Grand Vizier of Krar

by W. John Tucker

  “Please don’t help me out of duty, Pelembras. Help me only if you believe in what I am trying to do.”

  “I will help you because I believe in you, Blan. But do call me Pel.”

  “Thank you, Pel.” Blan touched Pel on the arm before turning away to hide the moisture that had come to her eyes. She was suddenly feeling emotional again and she did not fully understand why.

  “Let me think for a while what I need to do here,” Blan said. “While I do so, let’s try to clear away any evidence that we have been here. If they do break in, we want them to think it a false trail.”

  They worked in silence, systematically checking all the places they had been inside the dome, brushing away marks from foot or hand and disguising any disturbances they had caused. After about an hour of this, Blan called over Pel and Memwin and explained her plan.

  91

  Southport River – 16th November

  Cursing the injured arm that prevented her from being the one to stay with Blan and Memwin, Arnapa resolved to concentrate on directing the others safely to Port Fandabbin. Fortunately, Zeep had no trouble paddling the canoe without Arnapa’s help. Bonmar and Norsnette were in the second canoe, Pretsan and Aransette in the third. The river current was now working in their favour, but they still had to use side channels and hide in swamps and marshes during the day. Even at night they had to move out of the main channel on many occasions due to the increasing enemy activity on the river. Black Knight was clearly planning something big and that made it all the more urgent to get to Port Fandabbin soon. It also caused Arnapa to be increasingly concerned about Blan and Memwin. She wondered if she had made the right decision when she gave way to Blan’s request to be left behind to study the library’s lower chamber.

  “I think we have two pairs of lovers following us,” Zeep remarked in a low voice.

  “How quickly lives change in wartime,” Arnapa said in return. For the first time in a long while she smiled as she remembered her own younger days in Belspire, then a beautiful city full of light, colour, music and love.

  She had fallen in love quite a few times as a teenager, although she thought that Aransette and Norsnette were very much more determined than she had been and would probably capture the hearts of their respective men for the long haul.

  Arnapa had been wilful and somewhat reckless as a youngster, and very spoiled (or so she thought in retrospect), yet she looked back fondly on those happy years. Her half-brother, thirteen years older than she, had always been a good and supportive friend and it had been he who recognised her talents and encouraged her to start training as a Master Spy when she was just sixteen. After six years of intensive training she had qualified at the top of her class, just in time for the start of the last war. Although she had been of priceless service to the Free Alliance, she had not been able to prevent the murder of her dear parents or the destruction of her beloved city during the war. Those tragic events had brought her happy days to an end. She had since been a lonely soul, always trying to bury her emotions in her work and yet feeling within her a yearning to reach out for love.

  92

  The Secret of Belspire Library

  That night, Blan succeeded in opening the side door again in the same way that she had been opening the roof door. She marvelled that, for all the technological sophistication of the Visitors, their security measures were very simple. She wondered if this was because their world was more honest or whether it was because their technology made them fearless. She decided that, at the very least, they must have trusted each other.

  Pel and Memwin went through the door into the cavity between the two shells of the dome. They found that the bigger gap in the outer shell, through which Memwin had first discovered the dome, was indeed guarded. However, Pel managed to pull material away from the smaller crack near the side door, enough for Memwin to crawl through and for him to squeeze through, though with difficulty. He was short, but he was also stout in a muscular way, somewhat like a pale but even shorter version of Bonmar.

  They emerged behind a broken wall. It was a very dark night, so they were able to crawl away from the shelter of the wall without being seen.

  Pel found the hidden tunnel door and unlocked it in the manner that Arnapa had shown him. Memwin used that tunnel to cross under Belspire River to look for wild food. Pel then found the tunnel to the docks and busied himself collecting fresh water and making plans for an escape down the river. This close to the mountains, the water in the main channel of Southport River was potable, and wild food was abundant in the nearby swamps which had not been exploited since the sacking of the city nearly ten years ago. They collected far more food and water than they could bring back safely, so they left most of it behind the nearest tunnel entrance to be picked up on future excursions.

  *

  While Pel and Memwin were out fetching food and water, Blan finally resolved to enter the chamber beneath. She tried to clear her mind of her anxiety about how Pel and Memwin were getting on. She felt that it was important for her to let her mind take in her first impressions of what lay below.

  The means of descending into the lower chamber was somewhere between a ladder and a stairway, similar to the corresponding stair in the smaller sky ship but larger and more elegantly designed. From its structure Blan deduced that either Chanangii or Vanantii or both had legs much the same size and shape as humans. She found she could descend easily. As she did so, she noticed that the faint glow about her strengthened.

  To her surprise, she had only descended about three fathomes when her foot found a solid floor. The room in which she found herself was immediately filled with red light which continued to grow and gradually change colour until it had become white. She looked down but could see no obvious sign that she had trodden on anything that might cause the light to come on. She dismissed the primeval fear that some creature or intelligent being had seen her arrive and had responded with the light, although she could not restrain herself from looking around to see if there were any unusual dangers like, for example, giant worms. There were none to be seen.

  Blan had expected to see an enlarged version of the lower chamber of the sky ship at Pitpet Brook, a huge place as deep as the upper chamber was high and containing a multitude of Actios. What she saw here was quite different.

  Her hypothesis, that the dome was an enormous sky ship, still held. The room was open and covered roughly the same large area as the chamber above, except for the distance between floor and ceiling. Although the ceiling was twice her own height above the top of her head, the large diameter of the room, more than fifty times its height, made this seem somewhat claustrophobic. “Like being in a sandwich,” she muttered.

  In the centre of the room was an enormous elliptical dais, like a flat plateau of crystalline rock which had grown out of the floor. Most of the light seemed to be coming from the top surface of this giant tablet and its reflection from the ceiling. There were four similar tablets near the walls, spaced a quarter-circle apart. The tops of these other four were glowing, but with subdued intensity. Each tablet was about twenty-four paces in length, fifteen paces wide, and rose about three-quarters of a fathome above the floor. The wide floor space between the tablets appeared to be empty, but Blan thought she could see various shadowy items around the sides. The curvature of the sides was much more pronounced than the curvature of the dome above, but still suggested that the sky ship had further structure below.

  Blan went straight to the central tablet. At first, its surface looked like a pool of glowing water. When she touched it she found that it was hard and had a textured feel to it, not smooth like glass. It reminded her of her piece of skyhull and she wondered if the surface was actually made of the cut off ends of tiny fibres.

  “Extraordinary!” she exclaimed aloud. “There is no dust on the surface or even on the floor.” She resolved to make sure that the door was not left open any longer than necessary.

  She left the central tablet and went to walk aroun
d the edge of the room. This took her nearly half an hour. It would have taken her less time had she not found a skeleton.

  It resembled a human skeleton in general shape but was clearly not human. What at first looked like bones were not made of bone; they were made of a completely different material which had the appearance of glass. The long bones of the limbs consisted of intertwining cords with hollow spaces between, providing both internal support as well as some external protection to the living being. The rib cage extended all the way down to the waist, suggesting to Blan that the owner might have consumed food evenly across the day. The spine was similar to that of humans, only much thicker and made of the glassy material. The shape of the skull gave Blan the strong impression that this being had been a robust but kindly and thoughtful individual.

  “Are you the last of the Chanangii, returned here to die alone; no one left to honour your life or your passing?” she asked, shocked that she felt such sadness at what she saw. She could think of no other explanation for this single skeleton. The person, for she had no idea whether or not the Chanangii had different genders, would have been about Telko’s height but had been more robust in life than the most powerful human.

  A pace away from the skeleton’s hands, as though it had rolled away there at the moment of death, was a familiar sight. It was an Actio exactly like the ones she had taken from the sky ship at Pitpet Brook.

  “I’ll take this and I will make sure that your remains will be respected,” Blan promised as she picked up the Actio reverently. “By bringing this Actio back here you might have helped us to free the people of Earth, if that is any consolation to you.” She then bowed her head briefly and returned to the central tablet. She assumed that, if there was a controlling or highest ranking device, it would likely be the central one.

  Blan was tall enough to see across the tablet with ease. However, she would not have a very good perspective of anything that appeared more than a pace away. She wondered if the Chanangii actually used these tablets or whether they had been forced to build the small Actios because they had the same problem she had. She then wondered if perhaps the Vanantii had been very thin and frail but with long limbs that could support them above these tablets. Alternatively, they might have had a device which could move them about over the surface of the tablets. Maybe they were like birds and could fly. Whatever the case, Blan clambered up on top.

  Something was going on. She could feel a buzzing sensation go through her as she rolled across the surface. She lay on her back for a while, enjoying the rather relaxing vibration through her aching muscles. Nothing else happened until she knelt and placed her hands on the surface, directing her thoughts to the device, as she had done with the Actios.

  “Applicant claiming to be both ‘Chanangii Repair Detail’ and ‘Dualfield Resonation Displacement Component: Actio 28’ is attempting to access Vanantii Expeditionary Ship Number 586 Central Control Processor. Access denied.” She found it eerie to hear such words in her mind, seemingly spoken by a young woman in a soft and sympathetic tone, and it took her a moment to remember that these devices detected information from her brain and used it to respond in the best way they could. They would not know which voice patterns Blan would be able to understand, so they matched their signals to her own voice pattern and somehow triggered the same nerves that normal sound would trigger, or so Blan hypothesised.

  The denial of access was not as disheartening to Blan as it would have been to many others. She guessed she had been lucky so far to breeze through the doors so easily. She had hoped to get speedy access to this device, yet had not really expected to do so. Throughout her childhood and early adulthood she had spent a lot of time solving puzzles, and she had the capacity for great perseverance in any intellectual challenge. She sat on the Control Processor tablet with her legs dangling over the side and thought about her next strategy. Meanwhile, she enjoyed the gentle and soothing vibrations coming from the surface.

  93

  Belspire – 18th November

  For a day and a night Blan tried different approaches to access the Control Processor but with little progress. Despite her capacity for perseverance she was starting to become anxious.

  Although Memwin and Pel had collected ample water, and had nearly completed the task of covering the evidence of the group’s occupation of the upper dome, enemy engineers were close to breaking through the main entrance and Blan found it difficult to ignore the pressure this placed on her. Pel reckoned that it would happen around midday, just four hours away, so Blan had every reason to be concerned about her lack of progress on the one thing that justified her staying there; her big hope.

  She had tried to use the Actio she had found near the Chanangius, but it was completely run down. She had placed it on the surface of the Control Processor in the hope that it might draw energy from the larger device; there had been no obvious change yet.

  Blan had lifted Memwin up onto the Control Processor but the girl became bored when nothing seemed to be happening. Memwin lay down and the vibrations soon sent her to sleep. When she finally got up, invigorated, she went to explore the rim of the chamber, except where the skeleton lay.

  “Blan! Blan!” Memwin’s excited voice echoed around the chamber. “Look at this!”

  Blan needed a break, so she climbed down and headed for where she thought she could see Memwin waving her arms in the shadows near the wall of the chamber. There was no use trying to find the direction from which a sound came in this echoing place; even Blan’s aural powers could not sort out the strange ways in which air vibrations moved around the chamber.

  When she had walked around the rim of the chamber two nights ago Blan had missed what Memwin had found amongst the other shadowy items, including empty containers, lying along the wall. Even now it just looked like a visual discontinuity in the wall; until she came very close to it.

  “They are the same sort of glassy plates that I found in the sky ship by Pitpet Brook,” Blan declared. “You have done very well to find these, Memwin. My goodness, there must be thousands of them!”

  What had looked like a cube of colourless jelly more than half a fathome tall, was actually a stack of very thin, flexible, transparent plates. Memwin pointed along the wall and Blan now noticed other, similar piles. They both walked around the rim of the chamber again to see how many there were. When they came to the skeleton, Memwin stood back.

  “Come on, Memwin,” Blan urged. “Let me introduce you to my oldest friend, Lord Chanangius or Lady Chanangia, I’m not sure which. If you want to seek knowledge you will have to get used to meeting new friends like this.”

  Memwin edged forward and finally stood staring at the skeleton.

  “He looks so sad,” Memwin whispered.

  “I agree, but we will make sure he is treated with honour. Why do you think it is a ‘he’, Memwin?”

  “With a ribcage like that he couldn’t have babies,” Memwin reasoned.

  “That’s a reasonable hypothesis to start with,” Blan replied. “We will call it a ‘he’ for the time being, but we really don’t know yet. Maybe the glass plates will tell us.

  “Hey, what’s this…?” Blan bent down and gently lifted the edge of a glass plate, so thin it had been invisible against the floor until Memwin’s shadow passed over it and Blan saw a slight change of light across it. “I missed this before. It must have fallen from his hand along with the Actio. We’ll take this with us. Maybe it was important to him in his last days.”

  Having estimated that there were at least two hundred thousand glassy record plates in the room, Blan and Memwin returned to the Control Processor. Blan felt both elated and frustrated: elated because the glassy plates were probably full of knowledge; frustrated because it might take centuries to decode them all, let alone study them and understand them.

  “I feel like someone who is thirsting to death in the desert, finds a reservoir of fresh water, but can draw from it just one drip at a time through a pin hole,” Blan lamented. />
  “Please, please, please, please, please help us, and let Blan talk to you, Control Processor!” Memwin had suddenly thrown herself against the Control Processor, arms outstretched as she slid down the side to the floor. Memwin, too, was feeling frustrated. The prospects were staggering and yet seemingly unreachable.

  Nothing happened; except that Memwin’s outburst gave Blan an idea. She climbed up to the gently vibrating surface of the device, sat down and placed both hands on the surface. She opened her mind as if to direct all her thoughts to the device. She pleaded for help and did not attempt to hide any thought that passed through her mind. She let her anxieties, intentions and plans all float freely.

  She sat there for several minutes before a strange thing happened. The tops of the four surrounding Processors suddenly lit up with the same intensity as the Control Processor and then, just as suddenly, all five went dark.

  It took Blan a while before her eyes adjusted to the new light, for light there was. She looked up to see from whence it came and was surprised to see the whole upper chamber above her as though the floor between them was made of glass, albeit grimy with soot, dust and old paint. She then realised that she should not be surprised. When the Processors had been glowing, she had seen their reflected light above. Otherwise, as now, she would see the upper chamber and, she guessed, she would see the outside world were it not hidden by the outer shell. The dirt that coated the floor of the upper chamber did not seem to block the view as much as might have been expected.

  Blan looked down across the floor of the lower chamber but could see only a very faint red glow. Memwin was standing akimbo, looking up wide eyed and open mouthed.

  “Request for assistance from Blancapaw, pregnant female human, aged seventeen Earth years. Limited access allowed.” There were two things in this message that shocked Blan. The first words were enough for her to recognise that the device had now chosen to communicate with her in her mother’s voice, indeed, the sympathetic voice her mother would use when she had been consoling the child Blan in a matter of some serious disappointment. Blan reckoned that she must carry her mother’s voice patterns in her brain and that the device had read them.