by Steve White
"Look at my face," she said quietly. "It is the last thing you'll ever see. And someday—maybe a thousand years from now, but someday—a face that looks like mine will be the last thing that the last Grell in all creation ever sees, just before a human kills him."
With a quick, economical flick of her wrist, she tore out his throat.
Seventeen
Considering what they had come to witness, it was a curiously subdued group that stood on a landing of the vast Grella dome, looking out over the half-ruined cityscape and the arch beyond it.
The Queen stood at the head of a small group of humans that included Walsingham, Dee, Winslow, Virginia Dare and the few remaining elders among the Roanoke colonists. Elizabeth had long since been without the elaborate cosmetics and wardrobe that had almost defined her, holding at bay the signs of aging she had always loathed. Her hair was conspicuously gray at the roots, and was rapidly losing its artificial crinkly curliness. All her wrinkles were exposed, without the mask of white makeup that had concealed them. She wore the utilitarian Eilonwë garment, little different for male or female. All was stripped away.
She had never looked more regal.
Beside the human group stood the Eilonwë, with Riahn at their head. The other sheuath leaders stood behind him: Imalfar (as was fitting), Avaerahn (insisting to everyone who would listen that the attack had been his idea all along), Leeriven (finally with a consensus to follow, thus lending her the illusion of consistency), and the various others. But Tyralair stood beside Riahn. Like all of them, she stared at the soaring arch that loomed over all the Grella works that clustered at its feet. But her face wore an expression that was strangely ambivalent, considering that she was present at the moment of her people's final, definitive awakening from a nightmare that had lasted thousands of years.
Those Grella flyers that had managed to escape had flashed through that arch and vanished, thus confirming Virginia Dare's inspired guess as to its function—although Tyralair was of the opinion that it probably required a pair of arches, one at each of the two portals in the two linked worlds. If any further confirmation had been needed, Owain's observations from his vantage point in the Near Void would have provided it. So what was about to happen now was necessary. Of course, after suppressing the last resistance and establishing firm control over the city, the Eilonwë had cut off all power to the arch. (They didn't pretend to understand all the principles involved, but they could sever connections.) But no one could be sure about the full extent of what the Grella could do, even from an alternate world beyond. And there was no time to be lost, for given the differentials in time rates between the worlds there was absolutely no way to know how long or how short a time it would take the Grella to mount a counterattack.
So this had to be done, without further delay. Everyone agreed on that. And yet there was no disguising the wistful look in Tyralair's eyes as she gazed at that soaring arch, gleaming in the sun.
An Eilonwë technician approached Riahn and muttered something in their tongue.
"It is time," said Riahn.
At first, it was barely noticeable. There were merely a couple of puffs of smoke, close to the arch's two bases. Then there were a series of other puffs, up the arch's curve.
The sound didn't arrive until a moment later. Riahn had said something about the speed of sound being incomparably less than the speed of light. Like so much of what Riahn said, it made absolutely no sense to Winslow. But it seemed to hold up, explaining, for example, why one always saw lightning before hearing thunder. And when this sound arrived, it was rather like distant thunder, even though the sky was cloudless—not a shattering blast, across this distance. But the rumbling grew and grew, always lagging behind what they were seeing.
The arch's collapse began at the base, where the first explosive charges had cut it off. As it began to slide down, it also began to break apart as the other charges did their work. The great curve, in all its unimaginable tonnage, dissolved into segments before they all crashed to the ground with a sound that reached their ears shortly thereafter in a roaring crescendo. Soon the breeze blew away the dust cloud to reveal the rubble.
Dee broke the silence. "You realize, of course," he said to Riahn, "that this does not absolutely seal your world off. The portal itself still exists, and Grella can still come through it in vessels specially designed for the purpose."
"Of course. But we have reason to believe that such ships are expensive and therefore relatively rare. This, no doubt, is why they built the arch in the first place, so their ordinary flyers could make the transit. Now they can no longer do so, and we don't have to fear a sudden swarm of invaders. And any ships that do emerge will have to face . . . that." Riahn gestured at the nearest of the weapon turrets. Like all the others that could be brought to bear on the portal, it was a-swarm with Eilonwë, working like Trojans to change its orientation and adapt its controls. Fortunately, the turrets Owain had disabled had been on the other side of the city.
"Any ships that appear in the portal will fly into their fields of fire," Riahn continued. "We won't even have to rely on the Grella aiming devices, for the weapons will already be pointed at the only place from which a threat can appear. And remember, these are the heavy Grella weapons—larger and more powerful versions of the small ones that, according to your description, destroyed your nation's fleet."
"So any Grella invaders of your world will be consumed by Saint Antony's fire," Dee nodded. "How fitting."
"And," said the Queen, "by keeping them out of your world you will also be keeping them out of ours. We will not forget our debt to you."
"I observe that you have not begun adapting any of the turrets that face in the opposite direction," Walsingham observed. "Are you not concerned with the Grella still remaining in other parts of this world? Of course, they can no longer escape through the portal." He indicated the wreckage that had been the arch. "But what if they organize themselves and mount a counterattack against you here?"
"We are aware of the danger, but so far they have been too stunned to take any action. Not that they have any great capability to do so. They are scattered thinly around the world—mangers of plantations and mines and factories staffed by Eilonwë slaves, for the most part. And they are unarmed except for small and lightly equipped military detachments scattered among them."
"Why haven't the Eilonwë of those other lands risen up against them, over the course of the centuries?" Walsingahm wanted to know.
"Sometimes they have—and been savagely punished by expeditions from this fortress. This has always been the center of their power. Fear of reprisals from it has kept the Eilonwë submissive across most of the world. But now we have been spreading the word that it has fallen, and that the remaining Grella are trapped in our world and cut off from any hope of reinforcement. Uprisings are breaking out all over this continent, and have begun to spread to others. The Grella are leaderless and on the defensive . . . and, by all accounts, completely demoralized. Nothing like this has ever happened to them before. They can scarcely believe it." Riahn looked like he still scarcely believed it himself.
"Still," Walsingham cautioned, "those military detachments—even if, as it seems, they're more like sheriffs than soldiers, and have only the light-weapons—can do much hurt."
"No doubt. But we can help. We've already begun to send out captured flyers loaded with weapons and experienced fighters . . . and, more importantly, representatives to bring the sheuaths of the other regions into our alliance."
"That may be a delicate matter," said Walsingham with an air of studied understatement, as he contemplated the altered political dynamics of an expanded league.
"Indeed." Riahn's glance slid aside, in the direction of his fellow sheuath leaders. Winslow tried to imagine what was going through his mind, and the not necessarily identical things going through theirs. "But only if we are united can we hunt the Grella to extinction throughout our world and secure ourselves against their return. We've learned th
at now—thanks in part to you."
"Yes, undoubtedly," said Dee in tones of somewhat perfunctory interest. "But for now, we have an experiment yet to perform."
Tyralair visibly perked up.
* * *
"Now remember what I told you," said Winslow to his two companions. "When we enter the area of the portal, it will be exactly as it was when we did the same thing on Croatoan Island, Doctor Dee—"
"Yes, yes," puffed Dee as he struggled to keep up.
"—but you must both follow the instructions I gave you in order to remain in this world's Near Void."
Even as he spoke, the world faded in the now-familiar way. He automatically invoked the patterns of thought that enabled him to linger in the Near Void. And, he saw, Dee had done the same, for the magus was there in sharply defined color, walking about as Winslow had told him he could do, looking around him in wonder at the blurred grayness of the material world.
But Tyralair was still part of that world, standing forlorn amid its dimness and staring in the direction where her human companions had vanished.
The two men willed themselves back from the Near Void and walked back to face Tyralair. "I'm sorry," said Winslow in a voice turned gruff by feelings of inadequacy.
"Oh, don't be," said Tyralair with an airiness which would not have deceived a child. "It was never more than a possibility. Now we know for certain that the quality that permits effortless entry in to the void through an opened portal is unique to humans. Knowledge is always to be sought . . . even when it disappoints our hopes."
"And now that you Eilonwë possess the records and devices of the Grella for study," said Dee, trying to be encouraging, "you can doubtless discover their secret of forcing a vessel through a portal to another world."
"That's right," said Winslow heartily. "We'll welcome you as visitors to our world yet."
"I would like nothing better. And I do not doubt the possibility. But any such visits would have to be brief ones, given the difference in time rates. If, for example, I were to spend a year in your world, I would return to find that almost twenty years had passed in mine."
"I once said something of the sort to Virginia Dare," Winslow recalled. "She explained why it was not an insurmountable obstacle for the Grella. But for you . . ."
"Yes," Tyralair sighed. "Perhaps it is just as well that we cannot pass through unaided."
Dee cleared his throat. "We, however, can. And the time has come for making preparations to do so, and return to our own world."
"Which means," Winslow said thoughtfully, "that the humans who have lived here so long have a decision to make."
The hall filled almost all of one of the buildings under the great over-arching dome. No one knew what the Grella had used it for, but it held all the survivors of Raleigh's Roanoke colony who had blundered into this world nineteen years before, and their offspring, sitting on improvised benches. And it had the look of a meeting hall, for there was a dais at one end. There, John Dee stood and addressed the assemblage, with Walsingham, Winslow and Virginia Dare behind him.
"By now," Dee was saying in his well-trained voice, "you are all aware of the difference in the rates at which time passes in the different world. If you don't understand it, do not be troubled; neither does anyone else. Nor do we need to understand it. All we need to know is that, by God's grace, it works in our favor. While a day passes here, only a little more than an hour passes in our own world.
"Nevertheless, each such hour is another hour in which the Gray Monks, through their Spanish puppets, rule over England—which is an hour too many. So, now that the Grella can no longer prevent it, Her Majesty and those of us who came here with her must return without further delay, bearing with us the captured Grella weapons that can turn the scales in our world.
"Any of you who wish to come with us can, of course, do so. I must tell you, however, that we have only two ships—which we last saw just before they were blown away in a storm—and even those two were crowded. If you come with us, we will have to leave most of you on Croatoan Island, to await later transportation back to England."
"With Manteo's people," Ambrose Viccars nodded. Then his thick gray beard broke in a smile. "But of course! I forgot. Good old Manteo himself is very little older than we remember him!"
"Little older than you remember him," a young-sounding voice from the crowd corrected. It was like a release, for an ambivalent muttering now filled the room.
A man in his twenties stood up and spoke hesitantly. "Your lordships, I'm Robert Ellis. My father Thomas Ellis is long dead . . ."
"Yes, Robert," Winslow prompted. "You fought well in the raid on the Grella fortress. Say your say—you've earned the right."
"Well, Captain, what I meant to say is . . . I can dimly remember the world we came from, for I was a boy then. But only dimly . . . and many of us were born here and can't remember it at all." Ellis stretched a hand behind him as though for support. A teenaged girl took it. His voice firmed up. "We've lived among the Eilonwë, we have friends among them. We speak their tongue. And now we . . . well, we've begun to give ourselves a real link with this world." He drew the teenaged girl to his side, put an arm around her shoulders, and took on a look of quiet defiance.
So, thought Winslow with an inner chuckle, now there's a second generation of native-born humans on its way into this world. Evidently Virginia wasn't the only one among them to decide that the reasons for their reluctance to have children no longer obtain, now that there is a possibility of going home. Only some of them have begun to wonder just exactly where "home" is, now that they have the luxury of wondering.
Walsingham stepped forward, and Dee yielded place to him. "Her Majesty and I have spoken to Riahn and the other sheuath leaders. There will be a place here for any of you who wish to remain. And remember, such a decision is not irrevocable. Captain Winslow will show you how to locate the portal, and now that the Grella danger is removed you can pass through it whenever you choose. And no matter how long you take to make up your minds, only a twentieth of that time will have passed in our world."
"By the same token," Dee cautioned, "the decision to depart with us will be somewhat irrevocable. If you should decide after, say, a year to return to this world, you will find it—and everyone in it you knew—twenty years older."
The murmuring in the room sank an octave. They hadn't thought of this.
Virginia Dare stepped forward and stood beside Winslow. "The struggle against the Grella has bound our lives together all these years. Now those bounds are loosened, and each of us must decide as an individual what is best for himself or herself—and for our loved ones." For an instant her eyes wavered in Winslow's direction. "All I can say is that I myself am returning. We've freed one world from the Grella. Now there's another to be freed."
In the end, the majority of them—especially the youngest, and those with the strongest attachments among themselves—decided to remain, a decision they could tell themselves was only provisional. But the few remaining older ones, and a larger number of the younger ones than Winslow would have expected followed Virginia Dare into the effectively one-way journey back.
Evidently, freeing worlds from the Grella was a hard habit to break.
They stood on the lower slopes of Elf Hill, in a tightly packed group—those who remained of the party from Heron, and those of the Roanoke colonists, led by Ambrose Viccars, who had elected to return. All were laden with all they could carry of parts of captured Grella weapons—they could be disassembled, and Dee was confident he had learned how to reassemble them—and the even more important cylinders that held, by some unfathomable means, the energies that powered those weapons. They were limited to what they could carry, so they had eschewed the handheld light-weapons, for they didn't expect to have to face Grella so armed. It was more important to carry as many of the surprisingly heavy cylinders as possible, for once those star-born energies were exhausted the anti-matter weapons would be useless. Even the Queen had scoffed a
t Walsingham's scandalized protests and gamely hefted a weapon component of something that was translucent but was not glass. Held by her, it looked like a large scepter out of some realm of faërie.
By unspoken common consent, none of the English who had chosen to cast their lot with this world were present. Any necessary farewells had already been spoken.
But Riahn and Tyralair were there. All the pompous official ceremonies of leave-taking were past. This was something else.
"I feel diminished by our inability to aid you as you have aided us," said Riahn.
"You should not, for it is no fault of yours," Walsingham assured him.
"No," Dee agreed. "It is the work of the Fates, or the Norns, as our pagan ancestors would have said." Winslow expected the Puritan Walsingham to bridle, but he didn't.
Virginia Dare stood before Riahn. "If there's one thing I've learned here, I've learned not to deceive myself. I'll never see you again."
