.”
“Why the hell haven’t you called me?”
“I wanted to get it right.”
“Yet you were afraid you’d blow us off the map, and you still didn’t call….”
“Well for bubu’s sake….”
“Kriloy. This isn’t fourth-year ‘show and tell’. How do I convince you that we’ve no time for ego trips? So what did you finally do?”
“I shut it down and unhooked it.”
“Well hook it up again and stay with it. You’re on to something. And since there’s no buildup, the flow’s got to go somewhere. If anything happens, call me. And I mean anything. And no more twenty-hour naps. And keep your damned sensors open for movement. You get a line on something, lock in on it. Rig an alarm system to wake you, if and when it happens. You hear?”
“Okay. Out, Kyrie. Bless you.”
“Well, bless you, too. But what I said still holds. You screw up again and I’ll give you to the kaatis.”
So he must have loused it up somehow. Christo! There was simply no such thing as a registered flow of CT energy going nowhere… . Then suddenly, as if Hooli himself were whispering it in my ear, I remembe
red his earlier warning on the energy tap maintained by the sphere—the one extending through the gateway to the pre-nova. If the sphere could maintain such an obviously impossible tap, then why not… why not? Holy, bloody Og manifest! It had suddenly hit me. My heart literally skipped two beats at the implication. That I was aware that all matter beyond the gateway was antimatter, goes without saying. That the mass of the sphere was itself quite possibly antimatter had just never entered my head. I’d had no reason to think about it within any meaningful context. But now? Well, if it was antimatter it could only exist in this universe with a shield to protect it; ergo, the need for such a fantastic tap. The sphere, I’d figured to be about a quarter of the size of the Deneb. That’s a lot of mass. If the shield weakened, was destroyed, why then all of Marack would be blown right off the northern continent!
Gods! No wonder Hooli had begged me not to attack it. Except that though Hooli’ never lied, he had a way of not quite telling the truth either. Usually I found myself manipulated by him. In effect, though we worked, fought for the same ends, I seemed forever to be doing the job his way, despite my own plans.
Blast and damn Hooli!
Succumbing to a wave of doubt, I wondered: did I dare even believe the little son-of-a-bitch was caught somewhere within the gateway? Was it a maneuver, perhaps, so I’d bear the full burden of tackling the Alphians, i.e., win the secondary war, whereupon he would come in with some trick to knock off the sphere after warning me to stay the hell away from it?
Which led to another question. Did the sphere actually have a tap on a pre-nova sun in another universe; which could only suggest that the sphere itself was antimatter? Ho! Ho! Ho!, I mused. Nyet! No tap, no CT sphere, no threat of massive fission and the blowing of Marack off the map—and no reason for me not to attack it either, if I could capture ‘one or more of the ships. But there was still the quasi-conun-drum: Hooli never lied. He’d actually said there was an energy tap of the great fission mass of the pre-nova; and this, by the sphere, through the gateway. Damn the little bastard! What had he omitted, or had he? If his purpose was simply to immobilize me, he was succeeding. As it stood, I dared not attack the damned thing. If I did, and called it wrong, why then it would be me, Kyrie Fern, a Senior Foundation Adjuster, who’d be blowing Marack to smithereens. Except that I wouldn’t know that. I wouldn’t know anything….
A great jumble of questions hit me then; the ones I’d wanted to ask him before he’d conked out with his “poor Hooli on the rack” scene. What, indeed, was the sphere other than being the vehicle of, as he put it, “the Dark One’s uncle”? Was this an actual invasion, a repeat of the original attempt by life forms of that other universe as represented by the original Dark One?
If so, from whence came the Alphians? Why were their snips not contra-terrene! Where had they been these five thousand years? Moreover, what, precisely, was their connection with the sphere?
One thing I knew from personal observation and training: they came, from no ongoing civilization; no milieu of a developing social order. I figured them for incubator types; not cloned but bred—for a purpose. Hooli had guessed that I knew: ergo, his warning…. Damn again!
My head hurt. I was tired. To hell with it. We were still faced with the deadliest kind of peril. I had either to believe him and win with his way and with his ends, which were basically our ends, or to disbelieve, ignore him—-and do it my way, and risk, perhaps, the destruction of the Fomalhaut systems!
But hadn’t he said, too, that what was happening to him— being stretched, as if on an antiquated taffy-wheel—hurt? He’d never admitted to such a thing before and he’d been in some tough situations. That, too, had been a direct statement—and Hooli never lied!
We left early the next morning. There had been no changes, no “discoveries” aboard the scout ship. It was still raining. I chose Rawl, Sir Dosh and Lors Sernas to accompany me; in full armor beneath simple woolen cloaks.
Since the irresponsible Kriloy had slept through the coming to ground of both the Alphian and the blue sphere at Glagmaron, we had no idea where or if the other ships had landed. There being but five altogether, it was quite possible that one or more had chosen the continent and the cities of Om. We’d soon .find out.
Once above the cloud bank, I saw with relief that in terms of protection it stretched northwest to as far as Gleglyn, and southeast to beyond Corchoon and Janblink, the capitals of Kelb and Great Ortmund, respectively. Whatever the cloud’s original mass, it had been added to so that it covered the greater part of the northern continent. Such, apparently, was the power of Elioseen’s incantation. Her coven had drawn clouds from as far east as .the great sea, and from as far south as the Selig Isles.
At the drive controls, I took the scoutship directly to the westerly capital of Reen in the kingdom of Ferlach. On arrival, we were quick to note that whatever our expectations,-the facts were more terrible still. The great castle above the port city had been reduced to a few hellish acres of blasted stones and burning ruins. The city itself was half-destroyed, mostly deserted, with but here and there a band of citizens attempting to flee with their belongings. There’d been little looting. The buildings hit had been gutted. Indeed, wherever laser beams and heat-positers had touched there was nothing but black swaths of destruction. Secondary fires raged everywhere.
The area of the port with its great breakwater and lighthouse was a lake of twisted, burning wreckage. The masts of sunken coasters stood like twisted antennae above the waters. Here and there were the bright blue and red bottoms of swamped fishing craft. The debris of Ferlach’s merchant and naval fleets filled all the harbor.
Above, on the castle’s tournament field was the evil bulk of the Alphian invader. Nothing moved around it. The terrain had died the death of the castle. Indeed, it was as if the ship had returned to Alpha. For the very earth around it, red and black like that of the mother planet, was lifeless—and glowing.
Below the castle, I saw a grouping of a half-dozen Alphians in silvered armor astride saddled dottles, picking their way down the destroyed road toward the city. They apparently wished to observe the effects of their work at close hand.
Swinging back, under the invisibility distortion factor of “null” plus “five,” and following the road east at tree-top level, we came to a small encampment. It was off the road, hidden from both traffic and the skies by the thick branches of deciduous forest trees. I knew it was there by the accompanying presence of small troops of riders coming and going. Hovering, and with my contacts focused at ten mags, I could also discern the oak-tree banners of Ferlach’s royal house flaunted bravely before a single tent.
I landed the ship in a vale some hundreds of yards from the encampment. As we approached it on foot, advancing boldly between the heavy fern-clothed trunks of great trees, we began to hear a whistling from all around us. We interpreted the distant answering calls and the absence of zinging arrows as an agreement to let us pass.
Nearing the tent we discerned a huge figure in bronzed armor, together with a half-dozen others similarly clad, awaiting us. At fifty feet, for the tent was centered in a small clearing, the bronzed figure roared in a voice to blast the eardrums: “If that’s you, my lord Collin, then by the gods, I deem you ill-advised to come here, and that’s a fact. Approach me slowly and stand when I say, for I’ve little patience with those who’ll tell me now, after the fact, of plots and plans to snatch victory from defeat. Do you understand me, sir? You’ve come too late—for all I’ve ever loved in life, are dead!”
He’d spotted my colors, a sprig of violets on a field of gold. As an Adjuster, there was but one way I could meet this bombast. I dared to risk it. I had no choice. Without breaking my stride, though slowing just the slightest, I shouted back, “By Ormon’s breath, sire, do you think you’re alone in suffering, you damned gerd’s head? Must I match you loss for loss? A goodly portion of the flower of Marack lies dead upon our tourney field. Moreover, I see you’ve escaped to fight again while our royal ho
use is taken by the very scum you hide from.”
“DAMN you, Collin!”
He was Draslich, King of Ferlach, and he would not be spoken to that way. He took a step forward amidst the sound of swords being unsheathed all around us, including those of my own stalwarts who, with bared blades, now positioned themselves instantly to my left, rear and right.
“… And daammmn you, Draslich!” I matched him in voice, “for greeting a brother thusly, who’s always held you dear; ‘een though he’s come to do exactly what you’ve said: to plot a vengeance, sir, against these murdering cowards that’ll live when all our seas are dry. Now tell me: Do you have a drink for an old comrade, to wet his throat—or will you turn me away?”
My roar had been such, I think, as to cause even the forest birds to grow quiet. There were at least a hundred men in that camp. All stood as if carved from stone.
Draslich sneered, his voice still grating. “You prate of hiding, sir. Why, then, I see you’re free—as is our Lord of Fergis and yon largish oaf who seems in form and feature like my good friend Breen Hoggle-Fitz.”
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