The Malay called, speaking aloud so that Hawk would know his sincerity: “Night god—Rimstalker—hear me, I am calling to you. Speak with me now as you spoke with me once.”
Nothing. The Malay had expected that. Why would the demons come at his beckoning? To fully satisfy Hawk, he drew breath to try again. Before he could speak, the air brightened behind them. They jumped about and faced a mass of lashing cilia far bigger than a man and jointed like an upright centipede, eyes two black lenses above scissoring mouthparts.
“Human—why do you wish to speak with me again?” Gai asked, genuinely curious about the wee mind that had called out for her. She had been drifting through Chalco, remorseful about the Tryl she had caused to suffer, when Genitrix alerted her to the Malay’s plea. She came at once in her plasma body, as much to allay her feelings about the Tryl as to sate her curiosity about the pathetic creatures selected to take their place.
The Malay fell to his knees and could not bring himself to stare at more than the Rimstalker’s writhing shadow on the sand. Hawk stepped forward. “Rimstalker, I am Ned O’Tennis, sky-fighter of N’ym, thrall to Emir Egil Grimson. It is I who had this man call you here. Speak with me.”
Gai could see at once that this one was different from the others asleep on the beach, though he was dressed in kelp as they were and just as filthy. But strapped to his chest under his arm Gai sensed a device as elegant as any the Tryl had crafted. She wished she had not left her Form so far away and that she could use it to analyze who was before her. “I will speak with you, Ned O’Tennis. What is the instrument I sense under your arm?”
Ned removed from his armpit an oblate disc no bigger than his thumbtip. “This is a translator. This and a tracer chip I’ve attached to it are all that I could recover when my strohlkraft crashed here.”
“Explain strohlkraft,” Gai asked, again wishing she could patch directly to Genitrix.
“It’s a flyer propelled by ramstat. You don’t know about them yet, because they don’t exist now. I had to crash my strohlkraft through a lynk to escape my enemies and certain death. The lynk carried me to there—” He pointed out to sea. “There’s a lynk underwater there. That’s where my strohlkraft came through.”
Gai recognized the site where she had blasted the first zōtl lynk. The lake filling the crater had since become this sea beneath which the Tryl ruins waited—their lynks still functional.
“I need your help, Rimstalker,” Ned O’Tennis continued. “I and these other humans are held prisoner here by a distort with mindreach, who abuses and kills us. Help me to recover my ship. It’s intact and sealed! I had to eject in the water, because its ramstat cells were depleted by the powerdrain in the lynk—but I sealed the command pod and by now the cells have recharged. If you would only help me to raise my ship, I will serve you with my life.”
Genitrix had been right, Gai realized, learning about Squat. These creatures preyed on each other. They were truly worthy of their role as bait for the zōtl. But this one seemed a curious case—a throwback from the future. “Tell me, Ned O’Tennis—from what time have you come?”
“I do not know how Rimstalkers gauge time. I am from the Fifth Age, twelve hundred and fifty-six years after the Foundation of Doror.”
“I do not know of this Foundation. But speak to me of the zōtl in the Fifth Age.”
“The zōtl are the guardians of the Storm Tree,” Ned answered. “They are the world’s suffering embodied.”
“Then they thrive in the time from which you come?”
“Yes, they thrive—or they were thriving until the rebels rose up. But the zōtl never ruled. All they want is their offerings, not dominion. Or so I thought.”
“And the rebels?”
“The rebels would stop the offerings. They struggle to topple the Storm Tree. It was in my battle against them that fate cast me here.”
“Then you fight for the zōtl?”
“No. I fight for the Storm Tree—for the culture from which I come. I fight for my people, not their alien overlords.”
“Do the zōtl rule Chalco-Doror in your time?”
“They are the strength of the Emir, who rules. But the rebels are far stronger than we had supposed. They routed us on Valdëmiraën, where I was posted—where I think we are now, only many years before my time. Will you help me to get back to my people?”
“You overestimate my powers, Ned O’Tennis. Tell me how you were routed by rebels if you had the strength of the zōtl behind you.”
“I’m not sure. Apparently, the rebels found some weapon that destroyed zōtl.”
The O’ode! Hope opened in Gai. She could never have dared for such an augury of success—and she calmed herself by remembering that time in outer space offered manifold possibilities. Though the future remained uncertain, she felt grateful for this pitiful creature’s encouragement. “I would talk with you more, Ned O’Tennis—but I sense that the distort you speak of is rousing. Return to your sleeping places. Tomorrow, your strohlkraft will rise.”
The Rimstalker’s fibrillating shape dissolved into powdery light and disappeared. The Malay looked up at the familiar wheel of stars and Hawk shining with withheld joy. “Silence now,” Hawk warned. “If you can hold your thoughts for one more day, I’ll take you out of here with me.”
They crept back through the dunes to their sleeping places and drove their minds hard to think only of the suffering and despair they knew with Squat.
When the puppet man blared the work siren, the Malay and Hawk rose first to slog down to the sea for that day’s work. The hope clutched deep in their hearts twisted smaller when they saw no sign of the strohlkraft in the tide’s offerings. The Malay stooped quickly to work, immediately wondering if the apparition of the night god had simply been a dream.
Ned scanned the beach and its slum of seaweed, lux tubing, and plasteel sheets from the sunken Tryl city. His life in this hell had been possible only because he imagined himself in a book, a fabulously frightening story such as the kind he had read as a child about trolls and frost giants. Each day’s tide turned a new page in the book—and on one of those pages his ship would rise, and the book would end. But now, after the soaring hope of the previous day, he understood that this story had no happy ending— that this day’s tide, like all the tides before, flipped just another page from the book of nothing. What a joke that imagination seemed now. It had kept his mind empty of anything Squat would have cared to notice, but that was all. And that was not enough if he had to live like this even another day.
“Small thing with the busy mind,” the shrill voice of Squat called to Ned. “Come to me.”
Ned turned and looked up at the albino hulk standing on the dune above him, under a whiplash of stars.
“What troubles you, small thing? Why are you not working for me?”
At that moment, behind Ned, the sea churned. Squat’s jaw jarred loose as, out of the foaming brine, a sleekly contoured hull arose, shiny as black glass and winged with aerodynamic foils and fins.
Ned spun about, and, recognizing his strohlkraft, dashed into the shallows.
“Stop!” Squat bawled. “Obey me!”
Ned’s muscles froze, and he collapsed face down in the lapping water.
“Rise and come to me,” Squat ordered, and Ned did as commanded, stopping at the base of the dune. “What is this?”
“I do not know.”
The fetal face snarled, and Ned’s viscera jumped like live eels in his rib-basket, cramping him with pain. A strangled scream wrenched from him, and he fell to his knees. “A strohlkraft!” he gasped. “It’s mine. I flew it here.”
“You are not from the bluffs?”
“No. No—I came from the sea. From a lynk there. From your future.”
“So.” Squat waved the puppet man toward the strohlkraft. The android waded into the water and touched the hull. Its metal clanked. At Squat’s beckoning, the puppet man circled the ship, looking for an entry. Near the nose, he found a recessed hatch-gri
p, which pulled open with a gasp of released air and a piercing shriek that burst to a siren wail.
The android staggered back and splashed onto its back in the water. The Malay, who had been standing nearby watching, looked with alarm to Hawk. Jerking toward the weird black shrine that had lifted from the sea, Hawk’s vivid face urged him to enter. Quickly, Hawk’s face said. Enter quickly! The Malay lunged for the opening and dove into the flight pod.
Ned clutched the translator under his arm, and his shout sounded in Malay, “Hit the red stones! Hit the red stones!”
Squat silenced Ned with a mental clamp on his larynx, and the pilot thrashed in the sand, gasping for air.
The Malay searched the flight pod for red stones. A bewildering array of switches and dials stared back at him from control consoles. Outside the open hatch, the puppet man had gotten to his feet and splashed toward him. The Malay looked everywhere, face twitching, hands trembling. His gaze fell on the red buttons atop the steering yoke. As the puppet man lumbered into the hatchway, the Malay struck the buttons with both fists.
The strohlkraft’s noseguns fired a short burst that seared above Ned and exploded the dune from under Squat. The albino giant collapsed with a mighty howl in a fume of jetting sand. Ned, momentarily free of the distort’s mind-grip, sprinted for the strohlkraft.
The puppet man had the Malay under one arm when Ned burst in. Swiftly, Ned snatched a pistol from the bulwark and fired point-blank at the android’s head. The laserbolt punched a hole between those ruby eyes, and the puppet man reeled backward and slumped to the floor, mewling machine noises. The Malay twisted free as Ned slammed the hatch.
“Get in there and hold on for your life,” Hawk ordered, pointing to a sling of white leather.
The Malay was still trying to make sense of the hanging straps when Ned fired up the engines, not daring to take the time to strap himself in. With a cry as if from the throat of a storm, the strohlkraft rose fully out of the water.
Squat had gotten to his feet and with upraised arms bellowed, “Stop! Stop at once! Obey me!”
Ned finished punching in a flight sequence as the distort’s mindreach paralyzed him. Immobilized, he and the Malay watched through the ship’s visor as Squat stalked angrily toward them, his tiny face a fist.
Then the strohlkraft completed its programmed sequence: It spun about one hundred and eighty degrees, and before the startled Squat could shape even one more vehement thought, the ship’s afterburners fired. In a jet of bluewhite flames, the distort shriveled.
The strohlkraft arced up and away. Cruising over the sea, Ned helped the Malay strap in and secure himself; then, he set the ship’s trajectory for the Tryl lynk under the sea. With a grateful smile and a wink to the bug-eyed Malay, he dove into the unknown.
THE ORACLES
Mind is the echo of a future.
Time’s harshest mercy is prophecy.
Time unwrinkles differently for each of us.
We are all born for trouble.
—adages from the Glyph Astra
Neter Col hung by invisible tethers in the void of the Overworld. Saor, who called himself The Face of Night, had suspended the scyldar there to watch for Ned O’Tennis. In the gray emptiness, the Overworld appeared as a globe turning in the black. The black embodied the outer dark of the vacuum out of which the universe had sprung. The globe was time, the life of the universe. Across the globe, a splattershape of chromatic geometries shifted slow as clouds. These showed the timelines of the universe. Like a hologram, each tiny piece of the prismatic shatter-pattern replicated the shape of the whole—tinier and tinier, down to the very worldlines of atoms. Close by gleamed the recent forms of Chalco-Doror embedded in the shimmer flux of probabilities, the actual worlds barely visible among spectral colors of past time in the Overworld. The future ranged always unseen beyond the globe’s horizon.
The scyldar dangled in a gray vacuole of deep space inside the splash of rainbowed forms. He had been situated there among the seething colors by Saor so that he could see Valdëmiraën, a sphere in a livid chartreuse aura of timeshadows. Ned O’Tennis’ escape from N’ym through a Tryl lynk beneath the Silver Sea appeared in the Overworld as a gold thread, a just-visible gossamer line that followed the fractal perimeter of Valdëmiraën’s aura and returned to where it had begun but deeper in the shimmering pattern, at a different time level. The Overworld journey had spun the Viking wanderer back to the planet’s past.
Neter Col made no effort to pursue. If he even looked too hard at the geometries of the globe, they shifted. Observations changed these timeshadows. To enter the scene below would irrevocably alter it, and he would lose sight of his prey, perhaps forever. The scyldar had no choice but to wait and watch until Ned entered a lynk again. Then, the Aesirai’s flight through the Overworld could be monitored once more. But the scyldar dared not interfere until Ned’s flight vanished over the globe’s horizon, into the future. Beyond the horizon and the influence of the scyldar’s observations, Ned’s destination would not shift relative to Neter Col, and the scyldar could estimate from his prey’s trajectory where the human would put down on the time globe. Then the scyldar could use Saor’s power to propel himself over the horizon and pounce on Ned O’Tennis.
The zōtl impacted in Neter Col’s body approved the scyldar’s strategy and infused the impaled brain with bliss molecules—harmine and glucose—to steepen the host’s patience. They waited. When the gold gossamer thread of Ned O’Tennis’ worldline reappeared, they watched obliquely, unmoving, as the sky-fighter crisscrossed among the worlds, touching down three times before journeying toward the future beyond the horizon.
Like a black jag of lightning, Neter Col shot across the Overworld, propelled by Saor’s power. The flight through hyperspace ended as abruptly as it had begun: The scyldar flew out of a lynk into a pink landscape of flowering fruit trees. He collapsed among leaf debris and red mushrooms and sat up at once, laserifle poised, scanning for threats. Small animals watched from around large white stones—a toppled temple, its fluted columns overgrown with bracken. A statue’s face, chipped and almost worn smooth by rain, gazed at him and beyond to the arc of the silver lynk where he had entered.
Cool air fragrant with pollen enclosed Neter Col. He rose and strolled among the temple ruins to an alcove curtained by dangling vines. From there, he could watch the lynk without being seen. Eventually, Ned O’Tennis would come through that lynk. When, the scyldar could not know. Knowing where was enough. Though he had seen his prey’s worldline cross the horizon of the Overworld toward this very place, he had not seen where in the timeshadows the glide ended. The trajectory alone assured the scyldar that Ned had not arrived at an earlier time. Eventually—eventually-—he would come through that lynk.
While the scyldar waited, the zōtl slept, and the wash of pleasure molecules it had injected into its captive’s brain left the schoolteacher there feeling beautiful and quiet for the first time since this horror had begun. His body seemed like a familiar painting. He knew all its contours and apparent depths, but there was nothing to touch. In sight were the broken stones of a temple whose deity he did not recognize. But he knew the pink-blossomed trees as cherry. He identified many of the small animals—a root mouse, two thumbling monkeys making a house in a tree bole, and wind eels, transparent and looking green as the shrubberies where they fluttered like leaves. Their familiarity chilled him in his frightful isolation.
We are all here together, he thought, and the sound of his mental voice pleased him. Pain had owned him for so long, he had almost forgotten the sound of his own thoughts. All here together—the zōtl and its hurting hunger, the scyldar’s flesh with its own knowing—and me.
The schoolteacher’s thoughts stirred the zōtl, and it sponged back the bliss chemicals it had released. The teacher’s awareness shriveled into darkness like a flame-touched moth. In a blink, the scyldar’s mind widened empty again, the better to wait for prophecy, for the future and its promise.
The
Body of Light
Know-Where-to-Go returned to Chalco-Doror for the second time. Joao stood on the observatory deck staring up at the sparklights that were the planets. From this distance, they appeared as no more than motes against the immensity of space, and he had a hard time imagining the suffering of those worlds. All his life, for twenty years now, he had lived here in Tryl Tower and the surrounding territory, on the site of an old clave, enjoying the comforts of the Tryl and hearing frightful stories of Chalco-Doror—stories about brain-pithing zōtl and monstrous, telepathic distorts.
Joao’s parents, their parents and grandparents and their great-grandparents, back into time more than a dozen generations, had stood here and stared out at the pain worlds. They had exhausted their lives learning Tryl secrets in preparation for the time when this planet would be thrust back into the midst of the others. More than a dozen generations of tutelage under the Tryl—and he was the one whom destiny had selected to actually carry that knowledge to those nightmarish worlds. In a few weeks, Know-Where-to-Go would enter Chalco-Doror. Then he would live the legends that his ancestors had only feared.
“Woolgathering again, Joao?”
Joao leaped about, hand clutched to his chest. 164-97, the last of the Tryl, stood before the observatory deck, hands folded in her sleeves, orange throat frills fluttering with amusement.
“Did you think I was perhaps a distort?” she chuckled. “We are not that close to the devil worlds. Yet your body is wise to be jumpy. Soon, indeed, you may be jumping for your life.”
“Good and perfect of you to remind me.” Joao came down the broad steps. At the bottom, he knelt and kissed the embroidered serpent on the Tryl’s sleeve. “My love and respect for you is what has kept me from martial training or perhaps I wouldn’t be so nervous.”
“You would be more nervous,” the old Tryl rasped, and urged Joao to his feet. “Warriors are nothing but nerves. You are wise to have listened to me and eschewed the killing ways of your brethren. Your family has always been devoted to knowledge and not warfare. I am glad that in this critical time you have not abandoned the gentle ways of your forebears.”
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