by Roland Green
"Erick, Gredin. May your lives he long and your bed blessed by the getting and bearing of a dozen sons—"
Outside in the street, someone shouted. Then someone screamed. Torgia had just poured herself a fifth cup of wine when everyone started for the door. She gulped the wine, shouted for Seldra, the soldiers, and the watch to keep order, and headed for the door herself. She walked swiftly, and was glad to discover that she could walk in a straight line.
She did not walk so swiftly that she failed to overhear Gredin mutter: "A dozen childbirths is a blessing? A pox carry him off!" and then Torgia was out the door and into the street. She saw heads upturned, and hands upraised, pointing at the sky.
Another fire-trail blazed across the night. At first Torgia went cold from scalp to toenails at the thought of another comet falling, bringing new ghouls and weapons to join those from the first comet. Then she saw that the trail was smaller, a different shade of orange, and rising rather than falling.
It stopped briefly, started again, rose higher, and finally died entirely. Torgia thought she saw something glow briefly just after the trail died, something still rising toward the stars.
She looked back to where the trail had begun. A faintly glowing cloud was all that remained, fading under the assault of the winds in the high sky even as she watched. It seemed to lead back to the part of the mountains where the comet had fallen.
"We are not done with the comet's evil, not yet," she said, to no one in particular.
jazra divided the party into a camp garrison and an assault team the day after the satellite launch. The garrison consisted of four able-bodied Rael and the three invalids. The three injured Rael still included Hazlun, who would have given ten years off his life to be able to heal himself. Keeping up the garrison's supply of pure water and edible food did not reconcile him to staying behind.
Everyone else: soldier and civilian, Rael, human, dwarf, or half-elf, adventurer, wizard, or carpenter, was to shoulder packs and weapons, and try to retake Fworta. They left two days later, the day the enemy flew another drone.
Jazra told Ohlt that they had both more and less to fear from this new drone than they had from the first. Less, in that it .cemed to carry nothing but cameras, communications gear, and fuel, with no weapons to attack anything on the ground. More, in that it could fly under clouds that would blind the
satellite, but send what it saw back to Fworta through the same satellite.
"So you think they're not just planning to move to greener pastures?" Ohlt said. "You think they may be about to do it?"
"We will know more when we see if they have built any of the larger drones. Those can carry Doomed, at least," Jazra said. "For that we need to reach Fworta alive. We are going to be longer on the march than 1 had hoped. Are all your companions fit to march four days instead of two, and on rougher ground?"
"They'll all say they are," Ohlt said. "And I'll be cursed if I call any of them liars. Besides, the only one I would allow myself to doubt is Hellandros, and we will carry him in a litter if we must. Even if you don't believe—"
"You need not doubt our faith in magic any longer," Jazra said sharply. "At least not so loudly that they can hear it in Aston Point."
Ohlt apologized. He knew that waiting for action always sharpened his tongue and temper. Actually fighting was almost soothing, and when it wasn't, it at least kept a man too busy to argue.
• • »
Jazra showed Ohlt the four-day route on her map, and Ohlt, seasoned at reading mariners' charts, found no fault with it. It was three times as long as a bird's track to Fworta, but they were not birds, and might have been burned out of the sky if they had been. The route was intended to keep them below the tree-line, except for one high pass that they would cross by night, and let them come in on Fworta from the north, through well-watered country.
"Of course those iron-souled, iron-bodied children of the Abyss will have sentries posted on all sides by now," Chakfor grumbled, the second night on the march. "And it doesn't matter a lot to me if I die thirsty or not.
"But, supposing I don't die, Hellandros, you owe me a new axe. Or somebody does. The one I picked up after the battle i night to go back to the earth along with the Doomed's body. I le looked like the gods' bad joke, but no fighter ought to have his weapon dishonored."
"Give me one-tenth the tools aboard Fworta, my friend, and I will make you an axe the gods themselves will envy," Gregis said. Ohlt noted that the Rael had not yet begun formal offerings and prayers to any of the lawful gods, but even Gregis and Zolaris occasionally invoked them. The only exception was Breena.
"Consider that a promise," Hellandros said, "and anything Gregis cannot do with tools, I will do with my magic."
Human wizard and Rael technician looked at each other, grins turned to laughter, and human, Rael, and dwarven hands met in a three-cornered shake.
• • •
They were coming down from the pass at dawn, with stars still in the western sky, when Ohlt noticed that Hellandros was falling behind. This was curious, on an easy downhill slope, but not so much so that Ohlt would not leave the matter to the rearguard: M'lenda and two Rael.
The matter went from curious to disquieting when M'lenda came up to Ohlt, and whispered that Hellandros had disappeared.
"What am 1 supposed to do about it?" Ohlt snapped.
M'lenda's eyes were the brown of rich soil, and as bottomless as the sea. They held Ohlt's attention as the ranger whispered, "Find him before the Rael notice he is gone. Or we could find the whole question of their trusting our magic something to argue over again."
That possibility made the mountain dawn even chillier. Ohlt imitated the manner of one who needed to relieve himself, waited until the rearguard marched on, then headed back along the company's tracks. He wished M'lenda had come with him, or even Elda, both of them being far better woodsmen, but guarding embarrassing secrets seemed to be one of those duties of a leader that the old tales never mentioned.
The fieldcraft of a child of six would have been enough to find Hellandros. A soft whistle reached Ohlt's ears, he turned, it came again, and in the growing light he saw Hellandros sitting cross-legged, back against a pine. The wizard had a clear view of the western sky, where the last stars still lingered, but no one beyond the trees could easily see him.
"M'lenda sent me back," Ohlt said. "Are you hurt?"
"No. I just wanted to see the stars again. They helped me decide."
"Decide what?" Ohlt asked. He could not entirely keep an edge from his voice, and it would have been sharp indeed had the wizard not been rising. Moreover, Hellandros rose with the speed and agility of one much younger than even his apparent age, and headed off down the mountain so briskly that Ohlt nearly had to run to catch up. He repeated his question.
"Whether or not to go Beyond," Hellandros replied.
"Beyond?" Ohlt once more had the sense that he was hearing an old, familiar word, freighted with new and strange meanings.
"If—when—the Rael have taken their ship back, they are going to try to reconstruct the gate that links it to their worlds. If they cannot, Jazra has asked me to see if there are any spells that might at least take them back to their—I suppose you would call it, star-fort."
This, and the next several minutes' explanation, actually told Ohlt very little that was new, or, indeed, that Jazra had needed to tell him. Breena and some of the other civilians had apologized eloquently for their doubts, and in so doing, told Ohlt a good deal that he suspected he was not really supposed to know.
"Are there such spells?" Ohlt asked.
"There probably are such spells," Hellandros said. "The question is whether or not I can cast them. In theory, I should not
be able to tap the energy of other planes, but the spell of heavy striking seems to do so. Perhaps the common limits of magic do not always bind a wizard dealing with the star-golems, or the Rael."
Ohlt thought that Hellandros was about to go off on a long, discursive m
onologue about planar magic. He cut it off with a question that even to his own ears sounded rude.
"Did you ever think about going with them?"
To Ohlt's astonishment, Hellandros laughed and embraced him. "Many times. How did you guess?"
Now it was Ohlt's turn at conjuring—in this case, conjuring up a polite explanation. "Your curiosity about any and all forms of magic, and the Rael's 'technology.' Also, you seem accus-lomed to traveling, even if your youthful look seems to be as much vanity as anything else."
"Ohlt, there are wizards well past their apprenticeship, and with mind-reading spells, who cannot guess as many of a man's secrets as you have just guessed of mine."
"Shall I take that as praise?"
"It was so intended."
"Then I am grateful," Ohlt said, "but not so grateful that I will not ask you what Jazra has been saying to you that she has not been saying to the others. That, by the way, includes me."
"She has not told you of our going Beyond, to the Kel-Rael arcology?"
"Our, meaning all of us?"
"Yes."
"Not a word."
For a moment Hellandros looked as if he wanted to lay his st aff smartly across Jazra's shoulders, then he shrugged.
"In truth, she never said that she had told you, or the others. At least she has not taken to lying."
"May she continue in that righteous path," Ohlt said, in a tone of oily piety. "But what were you doing listening to her without telling us?"
"None of you can cast the spell to open the gate to the arcol-ogy. She thought that I, who might, had the right to know more. Or that she had the duty to tell me, so that, either way, I could decide freely."
"And the rest of us, I suppose—"
Hellandros's staff came down hard on the rocks, missing Ohlt's toes by the breadth of a mouse's whisker. "The rest of you can go where or when it pleases you, once Fworta is ours. The Rael are going beyond the stars, to save their comrades as they saved us.
"More than their comrades, perhaps. The arcology has gates to many worlds, including the original home of the Rael. If the Overseer commands that, and can send its hosts through it, the Rael are doomed. And we have only a stay of execution ourselves.
"Above all, even wizards know that there is such a thing as a debt of honor, in spite of all the tales that say otherwise."
Hellandros stamped off down the hill, at a pace that told Ohlt he was more likely to stumble from haste than from weariness. He would certainly overtake the rest of the company well before Ohlt did.
Ohlt turned, and looked back the same way the wizard had been looking. Only the brightest stars still winked in a sky rapidly growing light, but they were enough to give Ohlt a sensation he had never felt in his life.
He seemed to be looking down a tunnel to infinity, and at the far end of that tunnel the stars beckoned him, as bonfires built at a harbor's mouth beckoned seafarers on stormy nights. He would find a welcome there, and as this was a harbor he had never entered before, much might be new, even marvelous.
He would walk beyond the stars, too, Fedor Ohlt decided. Walk, fight, perhaps die, but he would follow Jazra and the Rael—and Hellandros—even if the other companions would not.
He had gone to sea as a boy not only to escape home, but to see exotic wonders, and walk in the marvelous lands beyond the horizon. Now he was being offered a chance to walk in a land more marvelous than any ever told of, beyond a horizon more distant than any seafarer had ever imagined.
His parents might not have loved him much, but they had not bred a fool.
• • •
Elda was nude as she crawled out of the water, but one had to look more than once to realize it. The flood water that had collected in the valley downstream from Fworta was loaded with filth the likes of which Ohlt had never before seen. He wished he had not seen it now. Elda emerged from the water looking as if she had been coated with rancid oil, then sprinkled with the contents of a low tavern's rubbish pile.
"Ptah!" she spat furiously. The water apparently tasted no better than it looked. "Does anyone have a towel?"
Ohlt handed her a double handful of dry leaves. Normally, she would have given him a flirtatious wiggle by way of thanks, but her scouting swim had taken even that urge out of her.
Crouching behind a rock at the edge of the filthy lake, Elda cleaned herself as best she could, then pulled on her clothes. She remained barefoot, as were Vorris and Ohlt, who had watched while she swam, blaster rifles ready to cover her retreat.
They had not even seen a target, let alone fired a shot. This was as it should have been, according to Jazra. The first knowledge the Secondary Director was to have of the attackers was when they struck. Losing surprise might lose the battle, or make suicide the price of victory.
The enemy's defenses had been penetrated. The blaster had begun to seem familiar in his hands, as did the grenades at his waist. With Elda's graceful form climbing the rocks ahead of him, Fedor Ohlt was content with his lot.
He would have been less content if he had not been part of the attack. He had seen what the Overseer's invading host had done to the land about Fworta, and it was an abomination. At times he wished that they could reveal the secret of the invasion to Drenin Longstaff. Whatever he might do in other matters, the druid would mete out only one fate to desecrators of the land: destruction, as prompt and utter as his powers allowed, even at the cost of his own life.
More than a dozen heavily armed Rael were a fair substitute for a druid, however, and what they could not do, Hellandros was busily preparing for.
Jazra was waiting for them when they had finished their climb over the rocks and scrambled down into a little ravine. She held out to Elda a canteen, and a handful of yellow pills.
"You need both. The pills won't taste any better than the lake, but you'll be sick otherwise."
"How sick?"
"Possibly dead. From what we've seen, the water could be poisonous."
Elda grimaced, crammed the pills into her mouth, then gulped water. From the second grimace, Ohlt judged that the pills tasted just as bad as Jazra had promised. Another vice that human and Rael healers shared: they seemed unable to make a potion that did not make you wonder if the disease would be a less unpleasant fate.
Jazra added details to her map of Fworta as the three scouts reported. When she had finished, she showed them the map, flickering and sometimes almost vanishing on a glasslike screen on one side of a flat box she carried slung over one shoulder.
"The device to the left—looking toward Fworta—is making fuel from the water in the lake. I'll tell you how later, but note that big metal tank uphill from the building. That is where they put the fuel for the drones that need it: the flyers and tanks.
"The building on the right is a replicator complex. They must have moved the units up there when they ran out of material from inside Fworta, or when they needed to start making things bigger than they could handle inside the ship. Even though she may be well stripped-out by now, there are still hatches to get through."
"Fuel," Elda said. "Like coal, or firewood?"
"Yes, but it's more like magically chilled water. Attacking it would release all the energy it contains at once."
Elda's eyes glowed in her filthy face. "All the more reason to ■ lo it. Can you imagine what Hellandros could do with a fireball ■pell right beside that tank of magic-water fuel? Or even some-iliing smaller, like burning hands?"
Vorris looked ready to burn like fire himself, but jazra held up ,i band.
"It would do more than we could afford. The explosion might destroy Fworta. Including things that we want to save, like the gate. It would certainly break the dam the constructs li.ive built to contain the lake. All the poisoned water would go pouring through Fworta, and, perhaps, do as much damage as l be explosion.
"Then it would flow on down the valley, poisoning everything in its path. It might flow into dwarven caves. Certainly it would make the valley barren for a human lifetime."
Elda could not raise her voice to curse as she obviously wanted to, but what she muttered was eloquent enough.
"You have done well, in spite of everything," Jazra went On. "We now know how to attack the replicator, which will stop their supply of new drones until they can replace or repair it. That and the assimilator are the two most vital targets, next to i he gate itself."
That was all Jazra said before she signaled them into movement. Ohlt no longer doubted her trust in the humans; he had seen her be as silent as a stone with her own folk. He had also seen the Rael frown, and even risk a glare when Jazra shut off i heir questions before they were satisfied.
They had come perhaps four hundred paces from where they left the water, when Jazra held up a hand, this time in a signal to halt. She then signaled everyone to spread out and lie down.
"Doomed," she whispered, in answer to Ohlt's look. Then she made the gestures for "two on foot."
Ohlt had heard worse news, but also better. The enemy seemed to regard the lake as a hidden back door. They did not patrol nearly as heavily west of Fworta as they did southeast of the wreck, and indeed did not patrol at all much beyond the fuel mill and the replicator.
This might change, as soon as the enemy realized that the folk of this world knew how to travel across water. Ohlt hoped that they had not chosen this, of all days, to become more alert.
The two Doomed certainly could hardly be called alert. One of them was a grimlock, the other was human. The grimlock carried a spiked club in one hand and two short throwing spears slung across its back. Ohlt saw that the tips of the spears had been replaced with grenades. He wondered if the Director had done anything with the club. Grimlocks were supposed to be less intelligent than hobgoblins, which might explain why this one didn't have a blaster.
As the pair came closer, Ohlt thought the human looked familiar, even under many days' worth of filth and fatigue. It did not seem that the Overseer's forces did much to prolong the life of the Doomed.
Merciful as death might be for the Doomed, it had to be dealt out with care. Surely someone would hear blaster fire, and even if only the bodies were found, blaster wounds would arouse suspicion. The Overseer's golems were staying close to Fworta as they built up their strength. It would be a disaster to provoke them into scouring the countryside again.
