by Alex Sapegin
According to an unwritten ancient tradition, guests were allowed to bring their personal swords with them, but were forbidden to touch them. The simple solution was that a young Miur squire was attached to each guest, who kept the invitee’s sword on a special pillow. The guardian’s place was behind the weapon’s owner. It was a pity that Ania wasn’t around; she was sitting next to the princess and the Great Mother on a high pedestal directly behind the princess’ entourage. Ilirra was speaking about something with Asha, who periodically leaned towards the dragoness. Etiquette dictated that neither he nor the entourage was allowed to be near the crowned heads during official negotiations. Ania was seated on the pedestal as a translator and first advisor. As it turned out, she was completely fluent in the native language of the Miur. Ilirra insisted on her presence.
He managed once to exchange glances with the copper-haired sida and blow her a kiss when, accompanied by Illusht and Irissa, who bore his sword, he entered the hall. Who cared about etiquette? Illusht didn’t see anything; she didn’t have eyes in the back of her head. Irissa, whom he called Iris, snorted in her whiskers, but Ilirra did not like the air kisses. The dragoness’ face stiffened. She said something to the girl and looked at the shkas angrily. Ania guiltily lowered her head and stared at the floor. She didn’t look at Andy anymore. The pointy tips of the elf’s ears glowed crimson. The princess pointed at a spot on the floor on her left. Ania bowed and moved to the new spot, her back to her boyfriend. The retinue pretended he didn’t exist. The short rashag on his stomach did not impress them, which could not be said about Ilirra. She appreciated the knife and the color of the scabbard, but Ania stayed in her new spot.
While he was looking out for his sweetheart, the dancers with the bells flew off the dance stage. A holy place is never empty. Instead of the tailed girls fluttering over the floor, a new batch of cat people came out, clattering on the stone tiles with special metal claws on their toes. The light in the hall faded; the dance floor fell down five feet. Andy turned to Iris.
“Fire fever,” the sword bearer tossed at him, smiling, her eyes flashing with excitement. Andy smiled. The cat was mentally among the dancers.
“Hey!” The impact of metal claws on the floor caused sheaves of bright sparks. A minute later, his former skepticism was gone without a trace. It really was an extravaganza with a capital “E.” If it weren’t for the alien surroundings and the absence of any ties with the Earth for the cats, it could be assumed that they are dancing an Irish jig, performing complicated geometric steps to the fervent music, but also knocking out sparks from their feet and periodically shouting “hey.” The incredible movements of the dance were supplemented by the different colors of sparkling flame that burst from under the Miur’s feet.
The platform gradually rose upward. New characters appeared from the darkened aisles. Iris squeaked enthusiastically.
“What?”
“Spellcasters of the elements! The sword dance!” The ecstatic brilliance of the Miur’s eyes was replaced by a fanatical fire.
An unpleasant premonition tugged painfully at his heart….
* * *
“Are there supposed to be elementals now?” Ashlat asked her sister.
“Yes,” answered Illusht.
“I know, but look, half of the dancers are from the Temple dwellers. There they go doing their own thing again.”
“It is not good. Tell the guard and warn mother. I will go to the guard, then move closer to the dragons.”
“To the dragons or to the dragon?”
A new action unfolded on the stage. The dark stone of the floor grew scalding hot….
What the sword-wielding Miur did on stage was indescribable. The only accompaniment to the dance was the enthusiastic screams of spectators and the clinking of colliding deadly steel.
The intricate swordplay between groups of dancers caused various elements to come to life. During the first theatrical duel, two huge Miur with red belts called upon the element of fire. The stone of the stage was heated; it glowed with unbearable heat, but the artists did not notice the elements, continuing to tread on the floor with bare heels. Then there was air. The swords’ sweeping caused small whirlwinds. Sharp gusts of wind knocked over tall crystal glasses and waved the spectators’ clothes. Earth and water followed air.
Then the cat people lined up around and led a bristling steel dance. It seemed impossible to survive among the blades, but none of the dancers was even wounded.
The dragons did not hold back their feelings and hooted at the top of their voices. Andy tried not to succumb to the general frenzy but more and more often caught himself thinking that he wanted to be there, on stage, with a sword in his hand, so fascinated he was by the skill of the spellcasters.
Suddenly, one of the fire spellcasters left the dueling and stopped right in front of him. The tips of her twin swords rested against his throat. Iris said something inarticulate. Andy felt the handle of his blade slip into his hand.
“Take your sword, you are being summoned into the dance!” the squire ardently whispered. He drew the elven blade from its scabbard and followed the topless giant.
The fatal circle dance drew him into its depth. In the center of the circle, a sea of strength splashed. Andy was seized by real euphoria. He was intoxicated by the energies poured into him by the Miur. He did a strange dance, attacked, retreated, and again attacked. But he was sure of one thing: the steel in his hand would not hurt, hit, or wound anyone today, just as the swords of the others could not harm him. If they did, it would be the greatest blasphemy. The dancers wielded the elements; he was the element!
The Miur increased the tempo. Ha, he could go faster! The cat people turned to their own familiar tribal elements. What, they don’t sense that I absorb them all, Fire, Earth, Water, and Air? I live in and through them. I am the fire! Lightness filled his body; it was flying away, a full retreat! It was a circle dance of steel, a dance of Death, a dance of Life, a dance dedicated to Manyfaces and the Twins. In the wave of excitement, Andy did not understand how he slid into the astral. From the floor rose fifteen-foot high flames and covered him head to toe. The world exploded with a kaleidoscope of colors. With his entrance to the astral, there was a sense of integrity which he had not experienced for nearly two months, and then a sense of danger cut through his nerves. He did not take off his shields. Constant control kept the body from an uncontrolled change in hypostasis, but energy poured into the world.
At some point, the insanity stopped; the huge flames fell, and he locked eyes with the Eldest priestess sitting at the very end of the hall. Triumph fluttered in the old cat woman’s eyes. She had achieved her goal. The dance was a trap! No. By an effort of will, Andy was able to shield himself from the ocean of energy, but at that moment, he had to remove some of the shields; it was impossible to control all the many parameters at once. The celebration in the priestess’ gaze was replaced by anger and confusion. A dull pain cut his left shoulder….
Guards with full-length shields filled the hall. They fell upon Andy. He lost consciousness….
Nelita. Celestial Empire. The Celestial palace...
“She is here.” Hazgar grabbed his left shoulder. “The foul creature….”
“Who is, father?”
But the dragon paid no heed to the question. He rubbed his left shoulder and looked at his son pensively.
“You did not feel anything?”
“A slight prick in my left shoulder.”
“Pup, how can you call yourself my son if you cannot put two and two together? That slight prick means that she is here, alive and unharmed!”
“Who are you talking about, father?”
“Your cousin, Jagirra.” Hazgar was thinking about something. His son did not want to interrupt his train of thought. “I know where she is. Go, get ready to take the troops. She will not escape from me again.”
Part three.
THREE WARS.
Russia. N-ville.
“Mehdi, wake up!” shouted Chuiko. “Carefully now. Apply the load with short impulses; otherwise, we might get kicked out again. God forbid that the load be dumped.”
“You’re preachin’ to the choir,” the Indian replied without an accent, bit a pencil between her teeth, and lightly touched the joystick. “Vitya, smoothly raise the pressure on the exterior. Countdown!”
“Ten, nine, eight... one, we have a visual! Oh, great. The orcs raised the dead into zombies again! Those freaks,” the voice of the invisible Vitya sounded in the earpiece.
The camera captured the burning city suburbs, besieged by the huge army of green orcs. Thousands and thousands of living dead raised by the orc mages and shamans stepped awkwardly, resembling a destructive mudslide. They moved through the ruins of houses towards the city walls. An endless column of undead marched along a pontoon bridge across a wide river. On their backs, the zombies carried bags and baskets of sand and ladders. The last rows of ghouls were hugging sealed pots and gleaming light-colored cobblestones. The wave of living dead didn’t seem to notice the fire directed at it from the city walls. No fireballs, arrows, moats, or explosions of magical mines, nor dozens of other gadgets and spells tearing the bodies into pieces, turning them into black fried pieces of flesh, could not stop the dead army. The earth was covered with greasy ash and lined with a foul carpet of rotting flesh left from past unsuccessful assaults. The pits and moats that appeared before the dead could not stop the offensive onslaught. The bodies fell down and filled the moats; the next wave treaded on them, continuing with unrelenting force approaching the brick walls. The bodies of the corpses torn to pieces twitched and convulsed for a long time; only those who lost their heads fell dead. Carts with the shamans on them moved behind the army of zombies. The green-faced and gray-skinned orcs from the besieging camp could afford not to be stingy when it came to zombies. They brought tens of thousands of captured humans and their gray-skinned tribesmen with them.
Many scientists couldn’t sleep for several days afterwards, having witnessed the bloody ritual of turning the living into the undead. The most terrible thing was, the orcs were helped by human mages….
Defenders of the city stood on the walls, tired and exhausted by the continuous assault. The city was also subject to massive magical bombardment. But the shields the mages constructed still held up against the fiery ramparts, blurring with bright flashes of beautiful but deadly fireworks. Teams of weapons bearers dexterously manned magical machines. In addition to them, numerous lifting mechanisms were assembling devices resembling satellite dishes that shot something like lasers. The city’s combat mages conjured upwind and dispersed the smoke. The released hundreds of griffons and ride-on winged lizards into the sky, reminiscent of dragons. The bombing of the besiegers’ camp began. In response, a magical “zenith” cover was activated. Over the camp, luminous domes popped up all around. Fire flashed in the sky as the power traps went off, turning the griffons and their riders into bloody stuffing.
* * *
Leaning back against the wall, Iliya looked at the Indian scientist and pondered. Someone once told him that the intellectual center of America is located in Delhi. After working with the Indian for two months, Kerimov was ready to agree with this statement. If there were more than a dozen people in India like her, the other countries would soon be helpless to do anything but look sadly at the red lights of the locomotive of Indian science heading off into the future.
Mehdi Shrestha got into the closed scientific center thanks to the patronage of Iliya’s old acquaintance and school friend, the linguist.
Kopilov, who followed the advice of the “authorities” and gave his consent to cooperation, received a spacious office on the negative-seventh level of the underground complex and a dozen subordinates, simply could not come up with a result that would satisfy the scientists and the military. Faced with the difficulties of mastering a foreign language with no dictionaries or primary sources, he remembered a young woman he met a couple of years ago at a symposium in Rome. According to Kopilov, if anyone could find the key to the language of the inhabitants of the other world without any computer programs, it would be this linguist-polyglot. Command, which was against attracting foreign experts to secret research, scratched their heads and decided to take a chance. So, Kopilov and a couple of his young “referents” went on a business trip to the southern countries.
Mehdi agreed to work under the guidance of her Russian colleague. Perhaps, it was because he showed her photos of ancient books with an unknown writing system, “found,” so they said, by Kopilov’s colleagues in the remote taiga of snow-covered Siberia. Or perhaps, it was a handsome secretary, who enchanted the Indian with his sky-blue eyes, child-like smile, and charming dimples. The fact that the inhabitant of the Hindustan Peninsula put a lot of effort into getting Valentin’s attention said a lot in favor of the second version. The psychologists participating in the operation who compiled the new member’s psychological portrait were rubbing their hands in satisfaction: Valentin did not disappoint.
So, a foreign visitor came to Russia when spring streams were running through the streets of the snow-covered state. And a woman no less, who agreed to work in a mostly male environment in the very patriarchal country. The thirty-year-old Indian, who spoke seven languages, including Russian, beautifully, was very surprised by the rapid flight from Moscow to the Siberia. It seemed to her that the distances in the northern state were much greater. Imagine her surprise when Kopilov, who had invited the guest to a bite, in a very private conversation accompanying a light breakfast, introduced her to the director of the closed scientific institution.
Iliya liked Mehdi at first sight. There was something about the young woman that made him believe what Kopilov said about her. Medium height, pudgy, with long, blue-black hair hanging in a braid down her back, the Hindu’s black eyes had a piercing gaze in which one could easily read a powerful intellect. She dressed in saris and shalwar suits while the weather permitted. She instantly linked the name Kerimov with the publications that were appearing in the press and the incessant conversations about the Russians opening a passage into a parallel world. Developing a cover operation, the state “office,” under whose patronage Iliya now had to work, had made him a public figure.
The Russian “guarantor’s” negotiations with the premier ministers of India, China, and Japan were successful. The foreign rulers were impressed by what they saw, and all expressed a desire to start a construction by Russian engineers of portals on their territory as soon as possible. Funding would not be a problem.
Mehdi immediately understood that there were several worlds, not just one, as they wrote in the foreign press and as the culprits themselves claimed. If Russian colleagues had invited her by such roundabout paths, that meant there was a lot of work to be done, and it was not intended for just anyone’s eyes and ears. She also realized that anyone who agreed to such a tempting offer should understand that there would be no way back. Since they didn’t ask her permission, but rather simply chocked it up to the fact, she understood she had little choice. The real bosses of the group headed by Kerimov were pragmatic people and wouldn’t take no for an answer. If there was a need for her humble person, okay then…. To put it plainly, anyone who refused the tempting offer after learning what it was all about would return home feet-first, and she felt a strong desire to live. Summarizing all of the above, she agreed, but with one small condition. The “condition,” sipping coffee at a neighboring table, was not against working as an assistant to a foreign scientist, all the more so since the authorities wanted it that way. Fast forward a little: a month and a half later, the third group, the one developing the foreign “virgin territory,” celebrated a merry wedding, which was not at all messed up by the restrictions in the form of the complex walls and secrecy.
It should be said that Shrestha turned out to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. The collective of philologists and linguists she led did th
e impossible. The scientists worked day and night. Mountains of materials and videotapes were analyzed. Four weeks later, a translator program was presented to the scientific council. They proposed attempting to decipher the speech and writing of the main language of Ilanta, called Alat.
Once she completed the main work on the magical world, the Hindu immediately re-directed the team to work with the block of high-tech worlds, but Ilanta remained her main love after Valentin, who, by the way, proved to be an excellent technical expert on power plants. Mehdi never acquired a love of the worlds with advanced technology. She was given strictly metered information and was allowed to preside during the opening of the “windows” in rare cases only, unlike when they were opened onto Ilanta. Mehdi understood that the Russians, while remaining behind an invisible border, were brazenly stealing other people’s achievements. She had free access to television, and it seemed strange to her that a pair of news channels flashed a message about the imminent start of construction in the Nizhny Novgorod, Ivanovo, and Amur regions of factories focused on the production of high-tech household appliances and computer components. The Russians had never bothered with that nonsense, and all of a sudden they were popping up everywhere. The deadline for the completion and launch of the factories was just eighteen months from now. It was clear as day that they’d gotten their hands on other-worldly technology, which was allowing them to become leaders in many fields. They had successfully extorted money from Japan and China for their backlog and were preparing to connect the milking machine to the “Indian sacred cow.” All her conclusions were based on information lying on the surface, but how many gigabytes and terabytes were hidden on the bottom of the sea?