"I agree it may take us a little longer to reach our goal this way, but by doing so we will pass a certain glade. It is ringed with very old oaks and is a place of ancient power. I am going to risk a dangerous conjuration there. It is the best place for it, and will be our last chance to learn the nature of the special corruption the warmlands will have to face.
"To do this involves stretching my meager powers to the utmost, so I will require all the magical support the web of Earthforce can supply me. The web is anchored at Yul, at Koal-zin-a-Mee, at Rinamundoh, and at the Glade of Triane."
"I've never heard of the others."
"They lie far around the world and meet at the center of the earth. The affairs of all sentient beings are interwoven in the web, each individual's destiny tied to its own designated strand. I will stand on one of the four anchors of fate and make the call that I must."
"Call? Who are you going to call?"
But Clothahump's thoughts seemed to have shifted. "The glade is close enough to the river so that we may leave our riding snake before we reach it and walk the rest of the way."
"Why not ride the snake all the way to the river?"
"You do not understand." She could feel his eyes on the back of her neck. "You will not, until you see the result of what I am to attempt. Such as this," and he tapped the riding snake's back with a foot, "is but a dumb creature whose life might not survive even a near confrontation of the sort I have in mind. It is as strong as it is stupid, and in a panic could be the undoing of all of us. So we must leave it a day behind when we give it its freedom."
She shrugged. "Whatever you say. But my feet will argue with you." She urged the snake to a faster pace.
Several days of pleasant travel passed as they journeyed southward. No predator came near the massive snake, and at night they didn't even bother to set a watch.
Flores Quintera was a pleasant companion, but what troubled Jon-Tom was not her dissuasion of his hesitant attempts at intimacy so much as that the excitement of the trip seemed to make her oblivious to anything else.
"It's everything I ever dreamed of when I was a little girl." She spoke to him as they sat around the small cookfire. The flames danced in her night-eyes, prompting thoughts of obsidian spewing from the hearts of volcanoes.
"When I was little I wished I was a boy, Jon-Tom," she told him fervently. "I wanted to be an astronaut, to fly over the poles with Byrd, to sail the unexplored South Pacific with Captain Cook. I wanted to be with the English at Agincourt and with Pizzaro in Peru. Failing a change of gender, I imagined myself Amelia Earhart or Joan of Arc."
"You can't change your sex," he told her sympathetically, "and you can't go back in time, but you could have tried for the astronaut training."
She shook her head sadly. "It's not enough to have the ambition, Jon-Tom. You have to have the wherewithal. Los cerebros. I've got the guts but not the other." She looked up at him and smiled crookedly. "Then there is the other thing, the unfortunate drawback, the crippling deformity that I've had to suffer with all my life."
He stared at her in genuine puzzlement, unable to see the slightest hint of imperfection.
"I don't follow you, Flor. You look great to me."
"That's the deformity, Jon-Tom, My lack of one. I'm cursed with beauty. Don't misunderstand me now," she added quickly. "I'm not being facetious or boastful. It's something I've just had to try and live with."
"We all have our handicaps," he said, not very sympathetically.
She rose, paced catlike behind the fire. Talea was stirring the other one nearby. Mudge was humming some ribald ditty about the mouse from Cantatrouse who ran around on her spouse, much to the gruff amusement of Pog. Clothahump was a silent, brooding lump somewhere off in the darkness.
"You don't understand, do you? How could you imagine what it's like to be a beautiful animal? Because that's how the world sees me, you know. I did the cheerleader thing because I was asked to." She paused, stared across the flames at him. "Do you know what my major is?"
"Theater Arts, right?"
"Acting." She nodded ruefully. "That's what everyone expected of me. Well it's easy for me, and it lets me concentrate on the harder work involved in my minor. I didn't have the math for astrophysics or tensor analysis or any of that, so I'm doing business administration. Between that and the theater arts I'm hoping I can get in on the public relations end of the space program. That's the only way I ever thought I'd have a chance of getting close to the frontiers. Even so, no one takes me seriously."
"I take you seriously," he murmured.
She stared at him sharply. "Do you? I've heard that before. Can you really see beyond my face and body?"
"Sure." He hoped he sounded sincere. "I don't pretend that I can ignore them."
"Nobody can. Nobody!" She threw up her hands in despair. "Professors, fellow students: it's hell just trying to get through an ordinary class without having to offend someone by turning down their incessant requests for a date. And it's next to impossible to get any kind of a serious answer out of a professor when he's staring at your tetas instead of concentrating on your question. You can call it beauty. I call it my special deformity."
"Are you saying you'd rather have been born a hunchback? Maybe with no hair and one eye set higher than the other?" '
"No." Some of the anger left her. "No, of course not. I just could have done with a little less of everything physical, I suppose."
"Asi es la vida," he said quietly.
"Si, es verdad." She sat down on the grass again, crossing her legs. "There's nothing I can do about it. But here"--and she gestured at the dark forest and the huge serpentine shape coiled nearby--"here things are different. Here my height and size are helpful and people, furry or human, seem to accept me as a person instead of a sex object."
"Don't rely on that," he warned her. "For example our otter friend Mudge seems to have no compunctions whatsoever about crossing interspecies lines. Nor do very many others, from what I've seen."
"Well, so far they've accepted me as a warrior more than a toy. If that's due to my size more than my personality, at least it's a start." She lay down and stretched langorously. The fire seemed to spread from the burning embers to Jon-Tom's loins.
"Here I have a chance to be more than what heredity seemed to have locked me into. And it's like my childhood dreams of adventure."
"People get killed here," he warned her. "This is no fairyland. You make a mistake, you die."
She rolled over. It was a warm winter night and her cape was blanket enough. "I'll take my chances. It can't be any worse than the barrio. Good night, Jon-Tom. Remember, when in Rome..."
He kicked dirt over the fire until it subsided and wished he were in Rome, or any other familiar place. All he said was, "Good night, Flor. Pleasant dreams." Then he rolled over and sought sleep. The night was pleasant, but his thoughts were troubled.
The following day found them climbing and descending much hillier terrain. Trees were still plentiful, but on the higher knolls they tended to be smaller and with more land between. Occasionally bare granite showed where the ground cover had thinned, though they were still traveling through forest.
And the gneechees were back. Even when Jon-Tom was not strumming his duar, swarms of almost-theres were clustering thickly around the little party of travelers.
He explained to Flor about gneechees. She was delighted at the concept and spent hours trying to catch one with her eyes. Talea mumbled worriedly about their inexplicable presence. Clothahump would have none of it.
"There is no room in magic for superstition, young lady," the turtle admonished her. "If you would learn more about the world you must disabuse yourself of such primitive notions."
"I've seen primitive notions kill a lot of people," she shot back knowingly. "I don't mean to question you, but I bet you'd be the last person to say that we know everything there is to know."
"That is so, child," agreed the wizard. "If the latter were true we would no
t be making our way to this glade." He snapped irritably at Pog. The bat was diving and swooping above their heads.
"You know you'll never catch one, Pog. You can't even see one."
"Yeah. Dey don't even react to my headseek either." He snapped at empty air where something might have been.
"Then why do you persist?"
"Gives me somethin' ta do, as opposed ta idly dancin' in da air currents. But dat's a thrill you'll never know, ain't it?"
"Do not be impertinent, Pog." The wizard directed Talea to stop. He dismounted, looked around. "We walk from now on."
Packages and supplies were doled out, stuffed into backpacks. Then they started uphill. The rise they were ascending was slight but unvarying. It grew dark, and for a while they matched strides with the mounting moon. Clouds masked its mournful silver face.
"We are close, close," Clothahump informed them much later. The moon was around toward the west now. "I have sensed things."
"Yeah, I just bet ya have, boss," the bat muttered under his breath. He snapped hungrily at a passing glass moth.
If the wizard had heard, he gave no sign. In fact, he spent the next two hours in complete silence, staring straight ahead. No conversational gambit could provoke a response from him.
A subtle tingling like the purr of a kitten began to tickle Jon-Tom's spine. Tall trees closed tight around them once again, ranks of dark green spears holding off the threatening heavens. Stars peeked through the clouds, looking dangerously near.
A glance showed Talea looking around nervously. She reacted to his gaze, nodded. "I feel it also, Jon-Tom. Clothahump was right. This is an ancient part of the world we are coming to. It stinks of power."
Clothahump moved nearer to Jon-Tom. Clouds of gneechees now dogged the climbers. "Can you feel it, my boy? Does it not tease your wizardly senses?"
Jon-Tom looked around uneasily, aware that something was playing his nerves as he would play the strings of the duar. "I feel something, sir. But whether it's magical influences or just back trouble I couldn't say."
Clothahump looked disappointed. Somewhere an anxious night hunter was whistling to its mate. There were rustlings in the brush, and Jon-Tom noted that the hidden things were moving in the same direction: back the way the climbers had come.
"You are not fully attuned to the forces, I expect," said the wizard, unnaturally subdued, "so I suppose I should not expect more of you." He looked ahead and then gestured pridefully.
"We have arrived. One corner of the subatomic forces that bind the matter of all creatures of all the world lies here. Look and remember, Jon-Tom. The glade of Triane."
XIII
They had crested the last rise. Ahead lay an open meadow that at first glance was not particularly remarkable. But it seemed that the massive oaks and sycamores that ringed it like the white hair of an old man's balding skull drew back from that open place, shunning the grass and curves of naked stone that occasionally thrust toward the sky.
Here the moonlight fell unobstructed upon delicate blue blades. A few darker boulders poked mushroomlike heads above the uneven lawn.
"Stop here," the wizard ordered them.
They gratefully slid free of packs and weapons, piled them behind a towering tree that spread protective branches overhead.
"We have one chance to learn the nature of the great new evil the Plated Folk have acquired. I cannot penetrate all the way to Cugluch with any perceptive power. No magic I know of can do that.
"But there is another way. Uncertain, dangerous, but worthy of an attempt to utilize, I think. If naught else it could give us absolute confirmation of the Plated Folk's intentions, and we may learn something of their time schedule. That could be equally as valuable.
"You cannot help me. No matter what happens here, no matter what may happen to me, you must not go beyond this point." No one said anything. He turned, looked up into the tree. "I need you now, Pog."
"Yes, Master." The bat sounded subdued and quite unlike his usual argumentative self. He dropped free, hovered expectantly above the wizard's head as the two conversed.
"What's he going to try?" Talea wondered aloud. Her red hair turned to cinnabar in the moonlight.
"I don't know." Jon-Tom watched in fascination as Clothahump readied himself. Flor had the collar of her cape pulled tight up around her neck. Mudge's ears were cocked forward intently, one paw holding him up against the tree trunk.
From beneath the leaf-shadowed safety of the ancient oak they watched as the wizard carefully marked out a huge ellipse in the open glade. The fluorescent white powder he was using seemed to glow with a life of its own.
Employing the last of the powder, he drew a stylized sun at either end of the ellipse. Red powder was then used to make cryptic markings on the grass. These connected the two suns and formed a crude larger ellipse outside the first.
"If I didn't know better," Flor whispered to Jon-Tom, "I'd think he was laying out some complex higher equations."
"He is," Jon-Tom told her. "Magic equations." She started to object and he hushed her. "I'll explain later."
Now Clothahump and Pog were creating strange, disturbing shapes in the center of the first ellipse. The shapes were not pleasant to look upon, and they appeared to move across the grass and stone of their own volition. But the double ellipse held them in. From time to time the wizard would pause and use a small telescope to study the cloudy night sky.
It had been a windless night. Now a breeze sprang up and pushed at the huddling little knot of onlookers. It came from in front of them and mussed Jon-Tom's hair, ruffled the otter's fur. Despite the warmth of the night the breeze was cold, as though it came from deep space itself. Branches and leaves and needles blew outward, no matter where their parent trees were situated. The breeze was not coming from the east, as Jon-Tom had first thought, but from the center of the glade. It emerged from the twin ellipses and blew outward in all directions as if the wind itself were trying to escape. Normal meteorological conditions no longer existed within the glade.
Clothahump had taken a stance in the center of the near sun drawing. They could hear his voice for the first time, raised in chant and invocation. His short arms were above his head, and his fingers made mute magic-talk with the sky.
The wind strengthened with a panicky rush, and the woods were full of zephyr-gossip. These moans and warnings swirled in confusion around the watchers, who drew nearer one another without comment.
A black shape rejoined them, fighting the growing gale. Pog's eyes were as wide as his wing beats were strained.
"You're all ta stay right where ya are," he told them, raising his voice to be heard over the frightened wind. "Da Master orders it. He works his most dangerous magic." Selecting a long hanging limb, the famulus attached himself to it and tucked his wings cloaklike around his body.
"What is he going to do?" Talea asked. "How can he penetrate all the way to Cugluch through the walls of sorcery this Eejakrat must guard himself with?"
"Da Master makes magic," was all the shivering assistant would say. A wing tip pointed fretfully toward the open glade.
The wind continued to increase. Flor drew her cape tight around her bare shoulders while Mudge fought to retain possession of his feathered cap. Large branches bent outward, and occasional snapping sounds rose above the gale to hint at limbs bent beyond their strength to resist. Huge oaks groaned in protest all the way down to their roots.
"But what is he trying to do?" Talea persisted, huddling in the windbreak provided by the massive oak.
"He summons M'nemaxa," the terrified apprentice told her, "and I don't intend ta look upon it." He drew his wings still closer about him until his face as well as his body was concealed by the leathery cocoon.
"M'nemaxa's a legend. It don't exist," Mudge protested.
"He does, he does!" came the whimper from behind the wings. "He exist and da Master summon him, oh, he call to him even now. I will not look on it."
Jon-Tom put his lips close to T
alea in order to be heard over the wind. "Who or what's this 'Oom-ne-maxa'?"
"Part of a legend, part of the legends of the old world." She leaned hard against the bark. "According to legend it's the immortal spirit of all combined in a single creature, a creature that can appear in any guise it chooses. Some tales say he/she may actually have once existed in real form. Other stories insist that the spirit is kept alive from moment to moment only by the belief all wizards and sorceresses and witches have in it.
"To touch it is said to be death, to look upon it without wizardry protection is said to invite a death slower and more painful. The first death is from burning, the second from a rotting away of the flesh and organs."
"We'll be safe, we'll be safe," insisted Pog hopefully. "If da Master says so, we'll be safe." Jon-Tom had never seen the bellicose mammal so cowed.
"But I still won't look on it," Pog continued. "Master says da formulae and time-space ellipsoids will hold him. If not... if dey fail and it is freed, Master says we should run or fly and we will be safe. We are not worthy of its notice, Master say, and it not likely to pursue."
A delicate gray phosphorescence had begun to creep like St. Elmo's fire up the trunks and branches of the trees ringing the glade. Argent silhouettes now glowed eerily against the black night. The glade had become a green bowl etched with silver filigree. Earth shivered beneath it.
"Can this thing tell Clothahump what he wants to know?" Jon-Tom was less skeptical of the wizard's abilities than was Pog.
"It know all Time and Space," replied the bat. "It can see what da Master wants to know, but dat don't mean it gonna tell him."
There was a hushed, awed murmur of surprise from the otter. "Cor! Would you 'ave a look at that."
"I won't, I won't!" mewed Pog, shaking behind his wings.
Clothahump still stood erect within his sun symbol. As he turned a slow circle, arms still upraised, he was reciting a litany counter-pointed by the chorus of the ground. Earth answered his words though he talked to the stars.
Dark, boiling storm clouds, thick black mountains, had assembled over the glade with unnatural haste. They danced above the wind-bent trees and blotted out the friendly face of the moon. From time to time electric lava jumped from one to another as they talked the lightning-talk.
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