A rock. No, not a rock. A slate. A slate as smooth and as polished as the sides of this particular pyramid. And on the slate, with sounds like glass cutters at work, the thing was drawing.
It was finished in just a few minutes, but held it carefully. The slate was drying out fast, but still seemed fragile and a bit wet. The Quislonian turned it around.
The drawing, as precise as any blueprint or engineering drawing O’Leary had ever seen, was of a structure that resembled an old-fashioned mirror or faceless clock, or an award one’s superiors gave in lieu of a bonus—an antique, ornate-looking frame sitting atop a neo-Victorian rectangular base. About the only thing that seemed to relate it to the Well World was that the center part was hexagonal.
“Have any of your people seen this?” the Quislonian asked.
“I do not believe so,” he told the creature honestly. “What is it?”
“It is the most sacred relic of all that has remained in this world,” the creature replied. “You take this drawing back to your people working in Zone and tell them that this is the link. If they do not know it and cannot find it in the records, then all is lost anyway as far as you doing anything with or about it. The Chalidangers know. They say that it is theirs, but it is not. They say that one of their own created it, but that is not true. It was never supposed to exist here in the first place. Note the scoring on it.”
O’Leary bent down and looked at it closely. “It seems to have—oh, nine pieces, from your scoring.”
“Eight. The contents of the hexagon are not, properly speaking, a piece of it. It appears that we are more involved than we believed. We would suggest that you do not show this around where the enemy might see it, but keep it within your circle. Place it in your pack—it is now hard enough and will not break—and show it only to those at the very top of your own alliance of whom you are absolutely certain. If they are as wise as you say, then they will know what to do.”
O’Leary reached out and took the slate, which had a substantial rocklike feel to it and was surprisingly heavy. He placed it in his backpack without looking, confident that its weight and the fact that it was between his supplies and his back protected it as well as it could be.
“What about you?” he asked. “If you are now more involved in this matter than you previously believed, you cannot go it alone. This is a very long reach for them, but they have the power and they are utterly ruthless.”
“Yes. We know. This is not a matter of instant conversion, nor does it demand immediate answers. We will confer among ourselves and then let you know. Is Pyron coordinating this?”
“Um, no. The Kalindan embassy is the center of much of it, although Kalinda itself is not considered secure. It is best to deal with the Ochoan embassy if possible, as they have just fought a costly and bloody war with these people and defeated them. I would suspect that there is not an Ochoan who did not lose someone in it, and that makes them very secure indeed. Yes, I’d say that would be the best bet. Communicate through the Ochoans. They will ensure that whatever is said is secure and that it reaches only those who we are certain of.”
“So be it. We shall be in touch. We shall also begin checking daily for urgent messages at the embassy courier drop at the Zone Gate.”
And alien species won’t have to be walking all over our land, he thought knowingly. These folks did not like visitors, and clearly resented his presence even though he brought them vital information. He wouldn’t do it himself, for ethical reasons, but he was beginning to see why it was so easy for the Pyrons in the past to eat these slimy characters rather than talk to them.
“I’ll report in and drop this sketch right away, if I may use your Zone Gate,” he told them.
There was another pause, and he could have sworn he almost heard, in his head, a kind of collective gasp when he asked this. A Pyron! At the sacred mountain!
He wasn’t sure if it was a real reaction he’d “heard” or simply something he was sensing in the creature’s tone and reactions stemming from his long years as a detective. Funny, though. He would never have thought of a collective mind as religious.
Still, it might be time to show off a little and see if he could put them at ease.
“I was not born of Pyron,” he told the creature. “I am relatively new here, in fact. I came from a different race and perhaps a different galaxy—it is impossible for me to know how far—through the gateway of the Ancient Ones. I had no choice of race to become.”
He wasn’t sure if that would mean anything to them, or be relevant, but he thought it might make him seem less like the old menace.
It did seem to have an effect.
“No Pyron has any choice of what race it is,” the Quislon-ian noted. “Any more than we do. Still, your point is that you are not born of the Well World?”
“Not originally. Nor of this race.”
“We have heard of such, but have never seen one. That explains why your manner and auras differ somewhat from the rest of your kind. There are more of you in this?”
“Yes. Many of us came in at once, from the same cause, and we are all involved in this to one degree or another. I am the only one who became a Pyron. We are the ones we trust.”
“Most interesting. Was one of you of Chalidang?”
That surprised him. “No, not of us, although it is true that some of Chalidang came in ahead of us and we were in a way chasing them. They were our enemies then, and they remain our enemies now.”
“There was a vibration, a sympathetic reaction in—never mind. It is becoming clearer now, and much more dangerous than it was even moments ago. We have decided you must be allowed the use of the Gate this once. Not because you are our friend or ally, but because we have the same enemy above all others. Tell us, out of curiosity—are you religious? Do you believe in the forces of good and evil in conflict?”
It was an odd question. “I was raised that way, yes. I’ve seen so much and learned so much that it grows more and more difficult to keep the faith of my fathers real in my mind.” It was the most honest he’d ever been with anybody on that subject.
“Know this, then. There may or may not be gods beyond those who created this world and what is upon it. That is unknowable and often beside the point. But there is a creature of pure evil, and you are pursuing that creature now. Do not take it lightly. It has destroyed far greater than any of us over the millennia. It may even be the force that drove the Makers— those you call the Ancient Ones—insane. That is the enemy we face. We call it the Heart of Evil. Your associates will not believe in the Heart, nor will they accept what we say as anything other than silly mysticism, but we must tell you anyway.”
It was an odd turn in the conversation, and it was getting cold and dark. Still, he had to humor them. “Then you’re saying that your belief is that there isn’t a Heaven but there is most certainly a Hell?”
“Not at all. We know nothing of Heaven, if it exists, but we know Hell. This is Hell, and if we do not constantly fight its ruler, we shall be consumed by it. He’s been away, possibly in your area of the universe, for a few thousand years, but he is back here now. We sensed it but did not recognize it without the added facts. You think us mad or quaint or worse, we know, but it does not matter. You are chosen as an instrument, as our people were who fought it long ago. Before this is done, you will know who is mad. You will know.” It paused for a moment, then said, in a very different tone, “Now, come. We will escort you to the Gate, explaining the situation as we go to those guardians farther in. Please do not hesitate and do exactly what we tell you. We assure you that your life depends on it, and we now require that you take that message to your people.”
“You lead, I’ll follow,” he promised, anxious to get out of this cold and spooky place.
Josich as the Devil? There were probably millions who thought so back home, considering all he’d done and the number of lives he’d taken, and he wasn’t very popular on this side by now, either. But—the Devil?
Sti
ll, who else could have come in here and wound up ruling an empire and running wars in so short a time?
No, no! Get that crap out of your mind, O’Leary! he told himself. A conqueror, yes. A thinking monster, certainly, in the tradition of all those who’d come before, but just a person. Just another brilliant megalomaniac. Josich can be killed.
But you couldn’t kill the Devil…
Ochoan Embassy, Zone
“It is an ancient sacred symbol,” the Ochoan ambassador told the assembled group, “but it is of no particular significance as far as I know. It’s not sacred to us, certainly, and it is unknown or forgotten by most of the races on the Well World, as far as I can tell.”
“Except,” Core responded, “that it remains something of a sacred symbol to Chalidang, and also to the Sanafe, Regeis, and Pegiri, and, it appears, to Quislon. Sound familiar?”
“But what does that mean, except that Josich and his people are superstitious and want all the gods on their side?” Tann Nakitt asked them. “They attacked us, not any of those others!”
“Ah! But look at the map,” Core came back. “Halfway to Quislon, it’s true, but only one hex from Sanafe. They’re still moving, both by land and sea, for a move from the south, most likely on Kalinda, which is just off Sanafe and which, coincidentally, has islands for anchorages—the only other hex in that part of the ocean that does.”
“But how come there is no noticeable movement against Pegiri or Regeis, both of which are closer and easier to strike?” O’Leary asked.
“The Regeis ambassador is doing everything possible to keep that armed camp to his north looking anywhere but south,” the ambassador sniffed. “They are also not terribly religious.”
“Don’t be too hard on them,” Core told him. “After all, they’re rather mild-mannered creatures that drift around in free floating water. Their colonies wouldn’t last ten minutes against even a small Chalidang force, particularly if Josich didn’t feed her troops for a couple of days. They don’t really have the design to fight, let alone the temperament. As for the Pegiri, well, I get the strong impression that they will be very friendly and do anything for any force they think it’s in their interest to be friendly with. They’re belligerent and a little nasty themselves, but more blowhards than real troopers. They’d love to march in as occupation troops behind the Chalidang Alliance so long as they don’t have to fight hard to take it. Those aren’t exactly folks who think of much as sacred,either.”
O’Leary hissed impatiently. Finally he asked, “But does anybody know just what the devil the thing is?”
There was a pause, and then Core said, “It’s called the Straight Gate. In the areas where it is known at all, it has the elements of all the mystical objects of past civilizations. Ex-caliber, the Lost Ark, the Black Stone of Karnath, that sort of thing. Wars have been fought to possess it before, and that seems to be what we have here now. It disassembles into these eight sections. They are scattered or hidden so nobody can put them together again and have all the magic powers from the assembled unit.”
“Well, yes, but it seems to me you’re overlookin’ one major problem,” the Pyron detective noted.
“Eh?”
“You can’t find Excaliber, if it exists or existed. If the Lost Ark’s real, it’s still hid beyond anyone’s knowledge but God’s. The Black Stone of Karnath might be real, except nobody knows where Karnath is, or even what planet it was supposed to be on. This, on the other hand, appears to be real. Get the pieces and you can build it. That’s a heap of difference from some mythical magical totems. I’d say this thing was a myth based on a real gadget, and who knows what the gadget will do?”
Tann Nakitt stared at the diagram intently. “There’s more than that,” she commented.
“What, my little friend?” O’Leary asked.
“You’ve seen it. Or one like it. I didn’t exactly see it, but I saw its picture.”
“Indeed? In Ochoa? That is fascinating!”
“No, not in Ochoa. Not on the Well World. Think back, O’Leary. You were part of the raid on Josich’s setup back in the Commonwealth. Fill it in. Make the frame a sort of ebony finish, the base black textured marble, and the internal hex some kind of lens, or glassy covering.”
“They said that the hex wasn’t filled—oh, my God!”
“What is the problem, you two?” Core asked curtly, disliking any situation where others had knowledge it did not.
“Josich was playin’ with it when we staged the raid! They were settin’ it up on that dead Ancients’ world when we surprised ’em!”
Nakitt nodded. “And I’m certain that if you showed this to Ming and Ari they would confirm it. They may well have seen it, too. It’s the thing that Jules Wallinchky sold to Josich for the jewels.”
There was a stunned silence. Then Core asked, “But how can that be? The thing can’t be back in the Commonwealth and also here. Besides, why do I have no record of it in my own memory? I handled the background for all of Wallinchky’s dealings.”
“This was barter, and, I suspect, not in your records since you were a fixed unit at the time,” O’Leary told the ex-computer. “You might think back and see that you got those fabulous jewels into inventory with no record of outgo for them.”
“Hmmm… You’re right. Still, I had the womens’ memories in storage, even Ming’s. Curious.”
“I doubt if your brain now holds a fraction of the data it once did, as impressive as you are,” O’Leary told it. “Either that or it was information protected even from you without perhaps your boss’s personal codes. It’s not important. The important thing is, what the devil is something venerated here doin’ way back there?”
Once Core accepted as fact that he didn’t know everything, even about Wallinchky’s criminal empire, he was back on a solid mental track. “It wasn’t,” she said. “What you saw cannot be the same thing as Josich is now trying to assemble here, because Josich knows it’s back there. And if we accept that the eight pieces as we see them here are still on the Well World—as I think we must, considering this drawing and the spare-no-resources effort to locate and obtain them—then the obvious conclusion is that there are at least two of them. This device is not a device in and of itself, but only one part of a device. Consider the name.”
“The Straight Gate?”
“Indeed. And a named gate, in the traditions of this world, is a kind of transportation device. You go in one gate, you come out another gate. We all got here that way. We assumed that all of Josich’s entourage got here the same way.”
“We know they did!” O’Leary told her. “We saw it, and had it on video.”
“Indeed? And you saw what you were trained to see. You saw the ancient Gate activated, as ours was, and you saw it transport the others to the entry area here in South Zone. They were all Ghomas, which here are called Chalidang, yet only one remained so, and that was Josich.”
“You’re saying that Josich didn’t come in the same way? That he jumped through this Straight Gate instead?”
“I believe he did, yes.”
“But he still changed sex when deployed on this world,” Nakitt stubbornly pointed out.
“Indeed he did, because he only had one Gate. It stabilized his race, but since he came in through the default entry area, he was added to the population, as it were, as the Well required. Suppose, though, he had the other Straight Gate here assembled, powered up, whatever? If just using one of them can force the system to maintain your racial makeup, then what might two do? Consider the name. Straight Gate. Straight through from any point where you have one end, to any point on this world where you have the other. Your own personal Zone Gate, only you can also use it to go back and forth to your colony home out there among the stars.” Even Core was thunderstruck by the concept.
“We said from the start that Josich seemed to know a powerful lot more than he should have about the Well World, the Chalidang, and such,” O’Leary noted. “You don’t suppose he was originally from
here, do you?”
“Highly unlikely,” Core said, thinking things through rapidly. “They’re long-lived, but the royal family of the Hadun is more wedded to genealogy than the Chalidangers, and Josich was undisputed Emperor. No, he was born and raised in our native neck of the woods. But think of what we’ve said here—that this has been the object of many wars over time here and was almost a mystical legend. No, not Josich, but an ancestor. An ancestor who took the other one through but lost control of it, probably rather early, and was stuck. If he still did well on Ghoma, and if he passed down this knowledge, then the rulers of the Hadun may have been looking for this thing on their end for generations. Finally, somehow, somewhere, Jules Wallinchky found it for them, and it meant nothing to him. Perhaps he simply acquired it in one or another of his illegitimate or even legitimate businesses. He certainly exacted a tremendous price for it.”
“Perhaps too high a price,” Tann Nakitt noted. “Is there any word on him? I thought that if he’d lived we’d at least have heard that he’s alive.”
“Nothing, but that means little. Do not underestimate him. If he wanted to remain hidden, I believe he could do it, no matter what the complexity. And if he is alive out there, he’s definitely going to be madder than hell. At Josich, at us, at the whole universe, even as he would revel in starting off young and in perfect health again. With Kincaid also out there, we’d have three insane megalomaniacs running around loose, untroubled by morals, ethics, those sorts of things. No, for all our sakes, I certainly hope he did not survive, but I have always gone under the assumption that he’s out there somewhere. If he is, I do not want to meet him or speak to him.”
“Huh? Why not?”
“Because I was created as his slave. I did much that was evil in his name and by his orders because I could not disobey him. I have no idea if the programming string was snapped when I came here or not. Certainly he probably was and perhaps is unaware that I am what I am. But if he should find out, I have no way of testing whether I would be forced to be his unwilling slave once again.”
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