Chulu was the first to voice his thoughts. ‘That was most impressive, Dhalvad,“ he said, returning Dhal’s ring. ”Any doubts about you have been answered.”
“Agreed,” said Amet, a look of grim respect on his face. “But I am afraid his display of skill has done nothing to prove that his friends are not more than they seem.”
“Dhal has proved that he is what he claims, and therefore is to be trusted,” Poco said. “If Taav and I could show you what we can do as Ni, would you extend that trust to us?”
Dhal dropped a hand on Poco’s leg. “Do you mean to open the world gate, Poco?”
“No, not that one,” she replied. She glanced up at Chulu. “Not that one until we have someone to back us up.” She looked at Dhal again. “I know how determined you are to find the Tamorlee, but I also know that we will never be able to do anything about it alone. If we can convince these people that we are not their enemies, perhaps they will consent to help us—or to let us help them,” she added, looking up at Amet.
“Where will you take us?” Dhal asked.
“To Port Bhalvar. Taav and I have done it once before, remember?”
Dhal nodded, then looked up at Chulu. “Well?” If she can show you another place on Lach, a place far from here, and Taav can hold that place for all to see, would you admit that they are both Ni and therefore not your enemies?”
Chulu looked from Dhal to Poco, then back. “We must talk a moment privately,” he said, taking Amet’s arm. “Please excuse us.”
In but a few moments, Chulu and Amet returned to make their decision known.
“We will accept the woman’s offer and give her and the atich-ar an opportunity to prove themselves,” Chulu said. “If they can do as they claim, we will revise our judgment and accept them as friends to our cause.”
“But if they cannot do as they claim,” Amet added, his glance touching Poco, “they will be accorded permanent quarters in the lower tunnels. The cells down there are quite roomy and well-ventilated, but that is all I can say for them.”
Poco ignored Amet’s threat and turned to Taav. “Come on, Taav, let’s show them what we can do.”
She stood and stepped around in front of Dhal and came to sit on Taav’s left. For a moment she wished for her chalks. Building her song pictures was much easier when reinforced by her artist’s skills. But she had done without them before, she could do so again.
Shutting off awareness of those around her, she looked into Taav’s eyes and began to sing of Port Bhalvar, a merchant’s world of water, boats, docks, and fishermen; a world of climbing stairways and flowered gardens; a world where the Sarissa ruled and the Ni-lach were no more.
The energy patterns swirled and locked as Taav listened to the words and melody that flowed from Poco’s lips. Moving shadows danced in his eyes and became reality. Poco saw her home port mirrored in Taav’s eyes and was content. She let her song die to the softest of whispers and leaned back, inviting Chulu, Tidul, and Amet to look at the scene she had created. As they did, Poco wondered at the possibility of traveling to Port Bhalvar as she and Dhal had traveled to the world of the atich-ar.
Chulu stepped back to allow Amet a better view into Taav’s eyes. “A lesser gate,” he said, looking down at Poco. “You have created a lesser gate, yet you claim to be only a half-blood. It is difficult to believe.”
Dhal’s arm dropped around Poco’s shoulders. “What do you mean by a lesser gate?” he asked.
“As a Seeker you should know that,” Chulu responded.
“Well I don’t, so tell me!”
Poco cringed inwardly at the sudden anger in Dhal’s voice. She knew that he felt frustrated by his lack of training in the use of his Seeker powers; after all they had been through in the past few months, he was in no mood to be told what he should and should not know.
Chulu hesitated, then explained. “A lesser gate is what the Seekers use to teleport from one destination to another. They lock into the energy of the Tamorlee through the fire stones they carry and are able to create small corridors in space through which they can pass. We call them lesser gates because only Seekers can use them, as opposed to world gates through which anyone can pass, Seekers and non-Seekers alike.”
“Is it unusual for a Singer to build one of these gates?” Dhal asked.
“No,” Chulu answered. “Not if the Singer has a talent for it. One out of fifty Singers may be so gifted.”
“What is unusual,” Amet said, turning his attention from Taav to the conversation, “is that such a group of gifted, yet untrained people would come together and, seemingly by accident, create the energy pattern needed to build a world gate—and not just any gate, but the one leading to the atich-ar and the Tamorlee. The more I think about it, the more I begin to believe there is more than chance at work here.”
“What do you mean?” Chulu asked.
Amet’s gray eyes narrowed. “What if it isn’t chance, but design.”
“Whose design?” Dhal asked, standing.
“The Tamorlee’s,” Amet answered.
“The crystal?” Poco could not keep the disbelief from her voice.
“Is that possible?” Dhal asked.
Amet and Chulu exchanged glances. Chulu spoke.
“The Tamorlee is unlike any other life form the Ni have ever discovered, in this world or any of the other worlds touching ours. Though we have studied it and have come to look upon it as a deathless historian, we do not really understand its life force or how it came into being. We are not sure just how it grows, nor why it is driven to learn all within its sphere of observation, but we do know that it is capable of molding and directing energy in order to communicate and to function as a life form.”
“Through the Seeker rings,” Dhal finished for him.
Chulu looked down at the ring on Dhal’s raised hand. “Yes, through the fire stones, like the one you carry.”
“Are you saying that the Tamorlee drew us to that world gate by exerting some kind of energy through Dhal’s ring?” Poco asked.
“It is possible,” Chulu responded.
“It is also possible that your finding of the I-naal gate was still only an accident,” Tidul said. “If you had not discovered Zaa-ob’s namepiece, you might never have discovered the right energy pattern to open the gate and therefore would know nothing about the Tamorlee. Or its loss.”
“But we did know.” Poco’s statement brought all eyes to her.
She realized that she had spoken out of turn, and tried to explain. “What I meant to say is that Dhal knew or at least suspected that the crystal was gone from Lach. That is why we came here, to find the Ni and ask about the Tamorlee.”
“Ah yes, you spoke about visiting the Ancients and seeing the Tamorlee as it existed in the past,” Chulu said. “That does explain your being here, but it also deepens the mystery concerning the I-naal gate.”
“I don’t understand,” said Dhal.
Chulu looked at him. “Your journey into the past, was it reality, or was it only a dream? If a dream, did it come from within or did it originate in the fire stone? If the answer is the fire stone, then we are back to the Tamorlee.”
Poco looked at Chulu, her face betraying her confusion. “Is it possible the Tamorlee’s energy could reach through a closed gate?”
Chulu shook his head. “We don’t really know, but if it is possible, some of our new Seekers should have picked up on it before now.”
“New Seekers?” Dhal asked.
Chulu looked at Dhal and his companions. “I think before you ask any more questions, we all should sit down. We have much to discuss and we might as well be comfortable while we are about it. I would also suggest that you release the atich-ar. Sensitives tire very easily.”
Chapter 22
POCO, DHAL, AND THEIR COMPANIONS WERE SEATED ON the raised platform with Chulu and Tidul. The guards had been dismissed, and Amet and Paa-tol had left to make housing arrangements down in the city of Jjaan-bi. Chulu was speaking, descr
ibing the beginning of the Sarissa war against the Ni-lach; the one-sided battles as small holdings of Ni were overrun by hundreds of Sarissa mercenaries; the cruelty of the men who seemed to delight in the deaths of the Green Ones.
“We had given them no cause to hate us,” he said, his eyes on Poco. “We did not covet their land or food supplies. We did not interfere with their forms of government. Some of us even lived among them and worked to help them secure their lands from draak. Never—never did we wish them ill. Yet they spoke of us as the enemy, and killed us on sight.”
Poco looked down at her hands. The sadness she saw on Chulu’s face, the anguish she heard in his voice, were almost more than she could bear, reminding her of her own losses and bringing to mind scenes long buried: her home in flames, Ni playmates screaming and running from the men who came at them with drawn swords, her father lying dead near the steps leading from their home to the river.
She closed her eyes and tried to block out the memories, but she could still feel her mother’s arms tight around her, squeezing her so hard that she couldn’t breathe. Hiding in a clump of bushes near their home, mother and daughter had witnessed the carnage taking place around them and had lived to walk away, but the hate born in Poco that day burned deep. She hated the Sarissa, hated them for what they had done to her father and her friends— and to her.
She felt the pressure of tears behind her eyes and fought to keep them from spilling over. She swallowed several times and took a deep breath, then released it slowly, trying to regain her composure. As her thoughts turned from the past, Poco realized that Chulu had stopped speaking and that Tidul had taken over.
“The Sarissa were afraid of things they could not understand or possess,” Tidul said.
Dhal nodded. “That is what Haradan told me, that men were afraid of the powers we used. It’s why he made me hide my healing talents. He was afraid of what would happen should the authorities hear about it—and he was right.”
“Haradan was your foster father,” Tidul said.
“Yes.”
“He must have loved you to hide you for so long a time,” Chulu said.
“He did,” Dhal said.
Poco looked at Dhal, her own pain forgotten for the moment as she remembered how Haradan had died trying to defend Dhal.
Dhal changed the subject. “Tell us about the Tamorlee. How and why was it taken from Lach?”
“The Tamorlee was taken into another world in order to keep it from Sarissa hands,” Chulu explained. “We had to use a world gate because there simply was no other way to get it out of Val-hrodhur. The crystal was too large to move through any of the tunnelways.”
“How many world gates are there?” Dhal asked.
“We know of five at the present. Three lead to very inhospitable lands, where the temperatures are either too hot or too cold for any of our kind to survive very long. The other two gates lead to worlds much like our own. One is called Trothgar, a world inhabited by a race of intelligent, heavily furred beings who are three times our size and who look upon any entry into their world as an invasion. We lost three Seekers to the Trothgar giants before we learned our lesson.”
“And the other world?” Dhal pressed.
“The last world gate discovered was located in the same year the Sarissa declared war on our people. It is called the I-naal gate and it leads to a world called Ari-al.”
Five or six questions popped into Poco’s mind, but she pushed them aside to concentrate on Chulu’s words.
“Though the knowledge of the world gates has been with us a long time, we had no real need to use them and were satisfied to let our Seekers do all our exploring for us. But then came the war and the safety of the crystal was threatened. A decision was made to move the Tamorlee through one of the world gates, but which one? Before a final decision was reached, Zaa-ob, one of our finest Singers, discovered a new world gate.”
Chulu looked at Poco. “Like yourself, Zaa-ob could create energy patterns with his songs. Some patterns were dream images which lived only while he sang—and some patterns were real. Up until the day he discovered the I-naal gate, all of his real patterns existed on Lach. If not for a Seeker named Lar-nol, who witnessed Zaa-ob’s find and knew it for what it was, Zaa-ob’s discovery might have gone unnoticed.”
“You mean he found a gate but didn’t know what it was?” Dhal asked.
“Yes. He thought it was just another dream image until Lar-nol proved to him that it wasn’t. Lar-nol, Zaa-ob, and another Seeker named Resset then did some exploring. What they discovered created such ripples of excitement among the Ni-lach that even the war with the Sarissa was forgotten for a while.”
Poco’s thoughts leaped ahead. “They found the atich-ar!”
“Yes,” Chulu answered.
“Blood kin to the Ni-lach!” Poco cried softly.
Chulu’s eyebrows raised in surprise. “Yes, Pocalina, so we believe. You know then the legends of the first Ni-lach?”
“Yes,” she answered. “They were told to me by an old friend. The legends of Ni origin center around a lake named Mar-lion, where the Ni were said to have first walked on land. The scaled ones, which we now refer to as atich-ar, left the security of their water homes to seek a new way of life on land.”
“So it is told,” Chulu said.
Dhal interrupted. “Wait! Are you both saying that the atich-ar from this other world, and the Ni-lach are somehow linked?”
Chulu turned to Dhal. “The scaled ones whom Lar-nol, Zaa-ob, and Resset discovered, spoke a form of Ni that they could understand. What do you think the chances are of two different peoples from two different worlds speaking the same language, Dhalvad? My guess would be almost nil—unless, of course, they shared a common ancestry.”
“How could such a thing happen?” Dhal asked.
“A world gate, a natural one perhaps, one that needs no opening or closing,” Chulu offered. “Did the Ni-lach come from the seas and rivers of this world, as some believe, or did they unknowingly discover a subterranean world gate and use it for passage to a new world that they quickly adopted as their own? No one knows for sure what the atich-ar sought when they left the waters of Lake Mar-lion, but whatever it was, they must have found it, because they never went back to their own world. Perhaps they were outcasts among their own people. Perhaps they were wanderers or explorers, or perhaps they were only curious. The truth is buried in the past and there it shall remain until our Seekers have time to look into the matter.”
Dhal frowned. “Is it possible for such natural gates to exist?”
“You, a Seeker, can ask me that?” Chulu said, smiling. “Do you forget your own power to move from one place to another by simply envisioning your destination? The lesser gates which you use as a Seeker are natural, the energy patterns within your mind forming a bridge from one reality to another. It helps, of course, to have a fire stone in your possession, which boosts your power to draw on the energy around you.”
Chulu looked at Dhal a moment before speaking again. “I do not mean to embarrass you or belittle your power as a Seeker, Dhalvad, but I must say that you seem to know very little about being a Seeker.”
“I don’t, but I am ready to learn,” Dhal replied honestly.
Chulu nodded.
“Before you two get off on another subject,” Poco said. “Chulu, would you please tell us more about these atich-ar in this other world. What did they think of this kinship? Did they accept it?”
“The evidence was too strong to refute, Pocalina,” Chulu replied. “We shared a common language, our eyes and hair coloring are the same, and we could even show them a few of our own atich-ar, Ni like your friend Taav, who are born with scales. Once they accepted the possibility of some of their ancestors accidentally populating another world, they greeted us as kin and offered to help us safeguard the Tamorlee. Would that we had realized their motives at that time.”
“What happened?” Poco asked.
“The war with the Sarissa ha
d already started when Zaa-ob discovered the I-naal gate. Most of our people were on their way out of the lands surrounding the Enzaar Sea by the time we made our first contacts with the atich-ar of Ari-al. Even Val-hrodhur was being evacuated of all but the Seekers, Singers, and Sensitives who were to take the Tamorlee through the gate. At that time we still had not decided which gate we would use.”
“Then you found Ari-al,” Dhal prompted.
“Yes, and after just a few weeks of meetings with the atich-ar, we confided in one of their leaders and told them about the crystal and our need to keep it safe. Their leader’s name was Chemii. He was the ruler of a territory they call the Errlog Waterways. According to Chemii, it is one of the greater domains inhabited by the atich-ar. This, of course, we had no time to verify. In truth, there was much we didn’t know about the atich-ar, but time was against us and we decided there would be opportunity for learning at a later date.
“Once we decided to trust the atich-ar, plans went ahead quickly. It was our intention to make two gates using the I-naal pattern. What we hoped to do was to take the crystal from Val-hrodhur to Ari-al, then from Ari-al to Jjaan-bi without actually having to move the crystal more than a few hundred meters.”
“You were only going to use Ari-al as a transfer point, then,” Dhal said.
“Yes,” Chulu replied.
“Then any of the gates would have done as well wouldn’t they?”
“No, because there was an element of time to consider. It requires a great amount of energy to hold a world gate open. The Sensitives who do that work were—and still are—few. We believed it would take us at least three hours to move the Tamoriee through the I-naal gate one way. Even dividing the energy load among the eight Sensitives we had at that time, we knew it was going to be a close thing. There was no way we could reopen the gate back to Jjaan-bi until after the Sensitives had rested.”
“How long a rest?” Dhal asked.
“A day at the least,” Chulu answered, “during which time our people were open to betrayal.”
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