Tales of Anyar

by Olan Thorensen

  The gamekeeper stiffened and muttered. Brush moved on the opposite side of the clearing, and an antlerless deer walked slowly into the open. Then another. Then two more, accompanied by two smaller versions. When all six animals were clear of the brush, a seventh head poked out with an impressive rack matching those in the hetman’s trophy room.

  What? The male lets the women and children check if it’s safe first? Even the animals in Vandinke are assholes.

  Sounds of the men driving the game quieted, as the seven animals moved farther into the open.

  Fordvak whispered into Yozef’s ear. “When the noise from the beaters dies, they’ll stop to listen and you’ll have better shots.”

  As the zarvors cautiously advanced, Yozef got a better look at them.

  He thought they might be Sambar deer, like the ones he’d seen in the San Diego Animal Park. Bigger maybe. These were the size of elk but sure looked like big deer. He remembered Sambars ranged from India to Southeast Asia and southern China and were among the largest deer on Earth, but these were bigger.

  The male froze, lifted his nose high into the air. Yozef could have sworn the stag’s characteristic fur, longer than other deer’s, seemed to rise on its neck and back.

  Suddenly, all the Sambars exploded, running, as a form flashed out of the foliage on the right side of the clearing.

  Hisses and quiet curses roiled through the blind.

  “Yorszas,” whispered Eldor. “I thought we’d cleaned them out of Vandinke.” The hetman’s eyes were wide, and his hands holding a musket trembled ever so slightly.

  Yozef looked around. The expressions of all the men ranged from grim to outright fear. Yozef’s two guards elbowed forward to flank their charge.

  “What—” Yozef started to ask. The shape that had chased the Sambars stopped at the edge of the clearing.

  “It missed them,” muttered the gamekeeper. “Where are the others? How did the men driving the zarvors not run into them?”

  The yorsza turned back, just as four more similar creatures stepped into the clearing, and Yozef got his first good look.

  This is getting old, he thought. First paracertheriums and entelodonts from Earth’s Miocene, and now hyaenodons. The creatures were spitting images of another apex predator also from the Miocene.

  That had to confirm it. Someone or something made at least two transplantations from Earth, one of which had occurred twenty or more million years ago.

  Too bad paleontologists aren’t around , thought Yozef. They’d go bonkers to study the real things .

  His train of thought jolted with a realization.

  Wait a minute. These three animals look TOO close to reconstructions of Earth’s Miocene animals. If that many millions of years passed since they were put on Anyar, they would have evolved into different species just like they did on Earth, where they haven’t existed for maybe twenty million years. To have stayed looking so similar, they would had to stop evolving. I suppose whatever aliens did the transplantation had technology I wouldn’t understand, but why stop the animal’s natural tendency to evolve? Hmmm . . . unless they didn’t change the animals but kept them in storage until transplanting at the same time as humans. Frozen? Some kind of suspended animation? But why?

  His fascinating internal discourse on Anyarian fauna was interrupted by the gamekeeper.

  “Nobody move, and for God’s sake don’t shoot any of them.”

  Yozef looked around. The gamekeeper’s warnings seemed unnecessary. None of the men, including Carnigan and Ethlore, appeared to have any interest in firing at the five animals Yozef now looked at more closely.

  Perhaps three feet tall at the shoulder, the size of a lion or larger. Elongated head with a short, heavily muscled neck, prominent cheekbones, and impressive stabbing and shearing teeth that were displayed when two of the animals yawned wide and emitted sounds reminiscent of hyenas. When the first yorsza looked in the blind’s direction, the hairs on Yozef’s arms and neck stood upright. The yorsza’s form was almost cartoonish with its smooth hide and lack of features, and the eyes appeared empty and dumb, similar to Yozef’s impression of opossums he’d seen and movies of sharks. Merciless.

  The five creatures moved in the direction the Sambars had taken. Maybe hoping to come upon the deer again? Yozef wondered, as he let go of breath he hadn’t realized he was holding.

  “Let’s give them a few more minutes to get farther away,” said the gamekeeper.

  “Then we’re getting our asses out of here,” added Carnigan.

  And that they did. Even Eldor was subdued and didn’t comment about the hunt he had so proudly promoted being cut short, with no game to bring back to Herstek.

  Yozef waited until they were on their horses before asking Ethlore for clarification.

  “Synton, I infer we were in some danger. I’d never heard of a yorsza before.”

  “Damn vicious and hard-to-kill beasts,” said Ethlore. “Most of them were exterminated, but every once in a while, a lone one or small pack like this crops up out of nowhere. Where they come from or where they were hiding, no one knows. It’s best to keep away from them. They’re known to attack even large groups of armed men. It’s almost like they don’t recognize men as being dangerous. Stupid. If we’d shot at them, they might have charged straight at us. Even with us armed and hidden in the blind, there’s a good chance one or more would have survived to get among us and tore some of us to shreds before they died. Hetman Vandinke will have to gather up a couple hundred men on horseback and sweep this area to find this pack.”

  “This is something we definitely won’t speak of when we get back to Orosz City,” said Carnigan, “or we’ll never hear the end of it from Gwyned, Maera, and Anarynd.”

  “Carnigan, when I used to walk and ride west of Abersford, and when we took Maera on a picnic, was that a good idea if these creatures are around?”

  “Not if I’d known there were still yorszas alive on Caedellium. I thought they had all been exterminated.”

  “I’ve lived most of my life in Abersford,” said Toowin Kales, “and never heard of anyone seeing a yorsza in the area. I know most people went unarmed before the Narthani came. I guess we became too complacent assuming no major predators in Keelan. Western Keelan, anyway.”

  “Well, I wondered why the balmoth numbers were declining, if Vandinke reserved hunting them for the hetman’s family,” said Yozef. “Now I know. The adults might be invulnerable, but the young ones would be easy prey.”

  It didn’t pass Yozef’s notice that his concern for the extinction of a species extended to the balmoths but not to the yorszas.

  It was a quiet hunting party that returned to Herstek. Even the normally ebullient Kivalian downed an ale unusually quickly after the party dispersed and the non-Vandinkers headed straight to a pub.

  As they departed back to Orosz City the next morning, Yozef mused that all in all, the trip had proved worthwhile. Eldor Vandinke might be an asshole, but his venality seemed sufficient to placate some of his concern about losing independence—if it was associated with getting richer.

  Well, thought Yozef, at least I’m not leaving with a desire to arrange a hit on the man, like my wish after visiting the Nyvaks hetman.

  Two days later, when they were within sight of Orosz City, Yozef turned to his four guards and Kivalian. “Remember, not a word about yorszas to anyone. Otherwise, Carnigan and I will hear about it from our wives into the next year.”

  Kivalian laughed, having returned to his normal demeanor after the infamous hunt. “It’s somehow refreshing to know some things are the same, no matter where you are on Anyar.”

  LEAF WAX AND SAWDUST

  The seven men wore three different expressions while waiting to hear what new project Yozef Kolsko would assign them. The four youngest men sat with eager eyes, broad smiles, and taut body language, as if preparing for a race. Three other men, a few years older, smiled knowingly at one another, seeing the youngsters’ anticipation of whatever the Sep
tarsh—or Paramount Kolsko, depending on how they thought of Yozef—had to tell them. After several years of working for the man on projects that succeeded or failed, they appreciated more than the younger men that Yozef paid handsomely not only because of their skills but because the projects tended to be more hazardous than they were comfortable with, no matter what the pay.

  The eighth man didn’t pretend he felt anything other than nervous. Sweat beaded on his forehead, and a trickle ran past his left ear. Alyn Klyndun was one of the first workers Yozef had hired in Abersford, starting with work on ether production, moving on to kerosene and soap, and then to flares and mines when war loomed against the Narthani. He had been paid well during those years, and he had scars and injured coworkers to justify the coin. The latest scar had come before Yozef canceled a project to develop mercury fulminate primers, as the clans finished preparing for the new Narthani army.

  When word came that Yozef had specifically asked for him, his first thought was Oh, shit! He put aside—temporarily, he hoped—plans to move back to Abersford to open a trade shop. One did not decline a call from the paramount who was also a Septarsh.

  Klyndun’s concern heightened when he learned the first meeting for the new project would be held in a building a mile from the outer edge of Orosz City. Previous experience told him Yozef wanted to limit casualties if anything went wrong. He grudgingly admitted that the same precautions, along with Yozef’s incessant harping on safety during other projects, had limited injuries to a surprising degree, considering the number of shops rebuilt or repaired.

  “Thank you all for coming today,” said Yozef. “Four of you have worked on past projects, including Alyn, who I’ve known for many years and who will be the foreman for this new project. The rest of you I picked because of reports of your hard work and innovative thinking. You four must listen to the others to learn what I expect, particularly about safety precautions. This will be critical for this new project because you will be making a new type of explosive and then packaging it in a form that is safer to transport and use. The explosive is called nitroglycerin , and the final form to be used is called dynamite .”

  Yozef spent the next hour going over the simple procedure for making nitroglycerin. Over and over, caution after caution, until one of the younger men couldn’t restrain himself.

  “Yes, yes, you’ve already said that a dozen times.”

  “And your name is . . . ?” asked Yozef.

  “Garnor Pymler.”

  “Ser Pymler, sorry, I don’t think you’re suited for this project. Please leave and go back to wherever you came from.”

  “What?”

  “You either haven’t the common sense to pay attention when someone says the work is dangerous, or you are too impulsive. Either way, you don’t fit this project. Leave.”

  The crestfallen Pymler looked at the other seven men and saw either blank looks, because they didn’t want Yozef to associate them with the ejected worker, or nods of agreement on removing someone they had new doubts about.

  The dejected youth left, and Yozef continued.

  “We will start by practicing the procedures I give you. It sounds simple enough, but you need to practice until each step is so second-nature that any deviation will be glaringly obvious. To help stay within the procedures, you will use a teammate strategy at every step. One man will carry out the step, while a second man watches and compares it to the written instructions. There will three members of each team, with Alyn announcing each successive step in the procedure. You’ll see how it works as we practice. Later, we’ll reduce the number to a team of two.

  “While the steps are underway, no unrelated conversation will be allowed. Deviation from this will result in a reprimand and loss of one sixday’s pay the first time it happens, and dismissal from the project the second time.

  “This initial practice will involve inert ingredients, then adding the actual ingredients a step at a time. Only when I’m satisfied will the production of nitroglycerin begin.

  “The first thing you have to do is purify the compounds needed to make nitroglycerin. Fortunately, the process only takes three ingredients—sulfuric acid, nitric acid, and glycerin. The last one will be isolated from beef tallow, and you’ll concentrate the acids from the sources available to us. Both sulfuric and nitric acids need to be high concentration. Sulfuric is the easiest. We can drive off water by boiling, thereby concentrating the acid. As you can imagine, you need to take great care in handling boiling acid, so as much of the work as possible will be with no one near the apparatuses. Alyn is familiar with the idea from his work with ether production.

  “One difference is that boiling off the water will be done outdoors to provide sufficient air flow. Late in the concentration process, there will be dangerous fumes given off.

  “Nitric acid will have to be distilled to concentrate it, which is difficult. The nitric acid and water mixture we’ll start with develops what is called an azeotrope . This is a chemical term for a liquid mixture with a constant boiling point. Whatever is recovered from distillation will have the same composition of nitric acid and water as the original solution.” The three remaining younger workers scribbled furiously with quill and paper. All three were among the burgeoning corps of chemistry students Yozef hoped to use to begin imparting more chemistry knowledge than he had thus far.

  “Why is that?” asked one student.

  “I honestly don’t know,” responded Yozef. “Maybe that’s something you or someone else can answer one day. I just know that’s the way it is.

  Yozef was truthful. He didn’t know the exact reasons for azeotrope formation, but he thought it had to do with hydrogen bonds.

  “Our nitric acid source is a low concentration that can’t be distilled to a higher concentration because of the nitric acid/water azeotrope. We overcome this by adding sulfuric acid, which entrains the water, allowing the nitric acid to vaporize before water.

  “The final basic ingredient is glycerin, which you will isolate from tallow by melting it, mixing with a lye solution, then adding salt and stirring until a viscous layer forms on top. The bottom layer is glycerin and salt. You’ll filter this layer and distill it to purify the glycerin away from the salt. Naturally, it’s not as simple as it sounds. Glycerin has a high boiling temperature and will start to decompose before boiling begins. What we have to do is get the glycerin boiling at a lower temperature. We do this by removing some of the air in the reaction vessel. If there was no air, it would be called a vacuum, but we only need a partial vacuum. This causes the glycerin to boil before decomposition and allows distillation.”

  One of the young men raised a hand. “How can there be no air, Paramount?”

  “Ah-ha!” exclaimed a second young man, this one from the Farkesh clan. “That explains something I’ve heard my grandmother talking about. I have family members living near the ocean and others in the higher mountain regions of Farkesh. The women know that water boils easier the higher in altitude you go. Also, we’ve probably all experienced that it’s harder to breathe the higher you go from ocean level to the mountains. We interpret this as there being less air. Is that the same as your ‘partial vacuum,’ Paramount?”

  Bingo! This guy’s gonna be a keeper .

  “Exactly,” said Yozef. “We might be able to distill the glycerin by doing it on a high enough mountain peak, but it’s far more efficient to do it in a shop with the right equipment, which fortunately we already have.” He didn’t go into the details or say that the apparatus pumping out air looked like a piece of junk, but it worked well enough for the current purpose.

  He also didn’t think it necessary at this time to describe the effort it took to make the stronger glass vessels to stand up to the temperatures and the dangerous liquids they would be handling. A team in Caernford had been working on a primitive form of Pyrex by adding boron trioxide (B 2 O 3 ) during glass making. The boron compound had to be isolated by adding sulfuric acid to the mineral borax (Na 2 B 4 O 7 ) a
nd heating it to a molten condition. Sodium sulfate then separated from the molten boron trioxide, which was decanted and cooled. The final product wasn’t real Pyrex, but it was close enough.

  It was just one of many cases where carrying out one procedure required developing one or more processes, materials, or apparatuses. Yozef usually swallowed his frustrations by remembering that the introductions would eventually feed on themselves and become self-sustaining. He hoped.

  He handed a folder to each man. “Here are more detailed instructions which I expect every one of you to memorize. What you’ll do for the next sixdays is purify the components I’ve described. After that, we’ll meet and go over the procedure for making nitroglycerin. You’ll then start doing what I call ‘dry runs.’ Once I’m satisfied you’re ready, we’ll begin making small batches of the nitroglycerin.”

  He stayed with the new project staff until mid-afternoon, then left for one of his smallest shops, focused on a project of highest interest and lowest expectations. After a thorough canvass, he had determined that the Island of Caedellium had nine Flagorn Eggs scattered among the provinces. The Caedelli assumed they were a rare mineral formation, and Yozef wasn’t tempted to explain his belief they were products of a technology more advanced than anything on Earth.

  Despite his thinking that he didn’t have the tools, he had wanted to inspect an egg closer ever since Hetman Welman Stent had told him the Stent Province contained two of the egg-shaped, three-foot-high, smoother than polished marble, dark blue objects, always found with their large end embedded in solid rock. However, it was Roblyn Langor, the Selfcell hetman, who had volunteered to let Yozef take to Orosz City for study the one egg within Selfcell Province. Yozef had had the egg chipped out of rock atop the province’s highest mountain. Thus far, the limited resources available had failed to either penetrate the egg or discover anything not obvious from what Yozef had seen from inspecting eggs in Hewell and Stent provinces. He had considered developing a diamond drill, but his enhanced memory contained nothing useful. Once again, he wished for an engineer.