“Tonight we double the watch,” he commanded stiffly. “And in the morning we shall account for every item—every bit of metal. If Balar was fool enough to play with the devices of the Ssu, he deserved to have his Skein ripped from the loom! We will discover who or what was responsible.” His little inner voice chided primly, “It is you who are responsible, Trinesh hiKetkolel! Who permitted the feast? Who posted one sentry alone on the roof? Who left the accursed Ssu implements unguarded in a heap upon the courtyard pavement?”
That was really unfair! Trinesh would have debated the matter with himself, but someone put a hand upon his elbow.
“Too late for any such measures, Hereksa,” the Lady Deq Dimani said. She pointed out into the night.
Below, where the city glimmered in the double moonlight behind the lead-gray sickle of the river, a cluster of orange lights twinkled and danced. More arrived with each passing moment. Then they swept out across the ford and over the plain toward the citadel, a trickling stream of sparks, like molten metal dribbled from an alchemist’s crucible.
“We are seen, Tsolyani, and now they come for us,” the Lady Deq Dimani stated. She did not sound overly dismayed.
11
Fortunately for Ridek, Aluja was the first to emerge into the blasted, charred landscape. The Mihalli leaped back through the gray-glittering Nexus Point “doorway” so rapidly that Ridek, behind him, was knocked skidding and slithering into the greenish mud of the Nameless Plane.
“Something—” Aluja panted. “We cannot—” He stank of scorched fur and smoke, and he slapped at a spark caught in his short mane.
“What is it? Fire—?”
“Ai, everything is burning there! I must think. ...”
Ridek brushed mud from his soiled tunic. It was a hopeless task; he gave up and plumped himself down upon a slimy boulder. He was tired, his feet hurt, and the excitement of adventuring on the Planes Beyond was fast wearing thin. Home—and even his father’s inevitable wrath—had begun to take on a certain longed-for, roseate aura. A day, even an hour, ago he would have scorned this as cowardly and “ignoble,” but fatigue, the passage of time, and their increasing distance from home brought forth wicked little worries that pricked at the edges of his consciousness.
It reminded him of the time he and Hris had borrowed a skiff and sailed out to Njekka Shoals. The initial thrill had given way to myriad anxieties soon enough. First there were the deceptive tides that surged all around the fanged, sea-girt rocks; then came the wind and scudding rainclouds; and when night fell his elementary navigation failed him utterly. He was never so glad as when the lights of Ke’er Harbor finally hove into view around Bayantla Head. He kept up a brave face, but he suspected that Hris saw through it. Six girls as pretty as Hris Alni Ku’arsh would not get him out onto the Deeps again, not until he had more seamanship!
His last stop with the Mihalli had been more amusing than dangerous: the tense throng of cloaked tribesmen, the dark cavern, the stench of drying skins and rotting sacrificial meat, all had been frightening at first. This, however, was the perfect occasion for Aluja’s shape-changing talent, and Ridek had not been surprised when he took on the semblance of a skeleton muffled head to toe in tattered cerements! La, it would have been comical were it not so serious! Ridek himself had hidden in the shadows among the tribe’s crude religious emblems and baskets of smelly tubers while Aluja strode out upon the temple platform to harangue the Folk of Na Ngore in their own tongue. The Mihalli had served the Baron in the Desert of Sighs for many years, and he spoke the language almost as well as he did Yan Koryani. The tribesmen’s reaction to this apparition, “my all-purpose ghost,” as Aluja styled it, would make great retelling if they ever got back to Yan Kor! A mind-touch with the Mihalli’s blue-glowing globe, a thing he named the “Ball of Immediate Eventuation” (whatever that meant), evoked a detailed and sorrowful recitation of grievances concerning certain recent fellow-citizens. The Lady Deq Dimani, her maid, and a creature who was probably one of her Pygmy Folk advisers had indeed arrived in a tubeway car, ostensibly prisoners of a half dozen Tsolyani soldiers. They had departed again similarly—and good riddance! The facts were unclear, but they did include breaches of tribal etiquette, poor social attitudes, and the loss of eight warriors who had journeyed off in a second tubeway car upon some “mission” and had not returned. The behavior of guests had greatly degenerated, it seemed, since the age when Aluja’s “ancestor” had lived. The Mihalli commiserated, uttered mournful cries, and vowed immediate pursuit, it was all he could do to prevent the rest of the Folk from joining them, hot with rage and bent upon definitive vengeance.
Ridek returned to the matter at hand. “You saw only fire?”
“Ai, a place that is all flame—not the energies of an empty Plane, but a real fire, a building or a cavern. Nothing could live in that holocaust. If the Lady Deq Dimani and her captors are there, then they are—” Aluja hesitated; he tended to forget that his companion was a twelve-year-old boy. Didn’t humans protect their offspring from the knowledge and the sight of death? He was not sure.
“Dead?” Ridek said scornfully. “I have seen dead men before.” He had, indeed, but only from a distance: the elaborate funeral of Lady Mmir’s clan-uncle a year ago, two felons who had committed such enormities that the Baron’s council had had them impaled, Tsolyani-style, and the body of a fisherman washed up on the sands near Ke’er. He was no stranger to death.
But then he had not really seen all that much of it either.
Aluja arose and daintily plucked murky yellow leaves from his fur. He forbore from mentioning the charred bodies he had glimpsed: not human, but smaller, four-legged, twoarmed, and still redolent of musty cinnamon. The boy would surely have heard tales of the Ssu.
“We can remain here for a while,” he said. “This Plane is harmless, and it lies within a region that is fertile with sorcerous power. There must be other Nexus Points nearby that will permit us to see the same place from a safer distance.” The Mihalli began to revolve, around and around, as Ridek had seen him do before.
Ridek had learned much of the topography of the Planes Beyond during his sojourn with Aluja. There were “fertile” zones in which the “skin of reality” was so thin that one could almost feel the presence of neighboring Planes like a breeze from nowhere upon one’s cheek; there were also “barren” regions where the “skin” between the Planes was as thick as the hide of a Chlen-beast, no Nexus Points existed, spells did not function, and only the stored power of “Eyes” and other devices operated—if they worked at all. Many of the Planes were featureless voids in which nothing lived; others boiled with inchoate energy; some contained creatures, peoples, and whole universes much like Tekumel’s; a few were home to beings so powerful and so inimical that not even the Mihalli dared set foot within them. Then there were the Planes of Time, the Planes of Death and the Afterlife, and the Planes which were the paradises of the Gods Themselves: a multifarious, kaleidoscopic, muddled, confusing cosmos of worlds, beings, things, and powers, all floating like many-dimensional bubbles within the infinite matrix-ocean of reality. . . .
Of all of the races of Tekumel, only the Mihalli could traverse the Planes and recognize their orientations and interrelationships. Had Ridek been a Mihalli child, Aluja could have diagrammed their pattemings for him, but he was human and hence limited to the fragmentary insights attainable through words alone. The Planes were like the pages of a book, Aluja said, but a book whose leaves did not lie only in a sheaf one on top of the other; each page, each sheaf, extended into infinity sidewise, horizontally, vertically, forwards, and backwards, all at the same time!
Luckily for Ridek, he lacked even a smattering of theology or philosophy, else he would have been thoroughly confused. As it was, he accepted Aluja’s dissertation uncritically—and, for the greater part, without enthusiasm. He had never shared Sihan’s interest in things arcane, nor did he have Ulgais’ natural talents with Other-Planar powers.
Where they were now
was a “Nameless Plane,” an innocuous but dismal place. The sky was a dull, sad umber, the vegetation yellow or purple-black; the air stank like an apothecary’s beakers; the soil consisted of gray-green muck; and the horizon was perpetually obscured by tatters of gray-brown mist. Not at all prepossessing! There was life of a sort: flat, eyeless lumps that crawled sluggishly across the spongy rocks and mud-slick clay. Nothing harmful, Aluja assured him, but distinctly unpleasant all the same. This Plane had no inhabitants and no name; it was a nonentity in a universe filled with more exciting things.
“What else did you see?” Ridek persisted.
“Nothing—nothing of interest, anyway. It was too bright: flames, a mass of molten stones, like the heart of a fire-mountain.”
“if the thing—your amulet—says the Lady Deq Dimani is there, then she must be dead.” He did not want that fate for her, and he added, “Perhaps she is farther away, not in that building, but somewhere nearby?”
“The amulet homes in upon her closely,” Aluja answered. There was no use raising false hopes. “Here, I’ll show you.” He took out the device, peered at it, and went suddenly silent, his long beastlike jaw agape. In rueful tones he said, “Ai, boy, I grow old! I should have looked at this before putting my head so trustingly through the Nexus Point door! See, the spark is gone again: from near the upper meridian of the circle to the southeastern quadrant. The Lady has already left the place of the fire!”
“Back to the cavern? Your ‘ghost’ may not convince those folk a second time—nor the Tsolyani soldiers.”
“Not the Desert of Sighs. The spark has moved across the face of the amulet to a new location.”
“Then we must follow?”
Aluja nodded.
Suddenly it was too much. Ridek slumped against the boulder, childish tears welling up from nowhere. “Oh, Aluja, I want to go home! I must go home!”
The Mihalli was amazed. He had not realized! What was worse, he had no idea how to comfort a weeping human child! He remembered that Ulgais and Naitl liked to be picked up, stroked and caressed, but when he attempted this now with Ridek, he was met with struggling limbs and threshing fists. He released the boy in astonishment.
“I must go home—to Yan Kor! My father— It must be daylight—hours after we left—my mother will worry—” “Hours?” Aluja was still more puzzled. “I told you, but you must not have understood. Some Planes are temporally slower than others: Lord Nere’s, for example. Days have passed upon Tekumel. ...”
“Days?” The tears became a storm.
It took a long time for the tantrum to cry itself out. Aluja sat silently beside the boy and waited. Humans were inscrutable.
When he was calm again Ridek said, “You—you will not tell anyone that I cried, will you? The Lady Si Ziris Qaya says that the boys of her people—younger than I by a year or more—go for days in the forests as scouts and messengers. They even fight sometimes as Thargir—skirmish troops. I would not have her—or my father—know.”
“No, of course not.” Aluja was bewildered. When one hurt, one cried, screamed, yelled, or whatever suited the occasion. Why others should not be told was mystifying. Yet if it meant so much to Ridek, he would do as the boy asked.
“Then let us go home, to Yan Kor.” Ridek used the black staff Aluja had given him as a crutch and got to his feet. He was suddenly aware of the alienness of the Mihalli beside him, the eyes like marbles of scarlet glass, the subtly inhuman posture, the downcurving fangs that would have terrified any other human. It seemed important to make his needs very clear. “You must understand: my parents must think me dead, and they will grieve. I have to go home. Now. When they' find out that I am alive, they will be relieved—but very
angry.”
He did not want to think how angry.
Aluja acquiesced with a sinuous shrug. He was familiar enough with humankind to have seen parental grief, and the boy was a burden anyway. He inspected a patch of scraggly saffron vegetation, then turned to face the cloud-draped hills in the distance. “The route to Yan Kor lies there: three Nexus Point doorways distant, perhaps twenty paces of actual walking. Can you manage that?” He did not know how much endurance Ridek still possessed.
The boy surprised him yet once more: he sniffed disdainfully and snapped, “Of course!”
They traversed a Plane of sandy hillocks, a second of black glass shards that shifted, clashing and tinkling, beneath their feet, and then a place all covered with fuzzy white bushes, like a field of Firya-plants from the fiber of which the weaver-clans made cloth. On this last Plane they halted in the midst of a thicket of puff-covered, dazzling white fronds, while the Mihalli consulted the amulet and his blue orb.
“Wait,” Aluja said. “My senses tell me that we are very close to the Lady Deq Dimani. One doorway leads to Yan Kor, and one in that—direction—goes to the place where she is now.”
“I suppose you want to go to her, now that we are this
close?”
Aluja strove for a look that the boy would interpret as apologetic. “We are so near. And she is my first concern. Your father ordered it.”
“I only wish 1 had the power over you that he has!” Ridek flared. “Damn my father!”
“Someday you may wield that power in his place,” Aluja replied with enigmatic precision. He did not elaborate. “Yes, 1 would see her, but no more than a glimpse, a moment of your time—and Tekumel’s. Enough to be able to tell your father her situation. Then if I require assistance to get her back—”
“Soldiers? More Mihalli? Wizards?” Excitement flickered up in spite of Ridek’s urgent need to return home.
“A Nexus Point door is small. Only one person can pass through it at a time, and so much energy is needed that I cannot maintain one for long—”
Aluja would have continued, but the boy brusquely waved his black staff and grumbled, “Oh, go ahead.”
Three paces through the cloud-white vegetation, and the familiar iris of a Nexus Point doorway gaped open in the air before the Mihalli. Aluja motioned him to stay where he was, thrust his muzzle through, and after a moment entered it completely.
Ridek waited in impatient silence. A minute passed, then another. And another. He pulled a puff of white fiber from the nearest plant and found it sticky and sweet-smelling. He was hungry, but he dared not taste it. He sat down, the staff across his lap, and looked about. The sky was also white, as blank as new parchment, the pearly, puff-covered branches motionless and uninteresting, the soil an ordinary, prosaic brown. He sifted dry dust through his fingers. Nothing moved.
There was a tramping, crunching sound. It was far away, but it seemed to be coming closer.
The white bushes were too tall for him to see over. The landscape became suffused with menace: the terror of the invisible. He watched the Nexus doorway, but Aluja did not reappear. There was nothing to climb, no vantage point to give him a view, and he moved closer to the Nexus door to assure himself that he could get through before it vanished— never again would he be trapped as he had been on Lord Nere’s ghastly world! The black oval (was it really black or was it some color that human eyes could not perceive?) hung unchanged in the muggy, stifling air. He poised himself before it.
The tramping approached. He thought he heard a voice, a human voice! It said something gruff and commanding in a foreign tongue. Was that a glitter of silver over the fluffy top of that bush? A spear point? A helmet crest?
He waited no longer but gulped a breath, held it, and plunged through the Nexus Point as a swimmer dives off a cliff into the sea.
His knees and outstretched hands struck metal, and he let himself roll. It was nearly dark on the other side of the portal, and it took long seconds for his eyes to adjust. Except for an abrasion or two, he was undamaged. He sat up, then let out his pent-up breath in a gasp of relief: Aluja stood there, back to him, peering through what looked like a lattice of dull bronze.
The Mihalli whirled at the noise. “I told you to wait!” he
hiss
ed.
“Men were coming—creatures, anyway—soliders—”
“You should have stayed! The guardians of the Pale Legion rarely leave the paths in the Garden of the Weeping Snows! They would have passed you by!”
That was unfair! How could he have known? Ridek made a rude sound.
Aluja seized his shoulder roughly, and for a shocked moment Ridek thought the Mihalli was about to strike him. Yet he only hustled him back across the chamber, giving him just time to see that the place was quite small, entirely covered with metal, and crisscrossed with protruding rivet-heads in diagonal patterns. Three walls were covered with solid plates; the fourth was blocked from the ceiling almost to the floor with heavy bars. A cage? A cell?
There was something worrisome about Aluja’s crouching stance, the way he held the “Ball of Immediate Eventuation” in one six-fingered hand. He sought about in the air, snarled something in his own tongue, then shifted back into Yan Koryani. “Now you are trapped too, boy, like me!” he cried, “The Nexus Point is closed from this side!”
“What? You—we—cannot. . . ?”
“No, whatever this place is, it is impervious to sorcery. A ‘dead zone’ where other-planar power cannot come! Here I am as blind and helpless as you—as a human.”
Ridek ignored the comparison. “How can the Nexus Point be closed from one side only?” The extent of their predicament began to dawn upon him.
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