“This has to be it!” Kickaha said. “I feel it in the bones of my bones!”
She patted his right cheek. “Every time we get to a temple, our chances to succeed increase. Provided, of course, that there is any gate on this planet.”
The children playing outside the wall ran screaming toward them. Kickaha figured that they must have been forewarned. Otherwise, they would have run screaming away from them. The children surrounded the two and milled around, touching them, chattering away, marveling at the two-legged beings. A moment later, a band of armed males chased the youngsters away. Immediately afterward, the priest appeared in the village gate and waved a long wooden shaft at them. The outer end of this sported a scarlet propellor spun by the wind. Halfway down the shaft was a yellow disc bearing on its surface several sacred symbols.
Behind the priest came two minor priests, each whirling above his head a bull-roarer.
All the natives were naked. They were, however, adorned with bracelets and with ear-, nose-, and lip-rings. Their heads and faces were covered with a short greenish fur except for the chin region.
And they were three-legged.
Ololothon, the Lord who had long ago made their ancestors in his biology factory, had been very cruel. He had made the tripeds as an experiment. Then, having determined that they were functional though slow and awkward, Ololothon had let them loose to breed and to spread over this planet. They had no generic name for themselves, but Kickaha called them the Whazisses. They looked so much like the illustrations of a creature called a Whaziss in a fantasy, Johnny Gruelle’s Johnny Mouse and the Wishing Stick, which Kickaha had read when very young.
Kickaha called out in the dialect of the locals, “Greetings, Krazb, Guardian of the Door and holiest priest of the deity Afresst! I am Kickaha, and my mate is Anana!”
Word of mouth had carried the news of the funny-looking bipeds and their quest to Krazb many months ago. Despite this, protocol forced him to pretend ignorance and to ask many questions. It also required that the council of elders and shamans invite the two strangers into the council house for the drinking of a local brew, for much talking, for a slow working up to the reason why the strangers were here (as if the Whazisses did not know), and for dancing and singing by various groups.
After three hours of this, the priest asked Kickaha and Anana what brought them here.
Kickaha told him. But that caused much more explaining. Even then, Krazb did not understand. Like all the natives, he knew nothing of the Lords or artificial pocket universes. Apparently, the long-ago dead Lord had never revealed himself to the natives. They had been forced to make up their own religion.
Though Kickaha did not succeed in making everything clear in Krazb’s mind, he did make him understand that Kickaha was looking for a Door.
Kickaha said, “Is there one in your temple or is there not? Anana and I have entered more than five hundred temples since we started our search fifteen years ago. We are desperate and about to give up the search unless your temple does indeed contain a Door.”
Krazb gracefully got to his feet from his sitting position on the ground, no easy movement for a triped.
He said, “Two-legged strangers! Your long quest is over! The Door you seek is indeed in the temple, and it’s unfortunate that you did not come here straightaway fifteen years ago! You would have saved yourself much time and worry!”
Kickaha opened his mouth to protest the injustice of the remark. Anana put a hand on his arm. “Easy!” she said in Thoan. “We have to butter him up. No matter what he says, smile and agree.”
The Whaziss’s lips tightened and the place where his eyebrows should be under the green fur was drawn down.
“Truly, there is a Door here,” he said. “Otherwise, why should I be called the Guardian?”
Kickaha did not tell him that he had met twenty priests, each of whom titled himself “Guardian of the Door.” Yet, all of their Doors had been fakes.
“We had no doubt that your words were true,” Kickaha said. “May we be allowed, O Guardian, to see the Door?”
“Indeed you may,” the priest said. “But you surely are tired, sweaty, dirty, and hungry after your journey up the mountain, though you should no longer be thirsty. The gods would be angry with us if we did not treat you as hospitably as our poor means permit us. You will be bathed and fed and, if you are tired, you will sleep until you are no longer fatigued.”
“Your hospitality has already overwhelmed us with its largesse,” Kickaha said.
“Nevertheless,” Krazb said, “it has not been enough. We would be ashamed if you left us and went to other villages and complained about our meanness of spirit and of material generosity.”
Night came. The festivities continued under the light of torches. The humans fought their desire to vent their frustration and boredom. At last, long past midnight, Krazb, slurring his words, announced that it was time for all to go to bed. The drums and the horns ceased their “music,” and the merrymakers who had not passed out staggered off to their huts. A minor official, Wigshab, led the humans to a hut, told them that they were to spend the night there on a pile of blankets, and wobbled off.
Having made sure that Wigshab was out of sight, Kickaha stepped outside the hut to check out the situation. Highly looped Krazb must have forgotten to post guards. Except for the drunken sleepers on the ground, not a Whaziss was to be seen.
Kickaha breathed in deeply. The breeze was cool enough to be pleasant. Most of the torches had been taken away, but four bright brands on the temple wall made enough light in this moonless night to guide them.
Anana stepped out from the hut. Like Kickaha, she had drunk very lightly.
“Did you hear Krazb when he said something about the price for admission to the Door?” she said. “That sounds ominous.”
2
It was too noisy. What did he say about the price?”
“That we’d talk about it in the morning. That there were two prices. One was just for looking at the Door. Another, the much higher price, for using the Door.”
The price, Kickaha knew, would not be in money. The Whaziss economy was based only on the trading of goods or services. The only item of any value Kickaha could offer was the Horn of Shambarimem. Krazb wouldn’t know what it could do. He would desire it just because there was nothing like it anywhere on his world.
Thus, he and Anana were not going to get through the Door unless they gave up the Horn. If they did not surrender it, they would have to fight the Whazisses whom Krazb would use when no one was watching.
He told Anana his thoughts while they stood in the doorway of the hut.
“I think we should sneak into the temple right now and find out if there is a gate. If there is, we go through it. Provided we can.”
“That’s what I expected,” she said. “Let’s go.”
While they were putting on their belts, backpacks, and quivers, Kickaha was thinking, What a woman! No hesitancies, no shillyshallying for her. She quickly figures out what the situation is—probably had it figured out before I did—and then acts as the situation demands.
On the other hand, he did get irritated sometimes because she knew what his thoughts were before he voiced them. And, lately, she obviously was having the same reactions to him that he was having to her.
For far too long, they had rarely been out of each other’s sight, and they had been without the company of other human beings. The Whazisses were unsatisfactory substitutes for “people.” They had a very stunted sense of humor and of art, and their technology had not progressed for thousands of years. Though they could lie, they were unable to conceive of the big whoppers that humans told just for the fun of it. Nowhere had Kickaha heard a Whaziss express an unconventional thought, and their cultures differed very little from each other.
Anana, holding her spear in one hand and a torch in the other, led the way. Tomahawk in hand, Kickaha walked a few steps back from her side until they reached the temple. The log building was da
rk. The guards who should have been here were drunk and snoring in the village square. While Anana followed him and cast the light of the torch around for him, he went around the temple to check for other entrances. But it had only one, the big wooden two-sectioned door in its front.
That had a thick wooden beam across the sections. He pulled it back from one of its slots and then swung a section back. Torch lights burning in wall sockets showed a smaller building in the center of the temple floor. It was a duplicate of the temple.
No Whaziss was here unless he was inside the House of the Door, as the priest had called it.
Kickaha shot back the bar on the small door and swung a section back. Anana got close behind him. He stayed outside the building but leaned far in to look around it. The two torches there lit up a structure flanked by two wooden idols.
Anana said, “At last!”
“I told you that this was it.”
“Many times.”
Both had seen gates like the one before them. It was an upright six-angled structure composed of arm-thick silver-colored metal beams. It was wide enough to admit two persons abreast.
They walked into the building and stopped a few inches from the hexagonal gate. Kickaha thrust the head of his tomahawk into the space enclosed by the beams. It did not, as he had half-expected, disappear. And, when he went to the other side and stuck the tomahawk in it, it was clearly visible.
“Unactivated,” he said. “Okay. We don’t need the codeword. We’ll try the Horn.”
He stuck the tomahawk shaft inside his belt and opened the bag hanging from his belt. He withdrew the Horn of Shambarimen from it. It was of a silvery metal, almost two and a half feet long, and did not quite weigh a fourth of a pound. Its tube was shaped like an African buffalo’s horn. The mouthpiece was of some soft golden substance. The other end, flaring out broadly, contained a web or grill of silvery threads a half-inch inside it. The underside of the Horn bore seven small buttons in a row.
When the light struck the Horn at the right angle, it revealed a hieroglyph inscribed on the top and halfway along its length.
This was the highly treasured artifact made by the supreme craftsman and scientist of the ancient Thoan, which meant “Lords.” It was unique. No one knew how to reproduce it because its inner mechanism was impenetrable to X-rays, sonic waves, and all the other devices of matter penetration.
Kickaha lifted the Horn and put its mouthpiece to his lips. He blew upon it while his fingers pressed the buttons in the sequence he knew by heart. He saw in his mind seven notes fly out as if they were golden geese with silver wings.
The musical phrase would reveal and activate a hidden gate or “flaw” if one was within sound range of the Horn. The notes would also activate a visible gate. It was the universal key.
He lowered the Horn. Nothing seemed to have happened, but just-activated gates did not often give signs of their changed state. Anana thrust the blade of her spear into the gate. The blade disappeared.
“It’s on!” she cried, and she pulled the blade back until it was free of the gate.
Kickaha trembled with excitement. “Fifteen years!” he howled. Anana looked at him and put a finger to her lips.
“They’re all passed out,” he said. “What you should be worried about is what’s on the other side of the gate.”
He could stick his head through the gate and see what waited for them in another universe. Or perhaps somewhere in this universe, since this gate could lead to another on this planet. But he knew that doing that might trigger a trap. A blade might sweep down (or up) and cut his head off. Or fire might burn his face off. Sometimes, anything stuck through a gate to probe the other side conducted a fatal electrical charge or a spurt of flaming liquid or guided a shearing laser beam or any of a hundred fatal things.
The best way to probe was to get someone you didn’t care for, a slave, for instance, if one was handy. That was the way of the Lords. Kickaha and Anana would not do that unless they had captured an enemy who had tried to kill them.
Her spear had come back from that other world without damage. But a trap could be set for action only if it detected flesh or high-order brainwaves.
Anana said, “You want me to go first?”
“No. Here goes nothing—I hope not.”
“I’ll go first,” Anana said, but he jumped through the empty space in the hexagonal frame before she could finish.
He landed on both feet, knees bent, gripping his tomahawk and trying to see in front of him and on both sides at the same time. Then he stepped forward to allow Anana to come through without colliding with him.
The place was twilit without any visible source of light. It was an enormous cavern with dim stalagmites sticking up from the ground and stalactites hanging down from above. These stone icicles were formed from carbonate of calcium dissolving from the water seeping down from above. They looked like the teeth in the jaws of a trap.
However, except for the lighting, the cavern seemed to be like any other subterranean hollow.
Anana jumped through then, her spear in one hand, a blazing torch in the other. She crouched, looking swiftly around.
He said, “So far, so good.”
“But not very far.”
Though they spoke softly, their words were picked up, inflated, and, like frisbees, spun back toward them.
Ahead was the cavern, huge as far as they could see. It also extended into darkness on both left and right. He turned to look behind him. The six-sided gate was there, and beyond it was more vast cave. Air moved slowly over him. It cooled off his sweating body and made him shiver. He wished that he had had more time to prepare for this venture. They should have brought along clothes, food, and extra torches.
The Lord who had set this gate up had probably done it thousands of years ago. It might have been used only once or twice and then been neglected until now. The Lord knew where other gates were and where they led to. But Kickaha and Anana had no way of knowing what to do next to get out of this world. There was one thing he could do that might work.
He lifted the Horn to his lips and blew the silver notes while his fingers pressed on the seven buttons. When he was finished, he lowered the Horn and thrust the tomahawk head through the gate. The head disappeared.
“The gate’s activated on this side!” he cried.
Anana kissed him on his cheek. “Maybe we’re getting lucky!”
He withdrew the tomahawk, and he said, “Of course …”
“Of course?”
“It might admit us back to the world we just left. That’d be the kind of joke a Lord would love.”
“Let’s have a laugh, too,” she said. She leaped through the hexagon and was gone.
Kickaha gave her a few seconds to move out of his way and also to come back through if she had reason to do so. Then he jumped.
He was pleased to find that he was not back in the Whaziss temple. The stone-block platform on which he stood had no visible gate, but it was, of course, there. It was in the center of a round, barn-sized, and stone-walled room with a conical ceiling of some red-painted metal. The floor was smooth stone, and it had no opening for a staircase. There was no furniture. The exits were open arches at each of the four cardinal points of the compass; a strong wind shot through the arch on his left. Through the openings he could see parts of a long, rolling plain and of a forest and of the castlelike building of which this room was a part. The room seemed to be five hundred feet above the ground.
Anana had left the room and was pressed against a waist-high rampart while she looked at the scene. Without turning to look at him, she said, “Kickaha! I don’t think we’re where we want to be!”
He joined her. The wind lifted up his shoulder-length bronze-red hair and streamed it out to his right. Her long, glossy, and black hair flowed horizontally like octopus ink jets released in a strong sea current. Though the blue but slightly greencast sun was just past the zenith and its rays fell on their bare skin, it was not hot enough to w
ithstand the chill wind. They shivered as they walked around the tower room. Kickaha did not think the shivering was caused only by the wind.
It was not the absence of people. He had seen many deserted castles and cities. Actually, this castle was so tall and broad that it could be classified as a large town.
“You feel uneasy?” he said. “As if there’s something unusually strange about this place?”
“Definitely!”
“Do you feel as if somebody’s watching you?”
“No,” Anana said. “I feel … you’ll think I’m being irrational … that something is sleeping here and that it’ll be best not to wake it.”
“You may be irrational, but that doesn’t mean you’re crazy. You’ve lived so long and seen so much that you notice subtleties I can’t …”
He stopped. They had walked far enough that he could see part of the view from the other side. Past the roofs of many structures, up against a hill of rock, was a round, bright blue structure. He resumed walking around the tower until he could see all of it. Then he stopped and gazed a while before speaking.
“That globe must be four or five miles from here. But it still looks huge!”
“There are statues around it, but I can’t see the details,” Anana said.
They decided that they would walk through the castle-city to the enormous globe. But the room had no staircase. They seemed to be imprisoned on the top room of the tallest tower in the castle. How had the former citizens gotten to this room? They busied themselves intently going over every inch of the inside and outside of the tower room. They could find no concealed door, no suspicious hollow spaces, nor anything to indicate a secret exit or entrance.
“You know what that means?” Kickaha said.
The World of Tiers Volume Two: Behind the Walls of Terra, the Lavalite World, Red Orc's Rage, and More Than Fire Page 70