“So then. What do you do in my presence when your wonderful savior appears?” Rygel demanded.
“BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ!” replied the drones.
Rygel XVI loved the whoop of audiences, the cheers of crowds, the adulation of the multitude!
Ah yes, even the pitiful little bzzzzings of his acolytes was music to his ears. “DRDs!” pronounced the former Rygel XVI, now Rygel the Great. “DRDs—Diagnostic Repair Drones!”
The little animated creatures buzzed and wobbled at the Great One’s words. Rygel the Extremely Great and now Most Holy raised his hand toward the assembled.
“Diagnostic Repair Drones—no longer!”
The DRDs stared at Rygel in total silence. Bewilderment hung in the air.
“You are now—Defending Rapturous … er … Disciples!”
Again, silence and again, bewilderment.
“Of the Faith, of course! Of the new Faith.”
Antennae bent tentatively. The buzzes sounded sceptically. Then, suddenly, they seemed to understand.
He’d contacted them with his Holy Communication Monitor. He could do it at will! There was no limit to his powers, now that he had a troop of obedient and adoring acolytes ready to obey his every unspoken command!
“BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ!”
Rygel bowed.
“Rygel!”
The voice sounded down upon him from on high. For just one moment Rygel thought that he had opened up the gates to communication with some ineffable presence even more mighty than he was.
“O Great One, I have found—”
“Oh, Rygel. It’s Pilot. What sort of oddness are you about now?”
“I am working on the communication device that I have perfected with my new-found disciples,” said Rygel.
“Rygel, you had best be careful with Moya’s DRDs. Whatever you are training them to do, you must remember that ultimately they are hers.”
Rygel grumbled to himself. The DRDs were helpful to Moya, yes—but she had no grand plans to save the universe. She was merely Moya. But he—he was Rygel the Great, the most magnificent potentate in the known universe, sadly deprived of his full powers just at the moment. But with the DRDs at his command, who knew what could be accomplished?
“Of course,” said Rygel with a deliberately penitent look. He climbed onto his ThroneSled and gazed around at the crowd of adoring acolytes. “We’re just practicing maneuvers, Pilot. Nothing important.”
The ThroneSled took off and the DRDs buzzed along behind it.
* * *
The World was not yet wholly dark, but a few stars had appeared, scattered in one corner of the sky.
“It is a good thing we are a party of warriors,” said D’Argo. “You know the territory. Where can we best take shelter and prepare to defend ourselves against the dangers of the night?”
Yanor shook his head hopelessly. “There is no shelter near here that can protect us. It will not be merely night-wraiths—next it will be all the harbingers of the night, and then the Queen and all her minions.”
“You appear worried,” said D’Argo. “But you haven’t seen a Luxan fight.” He looked at the path ahead; up slightly was a flatter space, a small clearing with a single tree clinging to the rock.
“Nor a Sebacean,” said Aeryn, her pulse pistol warm in her hand.
“We will make our stand there,” said D’Argo, gesturing to the clearing. “Let us move there while we still have light to see the dangers.”
“The nightwraiths will not forget us,” said Yanor. “We’ll go to the clearing if you wish, but our quest is over. The night will swallow us, and before morning the Queen will have penetrated the Hole in the World.”
D’Argo scrambled up the path, scanning the rocks and crags, his Qualta Rifle out before him. “If the Night-folk give up as easily as the Dayfolk, we’ll have no trouble fighting off the forces of the Queen.” Aeryn followed, stopping every few steps to listen for danger. She heard nothing but the soft whistle of wind in the mountains and the sound of their feet as they scrambled up the rocky path.
Yanor came last, his face clouded with worry.
They sat on the dusty ground of the clearing, listening. Aeryn started to speak, but D’Argo shushed her. He smelled peril in the air, and he wanted to be able to hear it when it descended.
He did not have to wait long.
It came swooping down with talons of steel and dark threatening wings. D’Argo rose up with a lightning spring. The night-thing raced toward him with astonishing speed and a horrid shriek that ratcheted through the gloom.
Instantly judging speed and trajectory, D’Argo thumbed off a pulse from his Qualta Rifle. Energy snapped through the air, sizzling up and slamming into the black chest of winged night. With a shriek, power frizzled around the beast and turned it into a ball of flame. It fell into a sizzling pile of flesh and burning bone, melting into a pyre on the ground.
D’Argo saw the next blur of black, and was already spinning on his heel. But it was Aeryn’s gun blast that caught it, snapping off one of its bat-like wings. Spinning, the thing crashed into the pyre with a shriek. As the creatures burned, the stink of sulphur and nastier stuff rose into a black smudge in the gathering night.
Yanor had risen to his feet as well. “Soon she will be here,” he said, his voice flat with despair. “Look at the stars.”
D’Argo looked up to the top of the sky, where stars were appearing, brighter than he had ever seen.
But there was something darker than the darkness up there, something cubical, and D’Argo’s warrior instincts sensed its true design.
“That thing…” he said.
“Yes,” said Aeryn.
He knew she understood.
“On my mark.”
“I’m on it.”
“Fire!”
Their bolts met, enveloping the black cube in a hail of disaster. The light from the explosion was so bright that D’Argo had to shield his eyes and look away. A fireball plunged to earth, and then farther down the mountain the fire from the crashed debris of darkness licked at the night.
The night offered no more enemies—for the moment.
He turned to Aeryn and bowed.
“You are a true warrior. I am proud to have fought by your side.”
Aeryn smiled wryly. “I’m honored. But I’m sorry that we may have to repeat the experience so soon.”
They looked up. The sky was now studded with starlight. A growing sound had begun to rumble out of the mountain passes, like a great wind gathering speed.
They turned to look at Yanor again. He glittered more vividly in the darkness, as if made of thousands of stars. His outline was more wavery, and his mouth became distorted as he spoke.
“It happens to anyone who is caught outside at night, away from the strongholds,” he said, a hopelessness in his voice.
Aeryn glanced up at the gathering brightness of the stars spread across the sky. “What happens?” she said fiercely.
“In the daytime,” said Yanor, “the World is imagined by the Dayfolk. Rivers, grass, breeze, soil—it’s all our memories. Only the strongholds are real. But the Queen of All Souls is Empress of Night—at night her thoughts take over. All of our world is wiped away.” He put his hands over his face.
Aeryn dug the toe of her boot into the dry earth. “Even the ground we’re standing on?”
It was as if Yanor had been reduced to a glittering outline. “I can no longer imagine myself,” he cried. “Only the Queen imagines me now!” The wind caught at the edges of his form, spinning the points of light around in a vast whirling rotation, pulling him off the ground. It was as if a whirlwind had seized him. With a last cry, he was lifted into the air, now only a great roiling mass of stars like a galaxy in the night sky.
The wind blasted along the side of the mountain. Aeryn felt herself lose her footing; the mountainside was ripped away from under her, but instead of falling down, she fell up. The night was swirling with stars.
“D’Argo!” s
he called, but she could see him lifted from the face of the mountain as well. He had slung his Qualta Rifle across his back and had his arms spread wide, as if to grasp the wind.
“The Hole in the World!” he shouted above the roar. “We must … get to … we must … Crichton!” His words were swept away by the wind. His form dipped as if he were fighting his way back to the ground, and then he too was gathered up into the sky.
The ground under Aeryn seemed to melt away into blackness, and she felt herself whipped around into the air. The reassuring solidity of the mountains was gone; there was no tree, no rockface, no D’Argo or Yanor, only a great cold blackness and a swirling mass of stars. She felt light-headed, and then realized she was floating. On all sides there was nothing but inky blackness and the small cold fires of the stars. It was absolutely still.
She was adrift in a universe, a dark object in a black sea twinkling with lights. Now I know what it’s like to be Moya, she thought.
Around her, what had been the World was now the seemingly endless expanse of the universe, and she was a dark object floating in a sky of stars. She had entered the kingdom of night.
She felt a moment of exhilaration. It was a kind of freedom, to be able to navigate amidst the stars without space-suit or oxygen. But then she realized that she was cold—bone-deep cold.
She turned slowly in space. Galaxies swirled around her in slow procession; stars were sprinkled through the blackness like glittering confetti. She felt the vastness of the expanse, and it was all cold and terrifyingly lonely.
She tried to maneuver, but she found she could go no faster than the slow wheeling of the universe. Galaxies turned slowly on their own axes, each scarcely bigger than she was, and there were a hundred, a thousand of them scattered around her. Moving her arms as if she were swimming, she turned to study one nearby. It looked like all the depictions she had seen of her own galaxy. She studied the familiar outlines. Something about it made her look harder, and she realized that this galaxy, glittering and elongated, was Yanor.
She gasped in surprise. His sparkling form was distorted, to be sure; he looked as though he were swimming through space, his arms long and curved and trailing stars, his heart a bright cluster of light. He looked as if he were screaming, but he moved soundlessly overhead.
She searched the blackness for any sign of D’Argo, but there were only the endlessly turning pinwheels of stars. It was time to fight night with fire. She took her pulse pistol from its holster, thumbed up the setting to maximum, held it before her, and fired it into the blackness. The red beam sliced through the darkness, propelling her backward.
She waited, scanning the darkness around her. After some moments, high above her she saw another scarlet beam pierce the sky.
“D’Argo!” she cried, but the words were whipped out of her mouth as if she were standing in a high wind. Aiming below her carefully, she thumbed off another beam. It was as if she were kicked upwards. Aiming carefully, she used the pistol to propel her upwards until at last she could see D’Argo, dim in the starlight, floating amid the galaxies.
“D’Argo!” she said.
Floating like spacemen, they grasped each other’s arms.
“Do you understand what’s happening?” she asked.
“Clearly the Queen of All Souls is fond of night,” he said. “I detect others of the Dayfolk around us; they have been transformed into galaxies. Because they are energy-beings, no doubt they can withstand a night of this, but we, being physical, cannot. Even I am cold. But remember that Yanor said the strongholds of the World are real, and exist even at night. One of these is the Hole in the World, and I have kept careful watch on the place. It is below us—there.” He pointed, and Aeryn looked down into darkness. “If we get to it, we may be able to take shelter and start a fire.”
“And we can get to it by firing our weapons,” Aeryn said.
“Exactly. We must be our own spaceships tonight.”
They readied their pistols.
“And when we get down there?” Aeryn asked. “Then what?”
“Then,” said D’Argo, “we hold on until dawn.”
* * *
Dawn had come, rosy along the horizon with a scattering of clouds.
Aeryn and D’Argo had clung to the rocks at the entrance to the Hole in the World for the entire night, overhanging slabs of rock sheltering them from the worst of the cold—and from the view of nightwraiths.
Now the day had returned again, but there was no sign of Yanor.
They stood upon the lip of The Hole in the World and peered down.
The Hole in the World was a large crevasse that plunged into the earth. Its edges were craggy and it seemed more like the opening of some cavern that went straight down into the dark heart of a planet. D’Argo could see a trail ridge that coiled down and disappeared into darkness.
“This is the heart of the ship,” he said. “If Yanor was telling the truth, we may be able to restore bodies to the ghosts and end this perpetual conflict.”
“And-locate Crichton,” said Aeryn.
“And find the maps.”
“Right,” said Aeryn. “Down we go. There’s only one thing bothering me.”
D’Argo turned to look at her.
“If the machine down there, the Orb of All, only lets the Promised One through—what will it do to us?”
CHAPTER 18
“Communication,” said Rygel XVI, “is vital to life, and particularly vital in keeping the lines of adoration and obedience open between a ruler and his subjects.” He pulled his kingly purple robes around him a little more tightly and settled back in his chair, looking out at the DRDs that thronged his chamber.
The DRDs looked back at him with awe.
He smoothed the tufts on his ears and then delicately hooked the furze over his left ear, checking to see that it was in place.
“I have distributed many communiqués in my time as Rygel XVI,” he declared stentoriously. “I have given many speeches. I have whispered in hushed tones to leaders of state behind closed doors. I have barked orders to generals. Always I have used my brilliant diction and enunciation. Always I have used language.”
He drooped a bit. “Now, it seems, I must use less well-developed faculties.”
The DRDs trundled up and touched him comfortingly with their antennae.
“Bless you,” said Rygel. “Bless you, my followers.”
He waggled his fingers in benediction.
“I am happy to say that all sectors in the esteemed brain-pan are working well. And I am now ready to begin our little effort. I request, however, that you all enter into this mental challenge with every fiber of your beings, with every filigree of your mechanical natures. Are you with me, my children?”
“Bzzzzzzzzz!” answered the DRDs.
“Excellent!” He shifted his weight forward as if this would give his effort extra force. “Now, go away.”
The DRDs looked up at him, their ocular sensors unblinking, their eyestalks slightly tilted, as if they were questioning his command.
He squeezed his eyes closed and thought into the furze. Go away, he thought. Disperse. The six to the left, go to the bridge. The ten in front of me, go to the maintenance bay. The eight to the right, go to the primary hallway on tier three. The four over by the wall, go to …
There was a moment of stillness, and then the DRDs began to circle again, slowly, their eyestalks drooping. Rygel concentrated his all on the furze.
“I know,” he said aloud, waving the back of his hand at them in a kingly gesture. “It is sorrowful to be away from the presence of a magnificent one such as myself. You will have the memory of my benevolence to sustain you.”
And, he thought to them, you will have the furze.
The DRDs began to make their way out of Rygel’s chamber, slowly, as if they were dragging their wheels. A bevy of ten scooted straight down the hallway, and another group of eight turned right and disappeared from view. The rest straggled out, whirring to themselve
s.
Rygel sat back and wiped his brow with the hem of his robe. The first part of the exercise was over. He hadn’t done so much heavy thinking since the Hynerian Trivia Brigade had asked him to verify the answers to the Worshipful Majesty section of the Lethal Trivia Combat.
A number of microts passed.
“Pilot?” said Rygel. “Where are the DRDs?”
“You just sent them out of your chamber, Rygel,” said Pilot’s voice.
The corners of Rygel’s mouth turned down in exasperation. “I know that. Where are they now?”
A moment passed. “There are six on the bridge, ten in the maintenance bay, eight on tier three…” He enumerated the rest of the DRDs, all in their assigned places.
Rygel allowed a satisfied smile to cross his face briefly. “Thank you, Pilot. Please continue to keep tabs on them.”
“I always do,” said Pilot. But Rygel had stopped listening. He put a hand to the furze and wrinkled his brow in intense concentration. He thought. He redoubled the intensity of his thought. He squinched his eyes closed and clamped his jaws together and stuck out his ears until the sweat ran down his face and dampened his whiskers.
“Rygel?” enquired Pilot.
Rygel let out his breath in a great exhalation and shook his head, scattering drops of sweat in all directions. “Yes, Pilot?”
“Rygel, is it you who is causing the DRDs to dance in conga lines on the bridge and tier three?”
“Conga lines are a very sophisticated exercise,” said Rygel, “especially for mechanical objects. To ask them to do conga lines is to ask for the ultimate in mechanical obedience.”
“And then I assume it is you who is causing them to do the Benuvian can-can in the maintenance bay and around the thermal core?”
“Perhaps not such a good idea,” admitted Rygel. “I’d forgotten they don’t have legs. But their willingness to try is admirable.”
“They are kicking with their antennae,” said Pilot.
Rygel’s eyebrows shot up. “Really!” He narrowed his eyes in satisfaction. “So the furze does work across distances.” He put his hand up to his ear and caressed the device. “Thank you, Pilot.”
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