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ERLOS (Book Two: The Three)
- Thread starter RJM
- Start date
ERLOS
Chapter Eight
Book Two: The Three
From the Diary of Hamish El Tyrone:
The eye of the needle: expansion and contraction.
I have the memory of long, indigo evenings, of the warm wind that carries with it smells of spices, of mountain herbs, and of the endless southern ocean. I long fiercely for the Aazyr that is in my blood and bones and in my eyes. I long for the sun. I long to have my skin burned brown by the hot Aazyrian sun. I long to wear again loose desert robes and sandals and to free myself of all these furs and raincoats. I long for dry earth and blue sky and for the clear aquamarine sea, and for the rocks of the cliffs against which the waves pound with a force to shake the land, after their twenty thousand mile journey across the open ocean between the southern continents.
I long for the raucous clamour in the dusty streets and markets of Llozd, the jostling and shouting of the ordinary crowds, smiling with missing teeth – always poor, always cheerful, always bargaining – and I long to see again the crystals of beryl and garnet, and topaz and amethyst and corundum, their colours dusty in the sunshine on my windowsill.
The very dust of Aazyr on my old sandals, today to me is holy, here upon this northern island of cold sleet rain. It is late afternoon and already nearly dark. I no longer hold a governor’s position, with all the perks attendant only to a sharp operator, although I was never one of them. I am an honest man.. Now I am no-one, an old man living out his days remembering the sun.
There is a bridge, and one of life's main tasks is to find that bridge, or else to build it. I have blank pages and a pen. This story is my bridge. Nothing else I do has any meaning but these words. Outside the cold wind booms and bangs against the doors and windows of my little house here by the sea.
+++++++++++++
'I must be clear minded,' Eldrinda was thinking. He was sitting alone at the table. Sorac was asleep by the fire. It was long after midnight: 'It is life, and the price of life. Somehow I have to find the strength to do this.'
He thought of Tyl’s mother, of her last words to him: ‘What I give, or you give, is given freely. Love isn’t going to run out of time. But cling to it, and it is gone.’
He struggled inwardly against opposing forces that threatened to pull him apart. Again and again, huge mysterious magnificent, like shadows cast upon a curtain by the mighty, whirling cosmos, images tumbled through Eldrinda's mind. His thoughts and feelings expanded to contain all space and all time, and for a while he knew its laws.
His tired eyes moved to the window where the night sky was a lake of stars. The night was quiet. Beyond the horizon of the water he saw the moving star. At last the time had come.
He first woke Tyl, then Sorac. “It’s time,” he said.
They joined him, standing at the window, as a bright light suffused the room. Eldrinda's face had a look of almost saintly calm. He went to the door and opened it and the bright light streamed into the house.
All the villagers had left their beds and were gathering outside. The light shone on their upturned faces. It shone upon the faces of men and women, young and old, and on the faces of children with wondering eyes.
Now the source of the light revealed itself as an Erlotian atmosphere craft. The bright white light came from underneath the saucer-shaped craft as it descended silently and quickly to hover a few feet off the ground. The light dimmed to a bluish glow. The craft was painted blue and gold, marked with the rising firebird crest of Astra City. Its rapidly spinning rim slowed down until it was hardly turning at all.
The villagers stood motionless and silent, their faces lit by the glow. A door slid silently open in the upper section of the craft, and a ramp slid out, extending downward until it reached the ground. Nothing happened for a while then Sumadji appeared in the doorway of the surface lander, framed by a bright light from inside.
Sumadji took off his helmet then his gloves. He stuffed the gloves into the helmet then walked down the ramp, grinning broadly, the helmet swinging casually from its strap in his left hand; his right hand extended to greet his friend.
Eldrinda, unsmiling, took Sumadji's hand. “You’ve hardly changed,” he said.
“Well – you have,” his friend responded.
He moved in, throwing his free arm around Eldrinda’s neck and hugging him to his chest. Eldrinda, embarrassed by the physical attention, patted Sumadji’s arm a couple of times, before pushing him away.
His heart was breaking. He took Tyl’s arm and introduced her to Sumadji.
“You’re even more beautiful than your father described you,” Sumadji said.
“And you’re every bit the handsome charmer that he described,” she replied.
Eldrinda turned to where Sorac was hanging back with the villagers. He went to him and laid a hand on his shoulder: “Be strong, my friend.”
He beckoned Sumadji over and introduced him to the shepherd.
“Erlos honours your quest, brave friend,” Sumadji said.
Sorac didn’t know how to react, so he just nodded.
Tyl. was crying. Eldrinda went to her and put an arm around her shoulders. Her flesh was warm, alive. She tightened her arms around her father and clung to him fiercely, weeping with her face buried in his shoulder.
“Tyl …” he said.
She lifted her face and her green eyes were hot with tears.
“Come back to me …” she said. “You must come back.”
“My darling, I will.” He kissed her forehead. “You too are blood of Erlos, Tyl. You know this must be done.”
It took all his strength to turn away from her. He walked up the ramp. He paused for a moment, fighting back tears. At the top of the ramp he seemed to hesitate for a moment in the light from the door but then, without looking back, he entered the craft.
Sumadji followed him, turning once in the lighted doorway to look back down at Tyl, and then the door closed and the ramp retracted.
Nothing happened for a while and then the rim began to spin, generating vortexia. The circle of villagers backed away from the craft. The light beneath grew brighter. Faster and faster span the rim and the light got brighter until the atmosphere craft began to rise, slowly at first, quickly accelerating, while the light shone down upon their upturned faces, until it was only starlight.
He was gone.
++++++++++++++
Tyl and Sorac walked back to the house. Tyl went into the kitchen to make tea while Sorac stood on the verandah with his hands on the wooden railing. Stars glimmered faintly beyond the grey mountains. He breathed deeply of the clear air of morning. Tyl came out of the house with tea. She stood beside him. She took a deep breath. They did not speak. He turned to face her. She looked at him with a steady expression. Her mouth opened slightly as if to speak. He reached for her and she came into his arms.
"I know you must leave soon," she said.
“Ah, Tyl.”
“I'm coming with you,” she said
They looked into each other's eyes. The smell of her clung to his shirt. “I will not stay,” she said.
He said: “Your father would not wish it.”
“How do you know what he would wish?”
He reached for his tobacco pouch and filled his pipe. He looked past her body at the far mountains, whose peaks would outlast man. A west wind blew her hair across her face. She brushed it away with her hand.
“Today?” she said.
“Yes.”
“Let me make make breakfast,” she said.
He followed her into the house. Embers still glowed on the hearth from Eldrinda’s night vigil. Sorac found his saddlebag and drew out his reed flute from a side pocket. He went back out onto the porch and sat down on the steps and played quietly.
Tyl came out again. She sat beside him. Her leg was warm against his. She took the flute away, and they kissed. She took his hand and led him into the house. She led him to the bed.
Later as they lay wrapped together, he sniffed: “Something’s burning.”
“Oh,” she cried. “The bread!”
She sprang out of bed. The first rays of the rising sun shone in her hair and framed her breasts with golden light. “You're so beautiful,” he said.
She wrinkled her nose at him and went to save breakfast. He knew that in their physical union they had forged a bond that would be hard to break but he felt relaxed and tired and did not wish to think deeply about it. He closed his eyes. She called him to the table.
“It’s only a little burned,” she said.
After breakfast she took the plates back to the kitchen, and then they went back into the bedroom, and they made love again and then fell asleep.
He woke in the late afternoon. Tyl was still asleep. He rose and dressed. He went through to the main room to pack. When he turned he found her standing in the doorway.
“I must go, Tyl”
“But stay tonight.”
+++++++++++++++
The fire burned low then flickered out. The moon rose -- a half circle in the dark sky casting silver shadows on the bed where they lay. Tyl was awake. The wind gusted outside the wooden house. She moved, finding a comfortable position against him.
Looking through the window she watched the clouds as they sailed like galleons across the sky past the half moon. She lay curled against him and wriggled her toes, watching the shadow play of moonlight outside. Trees creaked. She dozed off into a dream:
The man stood naked, hard and brown, looking up at the mountain: at the deep wooded ravines and steep granite faces. His hands were calloused, hard and strong, his bare feet soled, as if by leather, against the rocks and thorns. Rainwater through the aeons had carved the rock, each droplet carrying a little of the mountain to the sea.
Standing under open sky he felt the wind warm on his cheek, the earth warm beneath his feet. The woman moaned. An animal sound. She heard her own sounds, but she was not aware that she was the one making them.
And then they heard a new voice, a new crying.
She took the child to her breast. Soft gums plucked gently at her nipple. She felt her own warm milk begin to flow. The man came and took the child from her -- he raised their child in offering to the hard red sun. The woman cried out. The man laid the infant back upon her belly, laughing as she took the child back to her nipple.
Sorac woke her when the stars were beginning to fade above the dark and windy trees: “I must go now,” he said.
“I’m coming with you.”
“Get dressed then. Pack little -- just hard food and necessary clothing,” he said.
She packed quietly without speaking. She closed the door of her room behind her without making the bed.
Sorac stood on the dark verandah, smoking.
With her bag over her shoulder, Tyl blew out the lamp and went out to join him on the verandah. She reached for his hand.
As they walked up through the trees to the stables they passed Toache, early at work on his boats. The dumb giant stopped work when he saw them, dusting his hands on his knees, and greeted Tyl in his sign language.
“Goodbye Toache,” she said.
The boat maker replied with rapid gestures, which Tyl translated for Sorac’s benefit: “He says that if I’m going, he’s coming too. He says my father would wish it. He says that he is strong and that he knows the way.”
“And what do you think?” Sorac asked her.
“What he says is true,” she replied. “And he would just follow us anyway.”
(end of chapter eight)
Chapter Eight
Book Two: The Three
From the Diary of Hamish El Tyrone:
The eye of the needle: expansion and contraction.
I have the memory of long, indigo evenings, of the warm wind that carries with it smells of spices, of mountain herbs, and of the endless southern ocean. I long fiercely for the Aazyr that is in my blood and bones and in my eyes. I long for the sun. I long to have my skin burned brown by the hot Aazyrian sun. I long to wear again loose desert robes and sandals and to free myself of all these furs and raincoats. I long for dry earth and blue sky and for the clear aquamarine sea, and for the rocks of the cliffs against which the waves pound with a force to shake the land, after their twenty thousand mile journey across the open ocean between the southern continents.
I long for the raucous clamour in the dusty streets and markets of Llozd, the jostling and shouting of the ordinary crowds, smiling with missing teeth – always poor, always cheerful, always bargaining – and I long to see again the crystals of beryl and garnet, and topaz and amethyst and corundum, their colours dusty in the sunshine on my windowsill.
The very dust of Aazyr on my old sandals, today to me is holy, here upon this northern island of cold sleet rain. It is late afternoon and already nearly dark. I no longer hold a governor’s position, with all the perks attendant only to a sharp operator, although I was never one of them. I am an honest man.. Now I am no-one, an old man living out his days remembering the sun.
There is a bridge, and one of life's main tasks is to find that bridge, or else to build it. I have blank pages and a pen. This story is my bridge. Nothing else I do has any meaning but these words. Outside the cold wind booms and bangs against the doors and windows of my little house here by the sea.
+++++++++++++
'I must be clear minded,' Eldrinda was thinking. He was sitting alone at the table. Sorac was asleep by the fire. It was long after midnight: 'It is life, and the price of life. Somehow I have to find the strength to do this.'
He thought of Tyl’s mother, of her last words to him: ‘What I give, or you give, is given freely. Love isn’t going to run out of time. But cling to it, and it is gone.’
He struggled inwardly against opposing forces that threatened to pull him apart. Again and again, huge mysterious magnificent, like shadows cast upon a curtain by the mighty, whirling cosmos, images tumbled through Eldrinda's mind. His thoughts and feelings expanded to contain all space and all time, and for a while he knew its laws.
His tired eyes moved to the window where the night sky was a lake of stars. The night was quiet. Beyond the horizon of the water he saw the moving star. At last the time had come.
He first woke Tyl, then Sorac. “It’s time,” he said.
They joined him, standing at the window, as a bright light suffused the room. Eldrinda's face had a look of almost saintly calm. He went to the door and opened it and the bright light streamed into the house.
All the villagers had left their beds and were gathering outside. The light shone on their upturned faces. It shone upon the faces of men and women, young and old, and on the faces of children with wondering eyes.
Now the source of the light revealed itself as an Erlotian atmosphere craft. The bright white light came from underneath the saucer-shaped craft as it descended silently and quickly to hover a few feet off the ground. The light dimmed to a bluish glow. The craft was painted blue and gold, marked with the rising firebird crest of Astra City. Its rapidly spinning rim slowed down until it was hardly turning at all.
The villagers stood motionless and silent, their faces lit by the glow. A door slid silently open in the upper section of the craft, and a ramp slid out, extending downward until it reached the ground. Nothing happened for a while then Sumadji appeared in the doorway of the surface lander, framed by a bright light from inside.
Sumadji took off his helmet then his gloves. He stuffed the gloves into the helmet then walked down the ramp, grinning broadly, the helmet swinging casually from its strap in his left hand; his right hand extended to greet his friend.
Eldrinda, unsmiling, took Sumadji's hand. “You’ve hardly changed,” he said.
“Well – you have,” his friend responded.
He moved in, throwing his free arm around Eldrinda’s neck and hugging him to his chest. Eldrinda, embarrassed by the physical attention, patted Sumadji’s arm a couple of times, before pushing him away.
His heart was breaking. He took Tyl’s arm and introduced her to Sumadji.
“You’re even more beautiful than your father described you,” Sumadji said.
“And you’re every bit the handsome charmer that he described,” she replied.
Eldrinda turned to where Sorac was hanging back with the villagers. He went to him and laid a hand on his shoulder: “Be strong, my friend.”
He beckoned Sumadji over and introduced him to the shepherd.
“Erlos honours your quest, brave friend,” Sumadji said.
Sorac didn’t know how to react, so he just nodded.
Tyl. was crying. Eldrinda went to her and put an arm around her shoulders. Her flesh was warm, alive. She tightened her arms around her father and clung to him fiercely, weeping with her face buried in his shoulder.
“Tyl …” he said.
She lifted her face and her green eyes were hot with tears.
“Come back to me …” she said. “You must come back.”
“My darling, I will.” He kissed her forehead. “You too are blood of Erlos, Tyl. You know this must be done.”
It took all his strength to turn away from her. He walked up the ramp. He paused for a moment, fighting back tears. At the top of the ramp he seemed to hesitate for a moment in the light from the door but then, without looking back, he entered the craft.
Sumadji followed him, turning once in the lighted doorway to look back down at Tyl, and then the door closed and the ramp retracted.
Nothing happened for a while and then the rim began to spin, generating vortexia. The circle of villagers backed away from the craft. The light beneath grew brighter. Faster and faster span the rim and the light got brighter until the atmosphere craft began to rise, slowly at first, quickly accelerating, while the light shone down upon their upturned faces, until it was only starlight.
He was gone.
++++++++++++++
Tyl and Sorac walked back to the house. Tyl went into the kitchen to make tea while Sorac stood on the verandah with his hands on the wooden railing. Stars glimmered faintly beyond the grey mountains. He breathed deeply of the clear air of morning. Tyl came out of the house with tea. She stood beside him. She took a deep breath. They did not speak. He turned to face her. She looked at him with a steady expression. Her mouth opened slightly as if to speak. He reached for her and she came into his arms.
"I know you must leave soon," she said.
“Ah, Tyl.”
“I'm coming with you,” she said
They looked into each other's eyes. The smell of her clung to his shirt. “I will not stay,” she said.
He said: “Your father would not wish it.”
“How do you know what he would wish?”
He reached for his tobacco pouch and filled his pipe. He looked past her body at the far mountains, whose peaks would outlast man. A west wind blew her hair across her face. She brushed it away with her hand.
“Today?” she said.
“Yes.”
“Let me make make breakfast,” she said.
He followed her into the house. Embers still glowed on the hearth from Eldrinda’s night vigil. Sorac found his saddlebag and drew out his reed flute from a side pocket. He went back out onto the porch and sat down on the steps and played quietly.
Tyl came out again. She sat beside him. Her leg was warm against his. She took the flute away, and they kissed. She took his hand and led him into the house. She led him to the bed.
Later as they lay wrapped together, he sniffed: “Something’s burning.”
“Oh,” she cried. “The bread!”
She sprang out of bed. The first rays of the rising sun shone in her hair and framed her breasts with golden light. “You're so beautiful,” he said.
She wrinkled her nose at him and went to save breakfast. He knew that in their physical union they had forged a bond that would be hard to break but he felt relaxed and tired and did not wish to think deeply about it. He closed his eyes. She called him to the table.
“It’s only a little burned,” she said.
After breakfast she took the plates back to the kitchen, and then they went back into the bedroom, and they made love again and then fell asleep.
He woke in the late afternoon. Tyl was still asleep. He rose and dressed. He went through to the main room to pack. When he turned he found her standing in the doorway.
“I must go, Tyl”
“But stay tonight.”
+++++++++++++++
The fire burned low then flickered out. The moon rose -- a half circle in the dark sky casting silver shadows on the bed where they lay. Tyl was awake. The wind gusted outside the wooden house. She moved, finding a comfortable position against him.
Looking through the window she watched the clouds as they sailed like galleons across the sky past the half moon. She lay curled against him and wriggled her toes, watching the shadow play of moonlight outside. Trees creaked. She dozed off into a dream:
The man stood naked, hard and brown, looking up at the mountain: at the deep wooded ravines and steep granite faces. His hands were calloused, hard and strong, his bare feet soled, as if by leather, against the rocks and thorns. Rainwater through the aeons had carved the rock, each droplet carrying a little of the mountain to the sea.
Standing under open sky he felt the wind warm on his cheek, the earth warm beneath his feet. The woman moaned. An animal sound. She heard her own sounds, but she was not aware that she was the one making them.
And then they heard a new voice, a new crying.
She took the child to her breast. Soft gums plucked gently at her nipple. She felt her own warm milk begin to flow. The man came and took the child from her -- he raised their child in offering to the hard red sun. The woman cried out. The man laid the infant back upon her belly, laughing as she took the child back to her nipple.
Sorac woke her when the stars were beginning to fade above the dark and windy trees: “I must go now,” he said.
“I’m coming with you.”
“Get dressed then. Pack little -- just hard food and necessary clothing,” he said.
She packed quietly without speaking. She closed the door of her room behind her without making the bed.
Sorac stood on the dark verandah, smoking.
With her bag over her shoulder, Tyl blew out the lamp and went out to join him on the verandah. She reached for his hand.
As they walked up through the trees to the stables they passed Toache, early at work on his boats. The dumb giant stopped work when he saw them, dusting his hands on his knees, and greeted Tyl in his sign language.
“Goodbye Toache,” she said.
The boat maker replied with rapid gestures, which Tyl translated for Sorac’s benefit: “He says that if I’m going, he’s coming too. He says my father would wish it. He says that he is strong and that he knows the way.”
“And what do you think?” Sorac asked her.
“What he says is true,” she replied. “And he would just follow us anyway.”
(end of chapter eight)
Last edited:
Erlos
Chapter Nine
Kierien was ruminating on death and change while above him Aelutia was visible through Centura City's vast transparent skydome, slowly turning against the hard black backdrop of space – the continent of Oceana half visible in purple darkness, below ridges of indigo clouds. Kierien's old features were shadowed in silhouette as he waited for the airseal that would take him to a meeting of Erlos' Council that was to be held on Spectra City.
The twenty-five years that had passed since Eldrinda Benkilte had contracted the ceisorundra virus and had to step down as Hrothl in favour of his sister Auldrius was not a very long time in terms of a war that had already lasted more than 600 years. Erlos' Council of Seven were still mired in debate about whether or not to risk the proposed attack upon the planet Bueloess.
Centura City’s construction, like that of all the other cities, made use of the energy of vortexia, subtle but powerful. All Erlotians, but especially the inhabitants of Centura City, had developed higher senses beyond the five physical senses.
As primitive man once learned to master fire, Erlos was learning to manage the energy of vortexia to concretize certain material substances from the subtle flow of 'thought' energy. This ability was constantly improving as Erlotians continued to refine their ability to harmonize their own mental energies with others.
Centura City’s colours were amethyst and its crest was a bride with a lit lamp in her hand. Centura''s population of only 8 880 000 was tiny even in comparison to the other six Erlotian cities, yet Centura carried a powerful eight votes on Erlos' Council balance of 60, just two votes less than the 10 votes carried by the far more populous B'rahma and B'retza Cities.
The airseal arrived to take him to the meeting and Kierien ducked into the airlock then strapped himself into the seat of the silver pod and went through the flight checks. Airseals were used to travel through space between the Erlotian cities because the particle transceivers used to move around within the individual cities were not capable of long range transmission between cities.
After a short flight through space he docked at Spectra City.
The seven Erlotian Cities were active amongst the planets within the solar vortex of Sanfit, the Erlotian sun, but they had never yet attempted to travel the huge distance between stars. 'Innerspace' travel would involve accelerating to a-third the speed of light and then, using a concentrated impulse of millions of Erlotian minds to activate the lithos on which the cities were built – to propel them beyond the speed of light, beyond space and time, onto unknown vortexian roadways where time and space would no longer exist for them.
Expansion of Bueloess had hinged on outer space travel over millions of years at below the speed of light, though still at very high velocities. Bueloess, over millennia, had been able to colonize large tracts of fourth dimensional space, but it was still crude stuff compared to the Erlotian concept of fifth dimensional innerspace travel.
The issue on which the whole exercise would pivot, was the ability of thousands of millions of Erlotian minds to work together, in perfect attunement, to achieve the very precise mental wavelength and frequency required to activate the lithos. The powerfully attuned mental energy would then have to be directed through the triangle of power generated by three Cities acting as a lens to create an enormously powerful pulse of pure thought energy – of pure will – lasting just a tiny fraction of a microsecond.
This would activate the lithos at the exact moment of crossing. But the lithos hulls upon which the cities were built would have to be moving at around a-third of the speed of light before the ‘thought laser’ could have any effect. This was the dangerous part of the whole exercise because, at the very high speeds involved, the slightest harmonic disturbance could result in disaster, scattering the cities and their occupants as atomic dust over a very wide area of space.
So the question was always whether Erlotians had the ability to work together as a single entity of pure will.
Now, as Kierien docked, the decision as to whether or not they could, was becoming more urgent. Huge dangers faced Erlos, with the increasing establishment of a Buelotian presence on the planet Marion, in spite of all Erlos’ efforts to prevent them.
A meeting had been arranged between the rulers of B’retza, Victoria, Centura, Spectra and Diana Cities to try to gain B'retza City's 10 powerful votes. If B’retza city was won over, then Diana City would almost certainly grant its own three votes and finalize the issue.
Mycyl of Spectra City was the host. He was pacing up and down with his hands behind his back, beneath the entwined golden serpent’s crest of Spectra City. Solgarth of Diana City was already there, waiting for Kierien when he arrived, as were Thalia of B’retza City, and Justin Leobin of Victoria City.
These five cities represented more than 7,000 million Erlotians and carried a combined weight of 30 votes of the Seven Cities Council total of 60 votes. Astra and B’rahma Cities, both absent from the meeting, with 20 and 10 votes respectively, made up the other half.
Mycyl waved Kierien to a seat: “Well, my dear Kierien. What do you make of things?”
“The situation is becoming desperate," said Kierien. "With the main Bueloetian forces already starting to arrive, their strength will increase daily. It’s a battle we can’t win.”
Mycyl thumped his hand down on the table: “We must attack Bueloess now if we are to succeed. Why must we wait for B’retza and Diana? Even without them we have 47 votes out of 60 in favour, including those of Astra and B'rahma."
Justin Leobin of Victoria City shook his head slowly. “The Law cannot be changed,” he said: “Spectra City continues to look for loopholes, but there are none.”
“Loopholes!” Mycyl snorted with exasperation: ''I say scrap this antiquated law completely. It has outlived its purpose, which was to protect Erlos – and now threatens Erlos with destruction because of the stubbornness of one city alone.”
“Enough!” said Thalia of B'retza: “Must Spectra continue to wrangle with the law?”
“Wrangle!” Mycyl directed at her a look of barely contained fury: “Erlos could end this menace quickly and decisively, if B’retza City would work with us!”
“But B’retza cannot,” Thalia said. Her eyes were sad.
“But B’retza must!” Mycyl was almost shouting now.
There was the silence of resignation. Mycyl’s blue eyes crackled and sparked with fury. Leobin sat poised and upright, drumming his fingers on the arm of his chair. Kierien was quiet, distant and still, inscrutable, while Solgarth of Diana was doodling on a pad. Thalia raised her chin.
“Erlos will be divided by this mission, and destroyed if it fails,” she repeated: “Why then is B’retza’s continuing veto still a surprise?”
Mycyl snorted with disgust. He began to pace the hall again, hands clasped behind his back. Thalia’s rigid caution was completely alien to his own rapid adaptability. At that moment, the door opened and a new figure entered Spectra's great hall..
He was taller now, since they had last seen him 25 years ago, and his face was bronzed by the Aazyrian sun. He wore an Aazyrian robe of plain cloth, belted at the waist, and leather sandals on his hard brown feet. “May I request permission to say a few words?” he asked quietly.
“It’s good to see you again," Thalia said: "B'retza has no objection to you addressing this meeting, but perhaps it won’t be necessary? With Eldrinda Benkilte leading the mission, B’retza City agrees to add her ten votes.”
Thalia offered no reason for B’retza City’s sudden change. She offered no explanation, no apology. Nor would she ever do so. She had simply changed her mind, and in so doing had judged and decided on the fate twelve thousand millions Erlotian people, and eventually, of ten thousand worlds.
Diana City was now the only city to stand against, and Solgarth quickly added its three remaining votes to make the proposal unanimous.
+++++++++++++++
Astra, Victoria and Spectra Cities were elected to carry out the raid, which Astra City would lead.
Before the three cities could begin their inner-space mission to reach Bueloess, their flight plan required them to come in close to the planet Marion to use its vortex as a sort of slingshot to accelerate them outward towards the gas giants, and then out beyond the cold outer planets, before using the vortexian energy of the whole of Sanfit’s solar system, to accelerate them even faster, outward into deep space and towards the speed of light.
But the Buelotian presence on Marion had by now become too strong to risk to the three cities, with their combined population of nearly eight thousand million souls.
After much going back and forth on Erlos’s Council of Seven, it was decided that fighter carriers from B’retza City would first launch a decoy attack against Marion, to draw the Buelotian forces away from the planet to meet the B’retzan attack in space.
This had become the pattern of the war: Erlos’ cities sending out fighters, when they could spare them from their own defences, to attack and damage Bueloetian installations on Marion in an increasingly futile battle, as more of Bueloess’ main forces began arriving into the vortex of Sanfit after their long journey through space.
The next step of the plan required that after B’retza City’s decoy attack, that carriers from Diana City would come in after the Bueloetians, from the opposite direction, with the purpose of wreaking as much havoc as possible on Marion, before joining up with B’retza’s forces, from the rear, and catching the Buelotians in a classic pincer movement.
In the meantime Astra, Spectra and Victoria cities would enter the Marion planetary vortex at great speed to make use of the vortexian slingshot effect, while Bueloess's forces were engaged against the decoy attack.
These three cities, that would carry out the mission against Bueloess, were soon referred to by Erlotians as The Three.
++++++++++++
B’rahma, B’retza, Centura and Diana Cities stayed to defend Aelutia and to carry on if the mission failed. As the Hrothl, Auldrius, did not go with Astra City – her brother Eldrinda leading the mission. She moved residence instead to B’rahma City, taking with her Astra’s 20 votes. Victoria and Spectra City’s votes would devolve to Centura and B’retza, respectively
As those who stayed behind watched The Three disappear among the bright stars, Auldrius had heavy issues to deal with. Without Astra, Spectra and Victoria cities Erlos was left with greatly reduced defences. When The Three were finally out of sight, Auldrius embraced Eleni of B’rahma, who was to be her host, and they walked side by side through the gardens of B’rahma City to the temple for evening benediction.
As the glorious ceremony progressed Auldrius was filled with a sense of peace. She whispered her own prayer for fortitude during the trying days ahead, and when the benediction came to an end, her heart was calm and strong.
After a light supper with Eleni, she went to her room. To keep her mind off thoughts of her loved ones on their dangerous mission, she played an Akash Tape. These tapes, each a record of another being’s experience, were available on Erlos to those who had mastered their use. While immersed in one of these memory streams, the recipient was able to enter the mind of another being, long gone on time's ocean, and to fully enter that being's experience.
To use the Akash tapes required a high degree of self-mastery to remain impersonal while immersed in a reality that could become traumatic, to say the least. At the rising of a personal thought in the mind of the recipient, the tape would automatically stop -- to prevent psychic damage to the recipient.
Auldrius had acquired a very high degree of mastery. The tapes were her great adventure into Erlos’ distant past. Day by day and year by year she learned more of the ancient knowledge, through the minds of the old seers of Erlos and Aelutia.
Now, as she lay back on her bed in the hour before sleep, she entered a mighty panorama of events. She had reached back on a master tape to the time of the construction of the first Erlotian City -- Diana City -- under the guidance of ageless beings from another world.
It had offered a new adventure, a new land to be pioneered. Thousands had laboured to build the City, suspended on lithos and powered by vortexia. The City was now complete and the first inhabitants were gathering upon the great plain of Aabyr to be drawn into it.
She saw the master Obekallah, wearing simple white, and around him massed the leaders of old Aelutia – and Auldrius knew, in the mind of her guide, that Cephanti, the angel Chieftan of the new Arc into which Aelutia was now passing – listened from the heavens as Obekallah spoke.
“Now Aelutia passes from the Arc of Abinarthus and enters the Arc of Cephanti, becoming also Erlos -- and from this time, and forever forward, shall Erlos wear the Badge of Cephanti, which carries the promise of Cephanti -- that while Erlos and Aelutia progress onward within the Arc of Cephanti, that this City, which is named Diana City, and all Erlotian Cities yet to come – will carry with them the Badge of Cephanti upon all the roadways of her Arc.”
In the mind of her guide, Auldrius saw Obekalla lifted up into the new city.
Evening came and now the great plain of Aabyr was deserted. The earthly city that had once stood there now lay strewn, and new trees grew where the city once had stood.
Suddenly Auldrius became aware of the many levels of being.
The tape stopped.
Overcome by the intensity of the experience, and with the words of Obekallah still sounding in her ears, she found herself again thinking about her brother Eldrinda, and her people, the people of Erlos, now thousands of years later venturing forth in will united upon the roadways of Cephanti.
Now all fear was gone and her heart surged with joy.
(end of chapter nine)
Chapter Nine
Kierien was ruminating on death and change while above him Aelutia was visible through Centura City's vast transparent skydome, slowly turning against the hard black backdrop of space – the continent of Oceana half visible in purple darkness, below ridges of indigo clouds. Kierien's old features were shadowed in silhouette as he waited for the airseal that would take him to a meeting of Erlos' Council that was to be held on Spectra City.
The twenty-five years that had passed since Eldrinda Benkilte had contracted the ceisorundra virus and had to step down as Hrothl in favour of his sister Auldrius was not a very long time in terms of a war that had already lasted more than 600 years. Erlos' Council of Seven were still mired in debate about whether or not to risk the proposed attack upon the planet Bueloess.
Centura City’s construction, like that of all the other cities, made use of the energy of vortexia, subtle but powerful. All Erlotians, but especially the inhabitants of Centura City, had developed higher senses beyond the five physical senses.
As primitive man once learned to master fire, Erlos was learning to manage the energy of vortexia to concretize certain material substances from the subtle flow of 'thought' energy. This ability was constantly improving as Erlotians continued to refine their ability to harmonize their own mental energies with others.
Centura City’s colours were amethyst and its crest was a bride with a lit lamp in her hand. Centura''s population of only 8 880 000 was tiny even in comparison to the other six Erlotian cities, yet Centura carried a powerful eight votes on Erlos' Council balance of 60, just two votes less than the 10 votes carried by the far more populous B'rahma and B'retza Cities.
The airseal arrived to take him to the meeting and Kierien ducked into the airlock then strapped himself into the seat of the silver pod and went through the flight checks. Airseals were used to travel through space between the Erlotian cities because the particle transceivers used to move around within the individual cities were not capable of long range transmission between cities.
After a short flight through space he docked at Spectra City.
The seven Erlotian Cities were active amongst the planets within the solar vortex of Sanfit, the Erlotian sun, but they had never yet attempted to travel the huge distance between stars. 'Innerspace' travel would involve accelerating to a-third the speed of light and then, using a concentrated impulse of millions of Erlotian minds to activate the lithos on which the cities were built – to propel them beyond the speed of light, beyond space and time, onto unknown vortexian roadways where time and space would no longer exist for them.
Expansion of Bueloess had hinged on outer space travel over millions of years at below the speed of light, though still at very high velocities. Bueloess, over millennia, had been able to colonize large tracts of fourth dimensional space, but it was still crude stuff compared to the Erlotian concept of fifth dimensional innerspace travel.
The issue on which the whole exercise would pivot, was the ability of thousands of millions of Erlotian minds to work together, in perfect attunement, to achieve the very precise mental wavelength and frequency required to activate the lithos. The powerfully attuned mental energy would then have to be directed through the triangle of power generated by three Cities acting as a lens to create an enormously powerful pulse of pure thought energy – of pure will – lasting just a tiny fraction of a microsecond.
This would activate the lithos at the exact moment of crossing. But the lithos hulls upon which the cities were built would have to be moving at around a-third of the speed of light before the ‘thought laser’ could have any effect. This was the dangerous part of the whole exercise because, at the very high speeds involved, the slightest harmonic disturbance could result in disaster, scattering the cities and their occupants as atomic dust over a very wide area of space.
So the question was always whether Erlotians had the ability to work together as a single entity of pure will.
Now, as Kierien docked, the decision as to whether or not they could, was becoming more urgent. Huge dangers faced Erlos, with the increasing establishment of a Buelotian presence on the planet Marion, in spite of all Erlos’ efforts to prevent them.
A meeting had been arranged between the rulers of B’retza, Victoria, Centura, Spectra and Diana Cities to try to gain B'retza City's 10 powerful votes. If B’retza city was won over, then Diana City would almost certainly grant its own three votes and finalize the issue.
Mycyl of Spectra City was the host. He was pacing up and down with his hands behind his back, beneath the entwined golden serpent’s crest of Spectra City. Solgarth of Diana City was already there, waiting for Kierien when he arrived, as were Thalia of B’retza City, and Justin Leobin of Victoria City.
These five cities represented more than 7,000 million Erlotians and carried a combined weight of 30 votes of the Seven Cities Council total of 60 votes. Astra and B’rahma Cities, both absent from the meeting, with 20 and 10 votes respectively, made up the other half.
Mycyl waved Kierien to a seat: “Well, my dear Kierien. What do you make of things?”
“The situation is becoming desperate," said Kierien. "With the main Bueloetian forces already starting to arrive, their strength will increase daily. It’s a battle we can’t win.”
Mycyl thumped his hand down on the table: “We must attack Bueloess now if we are to succeed. Why must we wait for B’retza and Diana? Even without them we have 47 votes out of 60 in favour, including those of Astra and B'rahma."
Justin Leobin of Victoria City shook his head slowly. “The Law cannot be changed,” he said: “Spectra City continues to look for loopholes, but there are none.”
“Loopholes!” Mycyl snorted with exasperation: ''I say scrap this antiquated law completely. It has outlived its purpose, which was to protect Erlos – and now threatens Erlos with destruction because of the stubbornness of one city alone.”
“Enough!” said Thalia of B'retza: “Must Spectra continue to wrangle with the law?”
“Wrangle!” Mycyl directed at her a look of barely contained fury: “Erlos could end this menace quickly and decisively, if B’retza City would work with us!”
“But B’retza cannot,” Thalia said. Her eyes were sad.
“But B’retza must!” Mycyl was almost shouting now.
There was the silence of resignation. Mycyl’s blue eyes crackled and sparked with fury. Leobin sat poised and upright, drumming his fingers on the arm of his chair. Kierien was quiet, distant and still, inscrutable, while Solgarth of Diana was doodling on a pad. Thalia raised her chin.
“Erlos will be divided by this mission, and destroyed if it fails,” she repeated: “Why then is B’retza’s continuing veto still a surprise?”
Mycyl snorted with disgust. He began to pace the hall again, hands clasped behind his back. Thalia’s rigid caution was completely alien to his own rapid adaptability. At that moment, the door opened and a new figure entered Spectra's great hall..
He was taller now, since they had last seen him 25 years ago, and his face was bronzed by the Aazyrian sun. He wore an Aazyrian robe of plain cloth, belted at the waist, and leather sandals on his hard brown feet. “May I request permission to say a few words?” he asked quietly.
“It’s good to see you again," Thalia said: "B'retza has no objection to you addressing this meeting, but perhaps it won’t be necessary? With Eldrinda Benkilte leading the mission, B’retza City agrees to add her ten votes.”
Thalia offered no reason for B’retza City’s sudden change. She offered no explanation, no apology. Nor would she ever do so. She had simply changed her mind, and in so doing had judged and decided on the fate twelve thousand millions Erlotian people, and eventually, of ten thousand worlds.
Diana City was now the only city to stand against, and Solgarth quickly added its three remaining votes to make the proposal unanimous.
+++++++++++++++
Astra, Victoria and Spectra Cities were elected to carry out the raid, which Astra City would lead.
Before the three cities could begin their inner-space mission to reach Bueloess, their flight plan required them to come in close to the planet Marion to use its vortex as a sort of slingshot to accelerate them outward towards the gas giants, and then out beyond the cold outer planets, before using the vortexian energy of the whole of Sanfit’s solar system, to accelerate them even faster, outward into deep space and towards the speed of light.
But the Buelotian presence on Marion had by now become too strong to risk to the three cities, with their combined population of nearly eight thousand million souls.
After much going back and forth on Erlos’s Council of Seven, it was decided that fighter carriers from B’retza City would first launch a decoy attack against Marion, to draw the Buelotian forces away from the planet to meet the B’retzan attack in space.
This had become the pattern of the war: Erlos’ cities sending out fighters, when they could spare them from their own defences, to attack and damage Bueloetian installations on Marion in an increasingly futile battle, as more of Bueloess’ main forces began arriving into the vortex of Sanfit after their long journey through space.
The next step of the plan required that after B’retza City’s decoy attack, that carriers from Diana City would come in after the Bueloetians, from the opposite direction, with the purpose of wreaking as much havoc as possible on Marion, before joining up with B’retza’s forces, from the rear, and catching the Buelotians in a classic pincer movement.
In the meantime Astra, Spectra and Victoria cities would enter the Marion planetary vortex at great speed to make use of the vortexian slingshot effect, while Bueloess's forces were engaged against the decoy attack.
These three cities, that would carry out the mission against Bueloess, were soon referred to by Erlotians as The Three.
++++++++++++
B’rahma, B’retza, Centura and Diana Cities stayed to defend Aelutia and to carry on if the mission failed. As the Hrothl, Auldrius, did not go with Astra City – her brother Eldrinda leading the mission. She moved residence instead to B’rahma City, taking with her Astra’s 20 votes. Victoria and Spectra City’s votes would devolve to Centura and B’retza, respectively
As those who stayed behind watched The Three disappear among the bright stars, Auldrius had heavy issues to deal with. Without Astra, Spectra and Victoria cities Erlos was left with greatly reduced defences. When The Three were finally out of sight, Auldrius embraced Eleni of B’rahma, who was to be her host, and they walked side by side through the gardens of B’rahma City to the temple for evening benediction.
As the glorious ceremony progressed Auldrius was filled with a sense of peace. She whispered her own prayer for fortitude during the trying days ahead, and when the benediction came to an end, her heart was calm and strong.
After a light supper with Eleni, she went to her room. To keep her mind off thoughts of her loved ones on their dangerous mission, she played an Akash Tape. These tapes, each a record of another being’s experience, were available on Erlos to those who had mastered their use. While immersed in one of these memory streams, the recipient was able to enter the mind of another being, long gone on time's ocean, and to fully enter that being's experience.
To use the Akash tapes required a high degree of self-mastery to remain impersonal while immersed in a reality that could become traumatic, to say the least. At the rising of a personal thought in the mind of the recipient, the tape would automatically stop -- to prevent psychic damage to the recipient.
Auldrius had acquired a very high degree of mastery. The tapes were her great adventure into Erlos’ distant past. Day by day and year by year she learned more of the ancient knowledge, through the minds of the old seers of Erlos and Aelutia.
Now, as she lay back on her bed in the hour before sleep, she entered a mighty panorama of events. She had reached back on a master tape to the time of the construction of the first Erlotian City -- Diana City -- under the guidance of ageless beings from another world.
It had offered a new adventure, a new land to be pioneered. Thousands had laboured to build the City, suspended on lithos and powered by vortexia. The City was now complete and the first inhabitants were gathering upon the great plain of Aabyr to be drawn into it.
She saw the master Obekallah, wearing simple white, and around him massed the leaders of old Aelutia – and Auldrius knew, in the mind of her guide, that Cephanti, the angel Chieftan of the new Arc into which Aelutia was now passing – listened from the heavens as Obekallah spoke.
“Now Aelutia passes from the Arc of Abinarthus and enters the Arc of Cephanti, becoming also Erlos -- and from this time, and forever forward, shall Erlos wear the Badge of Cephanti, which carries the promise of Cephanti -- that while Erlos and Aelutia progress onward within the Arc of Cephanti, that this City, which is named Diana City, and all Erlotian Cities yet to come – will carry with them the Badge of Cephanti upon all the roadways of her Arc.”
In the mind of her guide, Auldrius saw Obekalla lifted up into the new city.
Evening came and now the great plain of Aabyr was deserted. The earthly city that had once stood there now lay strewn, and new trees grew where the city once had stood.
Suddenly Auldrius became aware of the many levels of being.
The tape stopped.
Overcome by the intensity of the experience, and with the words of Obekallah still sounding in her ears, she found herself again thinking about her brother Eldrinda, and her people, the people of Erlos, now thousands of years later venturing forth in will united upon the roadways of Cephanti.
Now all fear was gone and her heart surged with joy.
(end of chapter nine)
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Chapter Ten
Morning bought a soft, warm mist to the trees for Sorac and his two companions.
Toache, the Bear, rode ahead, Tyl was in the middle and Sorac behind. They wore coats against the damp air. The clunk of hoofs and the squeak of leather were as much a part of nature as the sounds of the forest that surrounded them.
They were not cold, but wet. Toache indicated in his sign language that they would reach the lubyar forest by nightfall. Another four day’s journey through the lubyar jungle should bring them to the border of Llozd.
Tyl huddled in her coat. The conifer forest was fragrant with the clean smells of wet earth and wood. She wasn’t tired, but silent, aware, her senses sharp. Later the rain stopped. Sunlight brushed with gold the tops of the evergreen pines now inclined to winter, in the stillness of the mountains.
Sorac led them on past the rising of the sun. Later, when it was high above the trees, they stopped to eat, but without making a fire.
When they had eaten he took a magnifying glass from his pouch and used it to concentrate the rays of the sun to get his pipe burning. He smoked silently while Toache sat carving some trinket from a piece of wood and whistling in his tuneless way, and Tyl rinsed her her face and hair with cold water from the nearby stream.
When Tyl came back, Sorac took her leg and helped her into the saddle of her patient chestnut mare, and then swung himself up onto Liere's back.
"Will Toache continue to lead us?" he asked.
The big boat maker heaved himself up onto the saddle of his heavy wooly-footed beast and signed his reply to Tyl, who translated for Sorac: “Toache says to follow the path and he will lead from behind.”
Sorac rode with Tyl beside him. Her hair was wet. They rode on into the new day. At noon the sun was warm and strong with the scent of pine. Later they headed downwards and the conifers began to mix with trees of broader leaf.
In the late afternoon, with dust of travel on them, they reached the outer rim of the lubyar jungle, with its mis-created creatures that protected Kaarth from outsiders. The shepherd immediately began a search for lyn leaves.
“We should continue while the going is good before we camp for the night,” he said. “But it'll be best to make the lyn potion now.”
Tyl and Toache's horses snorted indignantly when presented with the liquid, but then they followed Liere’s lead and drank. The shepherd stored what was left of the potion in water bags before pushing on into the thickening shadows of the jungle.
He looked up apprehensively when first he heard the spattering sound of wings in the treetops. A bat swooped down. He ducked. But it retreated when it sensed the aura of lyn. Tyl shrieked. Sorac took her hand reassuringly.
“They won’t touch us,” he said.
She felt his strength as their eyes mixed. She wanted him. The honest desire she felt for him, the private knowledge they shared of one another, made her feel warm and safe in spite of the danger.
Day wore to its end. The forest darkened quickly and they stopped to make camp. Sorac struck fire while Toache foraged for wood. The forest was completely dark when the flame took to the tinder. Toache made a wooden rack to hold a kettle. They filled it with water from a stream. They added fresh lyn leaves. When it was done they drank it as tea, keeping some to cool for the horses, whose noses twitched expectantly when they smelled it.
Tyl cut cabbage and potatoes into a pot and they sat around the fire while the food bubbled. Sorac sat cross-legged on a blanket. Tyl sat beside him with her knees drawn up to her chin. Toache reclined on one elbow on the other side of the fire.
Tyl looked at Sorac. He seemed so still, sitting there cross-legged and quiet. She wanted to unravel him but he seemed to hold up a barrier. She rose and stirred the pot. She ladled the food into bowls and they ate. Afterwards she scrubbed out the pot with sand from the stream. She was tired. She came back and sat down. She drew her knees up and yawned. Sorac put more wood on the fire.
“Where will you sleep?” he said.
“Where would you say?”
He took her hand: “Over here. Come.”
He piled a bed of leaves and laid a groundsheet. He laid out her sleeping roll. They kissed. She wrapped herself in her blanket.
He sat close, with his back to her. Toache sat across the fire from him, strangers met through circumstance, in silence each listening to the voice of his own thoughts. Shadows jumped and flickered in the firelight.
A forest creature grunted. It was answered by a nasal call -- this by a grunt, raised now in acknowledgement -- then a high pitched chatter, a grunt, a laugh -- mixed voice of jungle creatures, each to its own. Jungle chatter. Shadows.
Tyl closed her eyes and listened to the forest conversation of survival. There was nowhere to go, nowhere to be. She opened her eyes again and looked at Sorac, his back firm against the night. She wanted to hold him and feel him. She felt a tear squeeze from the corner of her eye.
My love -- who are you?
Nothing is certain. I only follow.
Ephemeral night of sound.
Too much sound. Unbearable. Destroying.
Darling, come.
What now? she thought, watching him as he slowly filled his pipe and lit it with a glowing twig from the fire: I don’t know … only -- we are together.
She drifted into sleep.
Toache sat looking into the fire. A log popped. He rose. He went to his saddle and fumbled in his bag. He came back with a stone flask of amra brandy and sat down again.
“Fine,” Sorac said.
Toache poured a dash of the spirit into each of two mugs and then he leaned back on his elbow with a cup wrapped in his big hand. Around them the jungle spoke a thousand languages of night. Toache relaxed more onto his arm. Sorac sat with his legs crossed, swatting insects, listening to the night.
They did not try to converse. The shepherd could not yet understand the boat maker’s sign language. Something made a rasping sound in the night. They sat there in comfortable silence. Toache drank from his mug. The fire lit their faces.
“I will sleep now,” Sorac said.
He made his bed close to Tyl. Before retiring he went over to Liere. The stallion snorted and nibbled a morsel from his palm.. Sorac put more wood on the fire. He kept his bag close and laid his bow against it. He lay down, still wearing his boots and wrapped himself in his blanket, keeping his bow within reach.
Tyl reached for him. He rolled over and took her in his arms. She rested her head against his chest with a sigh. They breathed deeply together. He lay on his back, looking up at the roof of the forest where their firelight flickered amongst leaves and branches. Tyl lay curled against him, and he stroked her hair.
+++++++++++++++++
Victoria City was now moving very fast through the vortex of the planet Marion as Justin Leobin prepared to follow the course set by Eldrinda Benkilte to accelerate their way out of the Marion vortex. Big screens in Victoria's command room showed Eldrinda with his six captains on Astra City, and Mycyl with his seven captains on Spectra City.
They were confident that the decoy raid presently being carried out by B'retza and Diana Cities against Bueloess on Marion was working as it was meant to in its main purpose of distracting Bueloess to the true intention of The Three -- which was to exit the Sanfit solar vortex altogether, en route for interstellar space.
This transit of Marion space was a most dangerous part of their mission.
The manoeuvre involved using the simple engine propulsion to make use of Marion's gravitational vortex. Leobin felt the power of the engines, pushing sideways and to the right through his body against Victoria City's gravitational stabilizers. Everything appeared to spin, before realigning itself and accelerating into the new trajectory.
Now, with Marion behind them The Three stepped rapidly outward past the gas giants, and then the outer planets and the dwarf planets -- using the powerful solar vortex of Sanfit as a catapult to accelerate them further outward into the void of deep interstellar space -- pushing them closer towards the speed of light, preparing for the final impulse that would propel them through the vortexian barrier: the breaking.
At the crucial moment of crossing – called 'the breaking' -- their vortexian engines would generate a flash of light, focused through the triangle of power, that would be strong enough to excite the lithos upon which they were built.
At the precise moment of the breaking the Erlotians within the three cities would generate a single concentrated impulse of will -- the combined will of more than 6000 million highly trained Erlotian minds locked together in a triangle of power -- and this, in combination with the 'breaking flash', would activate the lithos and take them through the barrier of four dimensional space into a different universe, beyond time and space.
Or so they hoped.
The alternative would be to smash themselves into sub-atomic stardust against the wall of time which marked the limit of the fourth dimension. Once through the barrier, time would cease to exist for them and only their combined will would be able to move them forward on unknown vortexian roadways in a ‘tack’ towards their final destination.
Although the inner-space had been conjectured by previous generations, no Erlotian had ever been there. Locked together as a triangle of power in the changing vortexian flux they would commit themselves to cosmic winds and currents upon 'innerspace' oceans of the fifth dimension as their distant ancestors, the early pioneers of Aelutia’s seas, had once done upon the oceans of their own world.
Lights flickered around Justin Leobin from sensors providing readings from Victoria's lithos hull and data from the accelerating engines, along with a myriad of other information, as Eldrinda Benkilte's voice came through from Astra City: ''Victoria, confirm ability to lock.''
This meant that the three cities were preparing to lock together in a triangle of power which would combine the enormously powerful energy of the three cities into a single effective unit Victoria City's population was 2 093 million.
''Victoria City is ready to lock,'' Leobin responded.
''Spectra City, are you ready to lock?'' Eldrinda said, from Astra.
There was a further slight delay before Spectra City's light came on, confirming the lock was complete.
The three Erlotian cities were now locked together as a triangle to create a lens effect through which force could be directed as a single powerful ray. The lock between the three cities meant that any abnormality would affect them all equally.
Light appeared to emanate from no single point in space.
Slowly at first, and then with increasing velocity, the golden flecks of light surrounding them appeared to spin until they were no longer points of light but golden circles, spirals within a lighted whole, and it appeared the whole of space became a whirling tunnel of light into which The Three were drawn as they accelerated.
Leobin felt the acceleration pushing him hard back against the stabilizers as Victoria City accelerated toward the light-barrier until, in a single blinding flash, the lithos activated and the closing walls of the tunnel of light disappeared.
They were gone.
+++++++++++++
The leaders of the remaining four Erlotian Cities that stayed to defend the planet Aelutia had assembled together on B’rahma City to witness 'The Breaking' of The Three.
“The great thing has begun,” said Thalia of B'retza City: “Now, though divided, Erlos must be united as never before. But we're out of contact with now, until they re-emerge from the innerspace, and we don't know how long that's going to be."
The reduced defences of the remaining four Erlotian cities' were now going to be taxed to the limit. They were working on improving their shields, as always, but it was an ongoing process that could only ever be partially effective.
“My mind's exhausted with it all …” Thalia’s words trailed off: “Can Erlos ever be the same?”
Eleni smiled. She covered Thalia’s hand with her own.
“I know,” she said. “Me too. It’s frightening -- and wonderful.”
“I must go now,” Thalia said.
“Have some breakfast first?” Eleni said.
"No, I can’t stay.”
“But I do hope that the rest of you will stay for breakfast?” Eleni said.
Auldrius and the others accompanied Thalia to the pod room. Thalia stepped into her airseal with agile grace. Her pod moved forward into the airlock and the lock closed and they heard a whooshing noise. When she was gone, Eleni turned to the others and saw that Auldrius was crying.
“Oh no, don’t cry,” Eleni said.
“I don’t know why,” Auldrius sniffed.
Soon Kierien, Solgarth, Auldrius, and Eleni were sitting down to breakfast beneath the strong limbs of an enormous flowering tree in the gardens of B’rahma City. A small bird sang merrily in the tree -- born to space and knowing no other world. Perfumed blossoms scented the air. B’rahma was the most beautiful of all the cities. Its horizon curved upwards, out of sight.
B'rahma City carried 10 votes on Erlos' Council balance of 60 votes, and stood with B'retza at the top level of Erlos' higher triangle of power, above Astra City. B'rahma's population of 2 200 million resided in 11 city states.
Auldrius felt the quiet sense of peace that she always did in B’rahma City. The others spoke little and Auldrius was grateful for that. She felt vulnerable from within and without, from above and below. She realized that Kierien was looking at her intensely.
“What is it?” she asked.
Kierien shrugged. “I was just thinking that your father, though strong, lacked your quality of leadership as Hrothl," he said. "Shelron would likely have made the error of mistaking emotion for weakness at this time. Erlos had a great respect and regard for Shelron -- but they love you. Erlos would be weaker now without your tears.”
SolGarth nodded agreement.
“It’s going to be hard,” Eleni said: “Waiting, without contact."
++++++++++++++++
It was shortly before these events that Ildries Ameira, dripping slimy green tendrils of pond scum after his ducking in the Emperor's fish pond and fuming with hatred and humiliation while all the soldiers laughed at him, had fled the Royal City of Aazyr and returned to the forest lands of Kaarth.
Mykros had allowed the Erlotian sorceror to walk free this time, but Ildries knew the Emperor well enough. He knew that he was now nothing more than a thorn in Mykros' flesh. There was no reason for the Mykros to suffer it. Ildries well understood that his life was cheap.
Helpless to extract any revenge on the powerful Emperor of the Ukonaai, Ildries had decided it was now best to exclude Mykros completely from any future plans and direct his attention back to what was happening on Erlos.
So now Ildries Ameira went to a lonely clearing, where he sat and waited. He sat for a long time. He wrapped his cloak around his shoulders against the chill. The night dragged on and the night sky glittered with bright stars, until at last one of the stars appeared to get brighter, and Ildries rose to his feet.
The light grew brighter until he could discern first the shape of the atmosphere craft, and then its black and silver colours and finally the crest of Diana City as the saucer shaped craft came down to hover over the clearing and the door opened and emitted a stream of light. A ladder was slung hastily down. Ildries ran to it and climbed it quickly and then began to strap himself into a seat beside the the pilot. The door was still closing and Ildries was still tightening the seat straps as the craft began to rise away from the planetary surface.
“You’re very late,” he complained.
“There was a new man on shift; I couldn't get away,'' the pilot answered: ''Have you my payment?”
Ildries handed him a small parcel. The pilot opened the package and disturbed the fine brown powder with a fingernail.
“It’s not enough,” he said.
“It’s all I have,” said Ildries.
“Then I'm taking you back down again,” the pilot warned.
“It’s good quality hril.”
“I want what we agreed.”
Ildries sighed. He reached into his bag and handed over another parcel. The pilot pocketed it with an expression of satisfaction. Aelutia’s curvature was becoming visible outside the window of the atmosphere craft. Ildries relaxed back in his seat until the enormous silver hull of Diana City began to loom.
“I must not be seen,” the pilot said.
Ildries was putting on a vacuum suit. He turned his eyes to the pilot’s face. The other was suddenly subdued by the flat look in those pale eyes.
“Please, no offence,” he said. “I’m risking much.”
Ildries held the pilot’s eyes for a few more seconds. “And you’ve been paid?”
The pilot nodded. “Yes. Thank you. And contact me when you need me again.”
Ildries Amerira ejected from the atmosphere craft, Wearing a vacuum suit and electrostatic boots, he cautiously clunked himself a short distance around a section of Diana City's vast outer hull to a service shaft.
Diana City was in low orbit, close to Aelutia’s atmosphere. After having spent so long on the surface of Aelutia, he paused a moment, newly impressed by the splendour of perspective that Erlotians took for granted as beneath him slowly turned the Aelutian continent of Oceana in deep blue darkness.
He keyed open the service hatch and went in through the airlock. Once through the lock, he stuffed the suit and the boots and the helmet into a bag. He slung the bag over his back and then descended a runged shaft. He emerged into an instrument room. Only the muted hum of instruments and the glow of instrument lights greeted his arrival on Diana City.
He was still wearing a tight inner suit of a silvery metallic material that left only his face exposed. Ildries stretched the fabric off around his face, and shook his head free.
Most of Diana City’s functions were dealt with by machines. Instruments repaired instruments, and a room such as the one in which Ildries now stood might function years without a human presence. His eyes were apprehensive, watchful. He stood and listened carefully for a few moments before peeling off the rest of inner suit and stuffing it into the bag with the rest of his stuff, before cracking open the door.
He looked furtively into a corridor. No one knew him in Diana City. Spectra City had been his home and he had left there more than 25 years before. Surface life had changed his fragile appearance too, and he had acquired quite a tough, weathered look.
There was no-one in the corridor. Still carrying the bag slung over his shoulder, he emerged into Diana City and mixed with the inhabitants. Diana City's population of 420 million was small by Erlos' standards and Diana's weight of only three votes on Erlos' Council balance of 60 was the least of all the seven cities.
Ildries prowled around Diana, listening to conversations and getting an idea of the general mixture of emotions there. Mixed with the atmosphere of fear of soon being left without the powerful presence of the The Three, the people of Diana City had also a new confidence.
In Diana City was the first understanding that material reality rests on a hidden foundation, and that changing that foundation makes it possible to alter things in the physical world. It was in Diana that the will first became able to draw down 'thought forms' to be shaped by concentration and imagination into concrete physical reality.
Diana City could be a very misleading place for anyone inclined to mistake illusion for reality. To such a person Diana City could seem full of secret tunnels and dead-ends and mazes and concealed mechanisms – a secret behind every mirror, a passage in every wall, a pair of hidden eyes behind every portrait, and a subterranean world of forgotten tunnels leading who knows where.
Diana's main function within Erlos was to collect and 'store' the various energies from Spectra and Victoria Cities – after they had been balanced and harmonized in Astra – and then to to distribute them, both upward again to Erlos and downward to Aelutia, while at the same time 'exhausted' energies were passed upward from Diana to Spectra City, to be re-generated and purified in the higher regions of Erlos.
But such thoughts were far from Ildries’ mind.
The sights and splendour of Diana City impressed him not at all. As usual, Ildries was plotting. Although Diana City made it easy to conceal himself, there wasn't much he could accomplish there either. He knew he would soon have to risk the ‘brightness’ of the higher cities, and the knowledge caused his guts to knot with fear.
He paused in thought before the soaring fountains in one of the parks, scheming what to do next -- after losing his last vestige of influence over Mykros of the Ukonai and learning with bitter disappointment that Eldrinda Benkilte had regained his status on Erlos, and was soon to lead a mission against the planet Bueloess. Ildries mind was a swirling mixture of desperation, resentment and self-pity.
(end of chapter ten)
Morning bought a soft, warm mist to the trees for Sorac and his two companions.
Toache, the Bear, rode ahead, Tyl was in the middle and Sorac behind. They wore coats against the damp air. The clunk of hoofs and the squeak of leather were as much a part of nature as the sounds of the forest that surrounded them.
They were not cold, but wet. Toache indicated in his sign language that they would reach the lubyar forest by nightfall. Another four day’s journey through the lubyar jungle should bring them to the border of Llozd.
Tyl huddled in her coat. The conifer forest was fragrant with the clean smells of wet earth and wood. She wasn’t tired, but silent, aware, her senses sharp. Later the rain stopped. Sunlight brushed with gold the tops of the evergreen pines now inclined to winter, in the stillness of the mountains.
Sorac led them on past the rising of the sun. Later, when it was high above the trees, they stopped to eat, but without making a fire.
When they had eaten he took a magnifying glass from his pouch and used it to concentrate the rays of the sun to get his pipe burning. He smoked silently while Toache sat carving some trinket from a piece of wood and whistling in his tuneless way, and Tyl rinsed her her face and hair with cold water from the nearby stream.
When Tyl came back, Sorac took her leg and helped her into the saddle of her patient chestnut mare, and then swung himself up onto Liere's back.
"Will Toache continue to lead us?" he asked.
The big boat maker heaved himself up onto the saddle of his heavy wooly-footed beast and signed his reply to Tyl, who translated for Sorac: “Toache says to follow the path and he will lead from behind.”
Sorac rode with Tyl beside him. Her hair was wet. They rode on into the new day. At noon the sun was warm and strong with the scent of pine. Later they headed downwards and the conifers began to mix with trees of broader leaf.
In the late afternoon, with dust of travel on them, they reached the outer rim of the lubyar jungle, with its mis-created creatures that protected Kaarth from outsiders. The shepherd immediately began a search for lyn leaves.
“We should continue while the going is good before we camp for the night,” he said. “But it'll be best to make the lyn potion now.”
Tyl and Toache's horses snorted indignantly when presented with the liquid, but then they followed Liere’s lead and drank. The shepherd stored what was left of the potion in water bags before pushing on into the thickening shadows of the jungle.
He looked up apprehensively when first he heard the spattering sound of wings in the treetops. A bat swooped down. He ducked. But it retreated when it sensed the aura of lyn. Tyl shrieked. Sorac took her hand reassuringly.
“They won’t touch us,” he said.
She felt his strength as their eyes mixed. She wanted him. The honest desire she felt for him, the private knowledge they shared of one another, made her feel warm and safe in spite of the danger.
Day wore to its end. The forest darkened quickly and they stopped to make camp. Sorac struck fire while Toache foraged for wood. The forest was completely dark when the flame took to the tinder. Toache made a wooden rack to hold a kettle. They filled it with water from a stream. They added fresh lyn leaves. When it was done they drank it as tea, keeping some to cool for the horses, whose noses twitched expectantly when they smelled it.
Tyl cut cabbage and potatoes into a pot and they sat around the fire while the food bubbled. Sorac sat cross-legged on a blanket. Tyl sat beside him with her knees drawn up to her chin. Toache reclined on one elbow on the other side of the fire.
Tyl looked at Sorac. He seemed so still, sitting there cross-legged and quiet. She wanted to unravel him but he seemed to hold up a barrier. She rose and stirred the pot. She ladled the food into bowls and they ate. Afterwards she scrubbed out the pot with sand from the stream. She was tired. She came back and sat down. She drew her knees up and yawned. Sorac put more wood on the fire.
“Where will you sleep?” he said.
“Where would you say?”
He took her hand: “Over here. Come.”
He piled a bed of leaves and laid a groundsheet. He laid out her sleeping roll. They kissed. She wrapped herself in her blanket.
He sat close, with his back to her. Toache sat across the fire from him, strangers met through circumstance, in silence each listening to the voice of his own thoughts. Shadows jumped and flickered in the firelight.
A forest creature grunted. It was answered by a nasal call -- this by a grunt, raised now in acknowledgement -- then a high pitched chatter, a grunt, a laugh -- mixed voice of jungle creatures, each to its own. Jungle chatter. Shadows.
Tyl closed her eyes and listened to the forest conversation of survival. There was nowhere to go, nowhere to be. She opened her eyes again and looked at Sorac, his back firm against the night. She wanted to hold him and feel him. She felt a tear squeeze from the corner of her eye.
My love -- who are you?
Nothing is certain. I only follow.
Ephemeral night of sound.
Too much sound. Unbearable. Destroying.
Darling, come.
What now? she thought, watching him as he slowly filled his pipe and lit it with a glowing twig from the fire: I don’t know … only -- we are together.
She drifted into sleep.
Toache sat looking into the fire. A log popped. He rose. He went to his saddle and fumbled in his bag. He came back with a stone flask of amra brandy and sat down again.
“Fine,” Sorac said.
Toache poured a dash of the spirit into each of two mugs and then he leaned back on his elbow with a cup wrapped in his big hand. Around them the jungle spoke a thousand languages of night. Toache relaxed more onto his arm. Sorac sat with his legs crossed, swatting insects, listening to the night.
They did not try to converse. The shepherd could not yet understand the boat maker’s sign language. Something made a rasping sound in the night. They sat there in comfortable silence. Toache drank from his mug. The fire lit their faces.
“I will sleep now,” Sorac said.
He made his bed close to Tyl. Before retiring he went over to Liere. The stallion snorted and nibbled a morsel from his palm.. Sorac put more wood on the fire. He kept his bag close and laid his bow against it. He lay down, still wearing his boots and wrapped himself in his blanket, keeping his bow within reach.
Tyl reached for him. He rolled over and took her in his arms. She rested her head against his chest with a sigh. They breathed deeply together. He lay on his back, looking up at the roof of the forest where their firelight flickered amongst leaves and branches. Tyl lay curled against him, and he stroked her hair.
+++++++++++++++++
Victoria City was now moving very fast through the vortex of the planet Marion as Justin Leobin prepared to follow the course set by Eldrinda Benkilte to accelerate their way out of the Marion vortex. Big screens in Victoria's command room showed Eldrinda with his six captains on Astra City, and Mycyl with his seven captains on Spectra City.
They were confident that the decoy raid presently being carried out by B'retza and Diana Cities against Bueloess on Marion was working as it was meant to in its main purpose of distracting Bueloess to the true intention of The Three -- which was to exit the Sanfit solar vortex altogether, en route for interstellar space.
This transit of Marion space was a most dangerous part of their mission.
The manoeuvre involved using the simple engine propulsion to make use of Marion's gravitational vortex. Leobin felt the power of the engines, pushing sideways and to the right through his body against Victoria City's gravitational stabilizers. Everything appeared to spin, before realigning itself and accelerating into the new trajectory.
Now, with Marion behind them The Three stepped rapidly outward past the gas giants, and then the outer planets and the dwarf planets -- using the powerful solar vortex of Sanfit as a catapult to accelerate them further outward into the void of deep interstellar space -- pushing them closer towards the speed of light, preparing for the final impulse that would propel them through the vortexian barrier: the breaking.
At the crucial moment of crossing – called 'the breaking' -- their vortexian engines would generate a flash of light, focused through the triangle of power, that would be strong enough to excite the lithos upon which they were built.
At the precise moment of the breaking the Erlotians within the three cities would generate a single concentrated impulse of will -- the combined will of more than 6000 million highly trained Erlotian minds locked together in a triangle of power -- and this, in combination with the 'breaking flash', would activate the lithos and take them through the barrier of four dimensional space into a different universe, beyond time and space.
Or so they hoped.
The alternative would be to smash themselves into sub-atomic stardust against the wall of time which marked the limit of the fourth dimension. Once through the barrier, time would cease to exist for them and only their combined will would be able to move them forward on unknown vortexian roadways in a ‘tack’ towards their final destination.
Although the inner-space had been conjectured by previous generations, no Erlotian had ever been there. Locked together as a triangle of power in the changing vortexian flux they would commit themselves to cosmic winds and currents upon 'innerspace' oceans of the fifth dimension as their distant ancestors, the early pioneers of Aelutia’s seas, had once done upon the oceans of their own world.
Lights flickered around Justin Leobin from sensors providing readings from Victoria's lithos hull and data from the accelerating engines, along with a myriad of other information, as Eldrinda Benkilte's voice came through from Astra City: ''Victoria, confirm ability to lock.''
This meant that the three cities were preparing to lock together in a triangle of power which would combine the enormously powerful energy of the three cities into a single effective unit Victoria City's population was 2 093 million.
''Victoria City is ready to lock,'' Leobin responded.
''Spectra City, are you ready to lock?'' Eldrinda said, from Astra.
There was a further slight delay before Spectra City's light came on, confirming the lock was complete.
The three Erlotian cities were now locked together as a triangle to create a lens effect through which force could be directed as a single powerful ray. The lock between the three cities meant that any abnormality would affect them all equally.
Light appeared to emanate from no single point in space.
Slowly at first, and then with increasing velocity, the golden flecks of light surrounding them appeared to spin until they were no longer points of light but golden circles, spirals within a lighted whole, and it appeared the whole of space became a whirling tunnel of light into which The Three were drawn as they accelerated.
Leobin felt the acceleration pushing him hard back against the stabilizers as Victoria City accelerated toward the light-barrier until, in a single blinding flash, the lithos activated and the closing walls of the tunnel of light disappeared.
They were gone.
+++++++++++++
The leaders of the remaining four Erlotian Cities that stayed to defend the planet Aelutia had assembled together on B’rahma City to witness 'The Breaking' of The Three.
“The great thing has begun,” said Thalia of B'retza City: “Now, though divided, Erlos must be united as never before. But we're out of contact with now, until they re-emerge from the innerspace, and we don't know how long that's going to be."
The reduced defences of the remaining four Erlotian cities' were now going to be taxed to the limit. They were working on improving their shields, as always, but it was an ongoing process that could only ever be partially effective.
“My mind's exhausted with it all …” Thalia’s words trailed off: “Can Erlos ever be the same?”
Eleni smiled. She covered Thalia’s hand with her own.
“I know,” she said. “Me too. It’s frightening -- and wonderful.”
“I must go now,” Thalia said.
“Have some breakfast first?” Eleni said.
"No, I can’t stay.”
“But I do hope that the rest of you will stay for breakfast?” Eleni said.
Auldrius and the others accompanied Thalia to the pod room. Thalia stepped into her airseal with agile grace. Her pod moved forward into the airlock and the lock closed and they heard a whooshing noise. When she was gone, Eleni turned to the others and saw that Auldrius was crying.
“Oh no, don’t cry,” Eleni said.
“I don’t know why,” Auldrius sniffed.
Soon Kierien, Solgarth, Auldrius, and Eleni were sitting down to breakfast beneath the strong limbs of an enormous flowering tree in the gardens of B’rahma City. A small bird sang merrily in the tree -- born to space and knowing no other world. Perfumed blossoms scented the air. B’rahma was the most beautiful of all the cities. Its horizon curved upwards, out of sight.
B'rahma City carried 10 votes on Erlos' Council balance of 60 votes, and stood with B'retza at the top level of Erlos' higher triangle of power, above Astra City. B'rahma's population of 2 200 million resided in 11 city states.
Auldrius felt the quiet sense of peace that she always did in B’rahma City. The others spoke little and Auldrius was grateful for that. She felt vulnerable from within and without, from above and below. She realized that Kierien was looking at her intensely.
“What is it?” she asked.
Kierien shrugged. “I was just thinking that your father, though strong, lacked your quality of leadership as Hrothl," he said. "Shelron would likely have made the error of mistaking emotion for weakness at this time. Erlos had a great respect and regard for Shelron -- but they love you. Erlos would be weaker now without your tears.”
SolGarth nodded agreement.
“It’s going to be hard,” Eleni said: “Waiting, without contact."
++++++++++++++++
It was shortly before these events that Ildries Ameira, dripping slimy green tendrils of pond scum after his ducking in the Emperor's fish pond and fuming with hatred and humiliation while all the soldiers laughed at him, had fled the Royal City of Aazyr and returned to the forest lands of Kaarth.
Mykros had allowed the Erlotian sorceror to walk free this time, but Ildries knew the Emperor well enough. He knew that he was now nothing more than a thorn in Mykros' flesh. There was no reason for the Mykros to suffer it. Ildries well understood that his life was cheap.
Helpless to extract any revenge on the powerful Emperor of the Ukonaai, Ildries had decided it was now best to exclude Mykros completely from any future plans and direct his attention back to what was happening on Erlos.
So now Ildries Ameira went to a lonely clearing, where he sat and waited. He sat for a long time. He wrapped his cloak around his shoulders against the chill. The night dragged on and the night sky glittered with bright stars, until at last one of the stars appeared to get brighter, and Ildries rose to his feet.
The light grew brighter until he could discern first the shape of the atmosphere craft, and then its black and silver colours and finally the crest of Diana City as the saucer shaped craft came down to hover over the clearing and the door opened and emitted a stream of light. A ladder was slung hastily down. Ildries ran to it and climbed it quickly and then began to strap himself into a seat beside the the pilot. The door was still closing and Ildries was still tightening the seat straps as the craft began to rise away from the planetary surface.
“You’re very late,” he complained.
“There was a new man on shift; I couldn't get away,'' the pilot answered: ''Have you my payment?”
Ildries handed him a small parcel. The pilot opened the package and disturbed the fine brown powder with a fingernail.
“It’s not enough,” he said.
“It’s all I have,” said Ildries.
“Then I'm taking you back down again,” the pilot warned.
“It’s good quality hril.”
“I want what we agreed.”
Ildries sighed. He reached into his bag and handed over another parcel. The pilot pocketed it with an expression of satisfaction. Aelutia’s curvature was becoming visible outside the window of the atmosphere craft. Ildries relaxed back in his seat until the enormous silver hull of Diana City began to loom.
“I must not be seen,” the pilot said.
Ildries was putting on a vacuum suit. He turned his eyes to the pilot’s face. The other was suddenly subdued by the flat look in those pale eyes.
“Please, no offence,” he said. “I’m risking much.”
Ildries held the pilot’s eyes for a few more seconds. “And you’ve been paid?”
The pilot nodded. “Yes. Thank you. And contact me when you need me again.”
Ildries Amerira ejected from the atmosphere craft, Wearing a vacuum suit and electrostatic boots, he cautiously clunked himself a short distance around a section of Diana City's vast outer hull to a service shaft.
Diana City was in low orbit, close to Aelutia’s atmosphere. After having spent so long on the surface of Aelutia, he paused a moment, newly impressed by the splendour of perspective that Erlotians took for granted as beneath him slowly turned the Aelutian continent of Oceana in deep blue darkness.
He keyed open the service hatch and went in through the airlock. Once through the lock, he stuffed the suit and the boots and the helmet into a bag. He slung the bag over his back and then descended a runged shaft. He emerged into an instrument room. Only the muted hum of instruments and the glow of instrument lights greeted his arrival on Diana City.
He was still wearing a tight inner suit of a silvery metallic material that left only his face exposed. Ildries stretched the fabric off around his face, and shook his head free.
Most of Diana City’s functions were dealt with by machines. Instruments repaired instruments, and a room such as the one in which Ildries now stood might function years without a human presence. His eyes were apprehensive, watchful. He stood and listened carefully for a few moments before peeling off the rest of inner suit and stuffing it into the bag with the rest of his stuff, before cracking open the door.
He looked furtively into a corridor. No one knew him in Diana City. Spectra City had been his home and he had left there more than 25 years before. Surface life had changed his fragile appearance too, and he had acquired quite a tough, weathered look.
There was no-one in the corridor. Still carrying the bag slung over his shoulder, he emerged into Diana City and mixed with the inhabitants. Diana City's population of 420 million was small by Erlos' standards and Diana's weight of only three votes on Erlos' Council balance of 60 was the least of all the seven cities.
Ildries prowled around Diana, listening to conversations and getting an idea of the general mixture of emotions there. Mixed with the atmosphere of fear of soon being left without the powerful presence of the The Three, the people of Diana City had also a new confidence.
In Diana City was the first understanding that material reality rests on a hidden foundation, and that changing that foundation makes it possible to alter things in the physical world. It was in Diana that the will first became able to draw down 'thought forms' to be shaped by concentration and imagination into concrete physical reality.
Diana City could be a very misleading place for anyone inclined to mistake illusion for reality. To such a person Diana City could seem full of secret tunnels and dead-ends and mazes and concealed mechanisms – a secret behind every mirror, a passage in every wall, a pair of hidden eyes behind every portrait, and a subterranean world of forgotten tunnels leading who knows where.
Diana's main function within Erlos was to collect and 'store' the various energies from Spectra and Victoria Cities – after they had been balanced and harmonized in Astra – and then to to distribute them, both upward again to Erlos and downward to Aelutia, while at the same time 'exhausted' energies were passed upward from Diana to Spectra City, to be re-generated and purified in the higher regions of Erlos.
But such thoughts were far from Ildries’ mind.
The sights and splendour of Diana City impressed him not at all. As usual, Ildries was plotting. Although Diana City made it easy to conceal himself, there wasn't much he could accomplish there either. He knew he would soon have to risk the ‘brightness’ of the higher cities, and the knowledge caused his guts to knot with fear.
He paused in thought before the soaring fountains in one of the parks, scheming what to do next -- after losing his last vestige of influence over Mykros of the Ukonai and learning with bitter disappointment that Eldrinda Benkilte had regained his status on Erlos, and was soon to lead a mission against the planet Bueloess. Ildries mind was a swirling mixture of desperation, resentment and self-pity.
(end of chapter ten)
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Chapter Eleven
Worlds hung like jewels on a bracelet, suspended limitless upon a halo of light.
“It’s wonderful,” she sighed.
Ai was the youngest Astran captain. She had taken over the seat of Triastra state from her father, Arun, when he had retired a few years earlier, though Arun continued to advise his daughter.
“Yes” Sumadji agreed.
He moved over to where she was sitting, Sumadji had loved Ai for years, but was afraid to let her know the depth his feelings, in case he lost her friendship. Together they looked out at the lovely, shining worlds silently turning in an azure vault of space.
Ai laid a hand on his arm, her touch so light that he could barely feel it.
“So blue …” she said.
Sumadji laid his own hand over hers, and she smiled. Just at that moment Eldrinda appeared, to join them, and Sumadji took his hand away. His heart was pounding in his chest.
+++++++++++++++
Unseen to the Erlotians, the angels of Cephanti had been with them during the fifth dimensional crossing and now an angel city made itself visible to them – a thousand times greater and more splendid than Astra City itself, and filled with light and music. The angel city went ahead, leading The Three into the innerspace, and the Erlotians had only to follow, each alone with his own mind.
They journeyed through kaleidoscopic voids of light and colour in a space between being and nothingness -- half-formed images ready either to solidify and take concrete form, or else to dissolve back into the aether from whence they were starting to take shape.
For how long these states existed the Erlotians could not guess, until eventually they began, like children whose eyes began for the first time to discern the patterns of forms from shapeless colours as yet unrecognizable, to be able to see and to look consciously around themselves.
Flung into the mixing and forming of worlds where matter and antimatter crashed in explosion of stars, The Three were safe upon a roadway -- a stairway which soared upward into infinite distance. From nuclear vortex, arching upwards at incredible velocity, they looked out from the path they were on.
They saw worlds forming. They saw gods in their gardens upon aetherean plateaux. They saw worlds of infinite variety as they moved through space of utter silence and space of crashing symphony.
They looked out from the roadway upon madness and divinity. They trembled before the gaze of beings magnificent and terrible who paused to watch Erlos’ passing -- until eventually the roadway bought the Erlotians up before a plateau, whose entrance was guarded by a terrible sentry whose appearance differed to each one of them.
Sumadji perceived the sentry as a colossus that walked between worlds and carried a staff with which, like a bored child swinging at stones with a stick, it struck out at worlds at random. Sometimes the staff missed its mark, meeting just empty space, and the spectre grunted with the effort of the empty, unsatisfying blow, and sometimes the staff connected, and then a world exploded into fragments -- striking at each world only once, leaving it to live if the blow missed its mark.
Remembering the Badge of Cephanti, Sumadji calmed himself by breathing slowly and deeply. He concentrated on trying to see past the sentry but, beyond the threshold of the plateau, everything was now dark.
“It is the Guardian of the Threshold,” offered Leobin of Victoria City: “For Erlos to have reached this point is a great achievement; for if we can pass the guardian, it will never trouble us again -- and we must pass it to reach Bueloess.”
“It blocks our way utterly,” said Eldrinda.
''Victoria City believes this guardian is really just the spectre created by our own doubt, which now becomes an obstacle to us,” Leobin said.
“How it rages!” Eldrinda said.
“Nor can our weapons be effective here in the innerspace,” Leobin said.
There was silence while they pondered the problem.
“Perhaps we must ourselves become the weapon,” Sumadji offered at last.
“What do you mean?” Eldrinda asked him.
“Perhaps we must aim ourselves as a triangle of power -- an arrowhead -- and strike the center of its forehead,” was Sumadji's reply.
The others accepted his plan as the only solution, rather than turning back.
+++++++++++++++++
Ignoring the voice that screamed in his head, Sumadji clung grimly to his course for, though united, every Erlotian must face the guardian of the threshold alone. He aimed himself directly at the point between the eyes of the monster.
In the last moment before impact, Sumadji felt a strange affinity with the guardian, as if each, faced with the imminence of death, was united by the common life that bound them. In the instant before the collision that would fission the atoms of his being across a very wide area of space -- Sumadji closed his eyes.
But no crash came.
When he opened his eyes again. The guardian had disappeared.
And now once again the angel city travelled ahead of them, to guide them through a region that at first seemed to hold four grey planets.
But as The Three came closer, Sumadji realized with horror that the four planets were in fact huge knots of stinking, terrified spirits, tangled into rotting hells. The bodies of the twisted forms trapped in the hells were knotted so tightly together that they were contorted into broken positions.
The screams and the stench were terrible. There were so many of them, and so closely packed that the compression generated unbearable heat, and the tormented spirits cried hopelessly while crushed in suffocating darkness.
Yet strangely, Sumadji saw that most of the twisted bodies near the outer levels were not trying to climb upwards in an attempt, however futile, to gain at least some space and relief, but on the contrary were trying to burrow deeper down into the putrid, stinking mass.
As they came closer Sumadji saw that the dreadful planets were surrounded by millions of small moving lights, like bright white sparks, where the angels of Cephanti were working trying to peel off spirits from the outer layers of the hells. Some of the angels carried rods of fire, and others rods of water.
Most of the trapped spirits, when they saw the rods of fire and water, screamed in fear and tried to burrow deeper down. But there were a few still able in their madness to recognize the rods as beacons of escape and to move, each to its own nature, towards either the rods of fire or of water, and to break free to where the angels could take them up, and carry them away.
And now an angel whom Sumadji recognized as his own personal guardian explained to him how for thousands of years Cephanti's forces had been working to clear the hells that had once been the aetherean plateax where four false gods had built splendid heavens for themselves.
His guardian angel went on to explain that the four false gods had once been angels in the service of Cephanti, but they had become proud. And if pride is a destructive force in mortals, in angels it is truly terrible.
Perhaps it began slowly. Perhaps at first they were pleased to enjoy the adulation they received from mortals on behalf of Eloih -- to hunger for more of it -- to begin to forget, great as they were, that even they were really only stewards appointed by Cephanti, and that without Eloih even Cephanti herself would have no power at all.
So the four false gods agreed between themselves to divide up the world of mortals into four kingdoms, and each one to encourage the mortals of his own kingdom to worship him alone. When mortals died, the four would harvest for themselves the souls who worshipped them, and enlist their labour to build for them beautiful aetherean kingdoms where they could be surrounded by the worship of their own subjects.
"When a mortal died, he would see the god he worshipped on a shining throne at the end of a roadway of light, and would approach his god on his knees, begging admittance to the heaven that he saw before him.
"And so, instead of rising into the infinite realms of Eloih, these poor souls were trapped into building heavens for their false gods, never knowing or believing they had any greater destiny, while the angels of Cephanti wept," Sumadji's guardian told him.
"For the forces of Eloih are powerless to intervene in the affairs of mortals without their invitation.
"For thousands of years this continued. However because the extent of their aetherean plateaux were eventually limited to the power of the false gods who had created them, and now the false heavens began to sink as they became over-burdened with the weight of souls upon them.
"Slowly at first and then faster and faster, the plateaux fell towards the lower regions of existence where the four had once worked alongside Cephanti harvesting and uplifting souls from the darkness of the lower regions -- and only now did they begin to see their mistake.
"Their first reaction of the four false gods was to abandon their mortal kingdoms, to stop the inflow of souls to their aetherean plateaux, and because of this the mortal world was lost to confusion and war and disease as mortals believed their gods had abandoned them, and their deaths only added to the weight of new souls approaching the four false heavens.
"As new souls tried to enter the sinking heavens, the false gods turned them away. But still the plateaux fell, and now the four were forced to cast off souls from the plateaux into the abyss, and so the space between the false heavens was filled with raging and fearful spirits trying to swarm back onto the overcrowded plateaux.
"And now those spirits that were still able to cling to the false heavens, believing that their gods were rejecting them, began to press inward upon them, begging their forgiveness, to be allowed to remain there, where they believed was their only protection from the madness around them.
"They crushed inward in their millions upon their false gods in the centre -- now howling mad and gods no longer."
That is how the four false gods became trapped at the centre of the tightening knots of the hells that had once been their lovely heavens, while the forces of Cephanti worked with rods of fire and water to rescue the maddened spirits abandoned to the abyss and to unravel the hells in order one day, perhaps many thousands of years in the future, to be able to release the four false gods from the hells of their own making.
+++++++++++++++++
Wilderness of space.
Lines of power on an endless grid.
The holding together, then they were out.
Now that the Guardian of the Threshold had been overcome, the way was open for Erlos to higher cycles of energy. Astra, Spectra and Victoria Cities had left behind the fifth-dimensional innerspace region of the four hells, and now re-emerged into four-dimensional space within the vortex of the Mazda Sun.
Mazda was a dark sun, giving off most of its energy not as light, but as invisible radiation much more powerful than the energy radiated by Sanfit. The Erlotians were intending to use its colossal energies to recharge their vortexian engines.
“Confirm lock. Closing. Standby for outer contact solar vortex Mazda.”
“Scanning."
Even from outside the solar system, Erlos' Cities could focus on individual planetary features with great precision – sensors recording everything about the planets from their atmospheric to core compositions, temperatures and pressures, topography, magnetic axis, gravity and, of course the presence of any recognizable life forms.
The data was swiftly sorted, the scan highlighting anything of urgent interest for immediate study, pending later analyses in depth. Eldrinda, Mycyl and Leobin were working to restore the thought links with the Four Cities that had stayed behind. The Seven Cities were all in communication with one another again, through their various special thought links.
Justin Leobin on Victoria City sat quiet and still, engaged in thought contact with Eleni on B'rahma City while on Spectra City Mycyl Mietra strode up and down with his hands behind his back, communicating with Thalia on B'retza.
“Bueloess knows we’re on our way, but not exactly where we are -- unless we are unlucky enough to be observed by chance spotters, or do something to give ourselves away,'' Eldrinda said. ''So we need to guard our thought links carefully now, and minimize keep our contact with Aelutia. to a minimum. There must be no unguarded moment, no careless thought. Keep your frequencies tight and let's work fast.”
'It’s you! You’re safe!'
Deep in his mind he heard his sister Auldrius’ voice. The silence of the vortexian crossing was now broken, as the Erlotians exchanged stories that would become legends.
Light travels more than six hundred thousand million miles in one year. The Three had travelled nearly a million times that distance in a few Aelutian days. Radio waves between them and Aelutia would have taken a million years , but thought is not limited to the speed of light. Thought travels instantaneously.
One more vortexian jump would enable them to reach Bueloess. Eldrinda felt an ecstatic sense of rebirth. His blood seemed to sing in his veins; every atom of his being was poised and vibrant.
+++++++++++++++
I have to learn to trust myself, Eldrinda thought.
The Mazda Sun -- its visible light radiation filtered so they could look at it -- appeared to the Erlotians no larger than a dark violet pea. The planets of the Mazda system were large ones with deep gaseous atmospheres. Although the Mazda sun was smaller than Sanfit, Mazda's gravity was greater.
The Three were now so far away from Aelutia that if their instruments were able to detect their home planet at such a distance, they would be able to see light that had taken nearly a million years to reach them from the planet. They would be able to view Aelutia as it had looked aeons before any of themselves had been born.
But Mazda's radiation was so powerful that the gasses making up the atmospheres of the inner planets closest to the sun -- and even the surface mineral composition of those inner planets that did have a solid core – were in a state of plasmic flux. The atoms were ionized constantly, and even their atomic nuclei splitting and reforming, changing from one element into another, under the bombardment of such enormous radiation.
That they had found no visible life-forms on these fiercely irradiated planets was hardly unexpected. But Erlos knew that life gives birth to form -- not form to life -- so the fact their sensors could not detect visible life did not mean that no life existed there, only that the Mazda system appeared unable to support any life-forms that Erlos could recognize as such.
Anyway, there would be plenty of time for Erlos to analyze the data gathered from the Mazda system later. They had to leave soon because, though they were keeping a good distance from the Mazda sun itself, its radiation would soon start to become dangerous to them, in spite of all their shields and defences.
Data confirming this was now starting to come in from all the cities. But they had been able to complete charging and were now preparing to make a second vortexian crossing. Instruments registered the powerful force field locking the three cities together.
Again the simplified idea was to get up as much speed as possible, with a very precise target of direction, and focus their combined will through the triangle of power to act upon the lithos at the moment of crossing through the fourth dimensional time barrier into the fifth dimension of innerspace where they would have to trust themselves to the guidance of Cephanti's angels on the unknown vortexian roadways
It would not be long.
We're moving fast now.
Be careful. I love you.
I love you too.
Eldrinda tried to keep mental contact with his sister Auldrius for as long as he could, while Astra City accelerated towards the fourth dimensional barrier. Her mental presence was like a talisman to him. The acceleration pushed Eldrinda hard back against the stabilizers as the golden spirals of light spun around him in deep and silent harmony.
(end of chapter eleven)
Worlds hung like jewels on a bracelet, suspended limitless upon a halo of light.
“It’s wonderful,” she sighed.
Ai was the youngest Astran captain. She had taken over the seat of Triastra state from her father, Arun, when he had retired a few years earlier, though Arun continued to advise his daughter.
“Yes” Sumadji agreed.
He moved over to where she was sitting, Sumadji had loved Ai for years, but was afraid to let her know the depth his feelings, in case he lost her friendship. Together they looked out at the lovely, shining worlds silently turning in an azure vault of space.
Ai laid a hand on his arm, her touch so light that he could barely feel it.
“So blue …” she said.
Sumadji laid his own hand over hers, and she smiled. Just at that moment Eldrinda appeared, to join them, and Sumadji took his hand away. His heart was pounding in his chest.
+++++++++++++++
Unseen to the Erlotians, the angels of Cephanti had been with them during the fifth dimensional crossing and now an angel city made itself visible to them – a thousand times greater and more splendid than Astra City itself, and filled with light and music. The angel city went ahead, leading The Three into the innerspace, and the Erlotians had only to follow, each alone with his own mind.
They journeyed through kaleidoscopic voids of light and colour in a space between being and nothingness -- half-formed images ready either to solidify and take concrete form, or else to dissolve back into the aether from whence they were starting to take shape.
For how long these states existed the Erlotians could not guess, until eventually they began, like children whose eyes began for the first time to discern the patterns of forms from shapeless colours as yet unrecognizable, to be able to see and to look consciously around themselves.
Flung into the mixing and forming of worlds where matter and antimatter crashed in explosion of stars, The Three were safe upon a roadway -- a stairway which soared upward into infinite distance. From nuclear vortex, arching upwards at incredible velocity, they looked out from the path they were on.
They saw worlds forming. They saw gods in their gardens upon aetherean plateaux. They saw worlds of infinite variety as they moved through space of utter silence and space of crashing symphony.
They looked out from the roadway upon madness and divinity. They trembled before the gaze of beings magnificent and terrible who paused to watch Erlos’ passing -- until eventually the roadway bought the Erlotians up before a plateau, whose entrance was guarded by a terrible sentry whose appearance differed to each one of them.
Sumadji perceived the sentry as a colossus that walked between worlds and carried a staff with which, like a bored child swinging at stones with a stick, it struck out at worlds at random. Sometimes the staff missed its mark, meeting just empty space, and the spectre grunted with the effort of the empty, unsatisfying blow, and sometimes the staff connected, and then a world exploded into fragments -- striking at each world only once, leaving it to live if the blow missed its mark.
Remembering the Badge of Cephanti, Sumadji calmed himself by breathing slowly and deeply. He concentrated on trying to see past the sentry but, beyond the threshold of the plateau, everything was now dark.
“It is the Guardian of the Threshold,” offered Leobin of Victoria City: “For Erlos to have reached this point is a great achievement; for if we can pass the guardian, it will never trouble us again -- and we must pass it to reach Bueloess.”
“It blocks our way utterly,” said Eldrinda.
''Victoria City believes this guardian is really just the spectre created by our own doubt, which now becomes an obstacle to us,” Leobin said.
“How it rages!” Eldrinda said.
“Nor can our weapons be effective here in the innerspace,” Leobin said.
There was silence while they pondered the problem.
“Perhaps we must ourselves become the weapon,” Sumadji offered at last.
“What do you mean?” Eldrinda asked him.
“Perhaps we must aim ourselves as a triangle of power -- an arrowhead -- and strike the center of its forehead,” was Sumadji's reply.
The others accepted his plan as the only solution, rather than turning back.
+++++++++++++++++
Ignoring the voice that screamed in his head, Sumadji clung grimly to his course for, though united, every Erlotian must face the guardian of the threshold alone. He aimed himself directly at the point between the eyes of the monster.
In the last moment before impact, Sumadji felt a strange affinity with the guardian, as if each, faced with the imminence of death, was united by the common life that bound them. In the instant before the collision that would fission the atoms of his being across a very wide area of space -- Sumadji closed his eyes.
But no crash came.
When he opened his eyes again. The guardian had disappeared.
And now once again the angel city travelled ahead of them, to guide them through a region that at first seemed to hold four grey planets.
But as The Three came closer, Sumadji realized with horror that the four planets were in fact huge knots of stinking, terrified spirits, tangled into rotting hells. The bodies of the twisted forms trapped in the hells were knotted so tightly together that they were contorted into broken positions.
The screams and the stench were terrible. There were so many of them, and so closely packed that the compression generated unbearable heat, and the tormented spirits cried hopelessly while crushed in suffocating darkness.
Yet strangely, Sumadji saw that most of the twisted bodies near the outer levels were not trying to climb upwards in an attempt, however futile, to gain at least some space and relief, but on the contrary were trying to burrow deeper down into the putrid, stinking mass.
As they came closer Sumadji saw that the dreadful planets were surrounded by millions of small moving lights, like bright white sparks, where the angels of Cephanti were working trying to peel off spirits from the outer layers of the hells. Some of the angels carried rods of fire, and others rods of water.
Most of the trapped spirits, when they saw the rods of fire and water, screamed in fear and tried to burrow deeper down. But there were a few still able in their madness to recognize the rods as beacons of escape and to move, each to its own nature, towards either the rods of fire or of water, and to break free to where the angels could take them up, and carry them away.
And now an angel whom Sumadji recognized as his own personal guardian explained to him how for thousands of years Cephanti's forces had been working to clear the hells that had once been the aetherean plateax where four false gods had built splendid heavens for themselves.
His guardian angel went on to explain that the four false gods had once been angels in the service of Cephanti, but they had become proud. And if pride is a destructive force in mortals, in angels it is truly terrible.
Perhaps it began slowly. Perhaps at first they were pleased to enjoy the adulation they received from mortals on behalf of Eloih -- to hunger for more of it -- to begin to forget, great as they were, that even they were really only stewards appointed by Cephanti, and that without Eloih even Cephanti herself would have no power at all.
So the four false gods agreed between themselves to divide up the world of mortals into four kingdoms, and each one to encourage the mortals of his own kingdom to worship him alone. When mortals died, the four would harvest for themselves the souls who worshipped them, and enlist their labour to build for them beautiful aetherean kingdoms where they could be surrounded by the worship of their own subjects.
"When a mortal died, he would see the god he worshipped on a shining throne at the end of a roadway of light, and would approach his god on his knees, begging admittance to the heaven that he saw before him.
"And so, instead of rising into the infinite realms of Eloih, these poor souls were trapped into building heavens for their false gods, never knowing or believing they had any greater destiny, while the angels of Cephanti wept," Sumadji's guardian told him.
"For the forces of Eloih are powerless to intervene in the affairs of mortals without their invitation.
"For thousands of years this continued. However because the extent of their aetherean plateaux were eventually limited to the power of the false gods who had created them, and now the false heavens began to sink as they became over-burdened with the weight of souls upon them.
"Slowly at first and then faster and faster, the plateaux fell towards the lower regions of existence where the four had once worked alongside Cephanti harvesting and uplifting souls from the darkness of the lower regions -- and only now did they begin to see their mistake.
"Their first reaction of the four false gods was to abandon their mortal kingdoms, to stop the inflow of souls to their aetherean plateaux, and because of this the mortal world was lost to confusion and war and disease as mortals believed their gods had abandoned them, and their deaths only added to the weight of new souls approaching the four false heavens.
"As new souls tried to enter the sinking heavens, the false gods turned them away. But still the plateaux fell, and now the four were forced to cast off souls from the plateaux into the abyss, and so the space between the false heavens was filled with raging and fearful spirits trying to swarm back onto the overcrowded plateaux.
"And now those spirits that were still able to cling to the false heavens, believing that their gods were rejecting them, began to press inward upon them, begging their forgiveness, to be allowed to remain there, where they believed was their only protection from the madness around them.
"They crushed inward in their millions upon their false gods in the centre -- now howling mad and gods no longer."
That is how the four false gods became trapped at the centre of the tightening knots of the hells that had once been their lovely heavens, while the forces of Cephanti worked with rods of fire and water to rescue the maddened spirits abandoned to the abyss and to unravel the hells in order one day, perhaps many thousands of years in the future, to be able to release the four false gods from the hells of their own making.
+++++++++++++++++
Wilderness of space.
Lines of power on an endless grid.
The holding together, then they were out.
Now that the Guardian of the Threshold had been overcome, the way was open for Erlos to higher cycles of energy. Astra, Spectra and Victoria Cities had left behind the fifth-dimensional innerspace region of the four hells, and now re-emerged into four-dimensional space within the vortex of the Mazda Sun.
Mazda was a dark sun, giving off most of its energy not as light, but as invisible radiation much more powerful than the energy radiated by Sanfit. The Erlotians were intending to use its colossal energies to recharge their vortexian engines.
“Confirm lock. Closing. Standby for outer contact solar vortex Mazda.”
“Scanning."
Even from outside the solar system, Erlos' Cities could focus on individual planetary features with great precision – sensors recording everything about the planets from their atmospheric to core compositions, temperatures and pressures, topography, magnetic axis, gravity and, of course the presence of any recognizable life forms.
The data was swiftly sorted, the scan highlighting anything of urgent interest for immediate study, pending later analyses in depth. Eldrinda, Mycyl and Leobin were working to restore the thought links with the Four Cities that had stayed behind. The Seven Cities were all in communication with one another again, through their various special thought links.
Justin Leobin on Victoria City sat quiet and still, engaged in thought contact with Eleni on B'rahma City while on Spectra City Mycyl Mietra strode up and down with his hands behind his back, communicating with Thalia on B'retza.
“Bueloess knows we’re on our way, but not exactly where we are -- unless we are unlucky enough to be observed by chance spotters, or do something to give ourselves away,'' Eldrinda said. ''So we need to guard our thought links carefully now, and minimize keep our contact with Aelutia. to a minimum. There must be no unguarded moment, no careless thought. Keep your frequencies tight and let's work fast.”
'It’s you! You’re safe!'
Deep in his mind he heard his sister Auldrius’ voice. The silence of the vortexian crossing was now broken, as the Erlotians exchanged stories that would become legends.
Light travels more than six hundred thousand million miles in one year. The Three had travelled nearly a million times that distance in a few Aelutian days. Radio waves between them and Aelutia would have taken a million years , but thought is not limited to the speed of light. Thought travels instantaneously.
One more vortexian jump would enable them to reach Bueloess. Eldrinda felt an ecstatic sense of rebirth. His blood seemed to sing in his veins; every atom of his being was poised and vibrant.
+++++++++++++++
I have to learn to trust myself, Eldrinda thought.
The Mazda Sun -- its visible light radiation filtered so they could look at it -- appeared to the Erlotians no larger than a dark violet pea. The planets of the Mazda system were large ones with deep gaseous atmospheres. Although the Mazda sun was smaller than Sanfit, Mazda's gravity was greater.
The Three were now so far away from Aelutia that if their instruments were able to detect their home planet at such a distance, they would be able to see light that had taken nearly a million years to reach them from the planet. They would be able to view Aelutia as it had looked aeons before any of themselves had been born.
But Mazda's radiation was so powerful that the gasses making up the atmospheres of the inner planets closest to the sun -- and even the surface mineral composition of those inner planets that did have a solid core – were in a state of plasmic flux. The atoms were ionized constantly, and even their atomic nuclei splitting and reforming, changing from one element into another, under the bombardment of such enormous radiation.
That they had found no visible life-forms on these fiercely irradiated planets was hardly unexpected. But Erlos knew that life gives birth to form -- not form to life -- so the fact their sensors could not detect visible life did not mean that no life existed there, only that the Mazda system appeared unable to support any life-forms that Erlos could recognize as such.
Anyway, there would be plenty of time for Erlos to analyze the data gathered from the Mazda system later. They had to leave soon because, though they were keeping a good distance from the Mazda sun itself, its radiation would soon start to become dangerous to them, in spite of all their shields and defences.
Data confirming this was now starting to come in from all the cities. But they had been able to complete charging and were now preparing to make a second vortexian crossing. Instruments registered the powerful force field locking the three cities together.
Again the simplified idea was to get up as much speed as possible, with a very precise target of direction, and focus their combined will through the triangle of power to act upon the lithos at the moment of crossing through the fourth dimensional time barrier into the fifth dimension of innerspace where they would have to trust themselves to the guidance of Cephanti's angels on the unknown vortexian roadways
It would not be long.
We're moving fast now.
Be careful. I love you.
I love you too.
Eldrinda tried to keep mental contact with his sister Auldrius for as long as he could, while Astra City accelerated towards the fourth dimensional barrier. Her mental presence was like a talisman to him. The acceleration pushed Eldrinda hard back against the stabilizers as the golden spirals of light spun around him in deep and silent harmony.
(end of chapter eleven)
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Chapter Twelve
From the Diary of Hamish El Tyrone:
Yes, I was once a governor of a large territory, In those days there was no want and very little strife or fighting in the Aazyrian land of Llozd, where the famous university of Quod attracted scholars and scientists from all over the land. But when Mykros of the Ukonaai took control of the garden kingdom all this changed. In all this Clarissa my now departed wife was always my strongest comfort and support.
Now I am like a floating seed blown on the wind. The earth moves beneath me, shifting, changing as I drift above it watching, looking, never touching.
The light of Eloih contains all good. The doings of this world no longer mean a thing to me. I just go through the motions, wanting nothing but inner peace. This world is not my home.
I’m not a good man or a clever man. But I am a lucky man. Eloih has taken away from me everything, and so given me the key to the narrow door which leads to freedom -- a door that was obscured by the tangled vines and undergrowth of my previous material concerns.
I see buildings, chimneys. Carriages cross an old stone bridge across the river, which is always peace, always the same. The words flow from my pen, as I write upon the empty page of yesterday.
+++++++++++++
Sorac and Tyl and Toache were on their way at dawn.
By midmorning the jungle has thickened. They found they often had to dismount to clear a way and by noon they could no longer ride and had to lead their horses as they tried to cut their way through the tangle of vines and branches, but making little progress. Though the lyn kept them safe from mira, they were wary of other predators and were tormented by biting, stinging insects.
By late afternoon the jungle was still getting thicker and Toache was no longer sure of the way. Darkness would come quickly. They decided to make a clearing and a fire as soon as they found water. Tyl stood exhausted, a machete hanging limply in her hand. She wiped her cheek with her wrist, smearing dirt and sweat. Sorac took her in his arms. She rested her forehead against him.
“We’ll soon be clear,” he offered. But his words sounded uncertain, especially to himself.
On reaching a slow stream they spent the last hour of daylight clearing a space for the camp. As the shadows darkened they made a fire and prepared the lyn potion. Afterwards they ate something and then slept wearily.
They set off again at dawn. By noon they had progressed into a very dense area where they would have to abandon the horses. They decided instead to try and cut a way around it. They were hot and short tempered, their faces sore with insect bites. They retraced their progress. By night they had not got very far. They camped again.
By noon of the next day Toache was forced to admit that he was lost.
They had reached a wide green river. Tyl wanted to bathe. Toache replied with furious sign language which she translated for Sorac: “That river is too dangerous. There are fierce predators below the surface.”
The air was humid, thick and close. They were all itchy with insect bites and streaked with dirt and sweat. Toache stood with a machete in his hand, a miserable expression on his big, dumb face, as if the whole thing was his fault, as hot, fat raindrops began to fall.
“How shall we get across this river?” Sorac asked.
Toache responded with hand signals, that Tyl translated: “It should be possible to build a raft big enough to carry over one horse at a time, and then ourselves, H'zaan."
For the first time he used the Aazyrian word H’zaan – Chosen One.
And so Sorac and Toache started cutting down trees for the raft, while Tyl helped trim the logs. She was hot, dirty, wet and completely exhausted. The trees groaned and came down, and the rain continued as they cut the logs to size and Toache the boatmaker expertly fitted them together into the beginnings of a stout raft.
Later the rain stopped for a while and Sorac struggled to make a fire with wet wood while Tyl stared heavily at the sluggish green river. He had just succeeded in coaxing a grudging flame when the rain came down again.
They worked on in the rain. They were blistered, sore and wet when they stopped for a short break and stood in silence, listening to the sounds of the darkening forest. A big leaf let go a pool of rainwater that it had been holding and sluiced a warm, heavy runnel down onto another leaf with a depressing spattering sound.
Tyl called them to eat, and they put down their tools.
They ate flat corn cakes with a little cheese, huddled uncomfortably in wet clothes without fire or, for Sorac, the prospect of a pipe. They decided to use offcuts from the raft they were building to make a crude lean-to shelter of leaves and branches to give them partial shelter from the rain for the night that was quickly coming.
Once they had a crude shelter built Toache brought out his flask and three mugs. Tyl shook her head. He poured a little of the spirit into each of two mugs and passed one to Sorac, who accepted it gratefully, swatting savagely at a mosquito that was whining around near his ear. The unpleasant implosion on his eardrum added one more small pain to his overall discomfort.
The forest dripped around them. He clapped again at the side of his face.
The rain continued without let-up and they slept uncomfortably under their leaking shelter.
Tyl woke before dawn from the unconscious sleep of pure exhaustion to renewed awareness of her discomfort. Her joints ached, her feet were sore, her hands were scratched and her face was puffy from insect bites. Rain denied the comfort of fire or hot water.
Toache began to arouse himself. Sorac woke and started grumbling about the rain, the jungle, the insects, and life’s overall worth. Toache’s expression agreed, and so Tyl decided to take it upon herself to be bright and cheerful.
The greyness around them began to fade as somewhere above the clouds the sun was rising, its rays absorbed by cheerless skies long before they reached the earth. They ate a quick cold meal and then set to work. The rain persisted.
While Sorac and Toache went back to building the raft, Tyl squelched about in the rain, finding poles. She stitched together horse blankets. When she had completed the task to her satisfaction she took one of the long straight branches she had found and asked Sorac to trim it for her. He looked at her questioningly.
“The main support,” she said: “For a fire tent."
Sorac performed the task. She thanked him and he went back to work on the raft. A few minutes later she came back with another branch. When he had trimmed for her about a dozen poles altogether, she allowed him to go back to work.
She erected a reasonably waterproof structure and then busied herself scratching for small dry scraps of wood buried under the sodden forest humus. By noon she had a fire going inside the tent, while the rain continued unabated.
Her mood had improved.
She collected bigger bits of wood and laid them out around the small fire to dry. Later she was able to call Sorac and Toache into the fire tent for hot soup, to the profuse gratitude of her two sodden companions.
Afterwards they drank as tea the lyn infusion, having come to enjoy its taste, and also its peculiar effect -- which seemed to quicken their senses, as it did the horses. Sorac and Toache worked all afternoon while Tyl put together another tent to sleep in, away from the smoke of the fire.
Now, with their senses heightened by lyn, they all became aware of something. Perhaps the jungle was unnaturally silent. Their nerves, alert for danger, cried a warning. One leaf dripped upon another leaf -- leaf upon leaf, dripping out a tune.
When at last they came in for supper the jungle was getting dark. They stooped gratefully into the smoky fire tent and dried themselves off before changing into clothes which Tyl had dried by the fire. They ate without talking much. Their earlier unease was now much worse. They sensed they were in danger, but from what they did not know.
Tyl reached out a sleepy hand for Sorac and pulled him down beside her and rolled against him. Sorac knew he must stay awake. Moments later he was sleeping.
He dreamed he saw a man alone in a dark balloon, silhouetted in an aura of golden light against the darkness of the sky, rising into regions where the air was so cold that flesh turned to ice -- rising to where the sky was only darkness and even an eagle could not spread its wings.
++++++++++++
Toache ducked out of the tent into the rain. Though he was exhausted and his eyelids felt like heavy nutshells, he knew he must stay awake to face the unseen danger. He hoped the rain would keep him awake for a few hours, after which he would wake the shepherd to take over guard duty for a shift.
He filled a mug with water and rinsed out his mouth with it. He took a piece of charcoal from the edge of the fire and crumbled it. He mixed the charcoal with a little salt and then with a thick finger began rubbing the mixture against his few remaining teeth to clean them.
At that moment came a crash of breaking branches from the jungle and an apelike creature lurched into the clearing, bellowing loudly.
It was a Kradok.
The shepherd was out of the tent in an instant -- and had already loosed an arrow at the throat of the huge, hairy creature. The kradok’s hide was so tough, and its muscle so solid, that the arrow failed to penetrate. It tore the arrow out with a scream of rage, but the delay gave Toache time to dive at its legs and bring it down in the mud.
Toache’s roaring mixed with the bellowing of the kradok as he struggled to pin the powerful creature down with his own weight but the kradok threw him off like a rag.
Tyl emerged half asleep from the tent and screamed.
“Get behind me!” Sorac shouted.
He loosed another arrow at the creature’s neck as it was rising to its feet.
Again the arrow failed to penetrate, and again the kradok tore the arrow out, bellowing in rage.
And again the arrow slowed it for an instant.
Desperately Toache reached for the nearest weapon he could find -- an axe -- and this time he made no mistake. With one swing of the axe, he severed the creature’s foot.
Tyl was screaming, Sorac was shouting, Toache was roaring incoherently and the kradok was bellowing and howling as it toppled over backward, spraying sheets of blood into the rain.
Toache stepped up and raised the shining axe to split the kradok's skull.
But something in the creature’s eyes made him delay the stroke. Half animal half man, it ceased to rage and stared up at Toache with brutish brown eyes, writhing on the ground while blood gouted in thick spurts from the terrible wound and churned with mud.
The kradok saw Toache surrounded by a golden aura of light, and behind him Sorac and Tyl surrounded by the same light.
It tried to rise upon its stump, but Toache gestured with the axe: “Stay down!"
The kradok, like most wild beasts, was mostly concerned with its own stomach. Now on the precipice of death, its mind found a different concern, and in the instant before it lost consciousness it prerhaps took the first step towards becoming something greater. Toache let his hand fall to his side, still holding the axe.
“We must bind it securely.” He heaved for breath.
“But it wants to eat us?” Tyl objected.
“It did indeed -- but now I think it just wants to live,” Toache said, in the sign language that Sorac was starting to understand.
He let the axe fall and stood panting, with his hands on his knees: “I must cauterize the wound, or it will bleed to death.”
“But why?” Sorac asked him.
“I just can’t kill it,” shrugged Toache. “We’re going to need your ointment now, H’zaan.”
He applied a tourniquet before binding the unconscious creature, and then he expertly sealed the bleeding stump and stitched the wound, after cleaning it with hot water and smearing it with the ointment. The Kradok stirred and shifted while he performed the operation, but mercifully did not regain consciousness.
++++++++++++
From the diary of Hamish el Tyrone
Black curtain in the sky. The writer, trying to find words: to cage the swift bird of thought, before it is gone, flown out the window. Moth flutter. Velvet wings. The booming fog horn. The rattling wind. Candle in a bottle. Words. Nothing can stop the words.
Honesty. Simplicity.
Images.
Spin spider, spin.
I know so little.
Candle flame. Darkness. Lessons in the night sky. Eternal truth. Now is the truth. This pen is the truth. I am a mirror. In me you see yourself. Timeless self. Words fall onto the virgin page, accumulating. Cloud billowing in over the saddle of the mountain.
I am an ordinary man, bound to the natural world. I sit in silence here in my room early in the morning while the sky is still dark, wanting only to feel better than I do. Joy is missing. I am nothing. I just want peace of mind.
Nothing can stop the words.
++++++++++++++++
As the kradok began to recover consciousness it shook its head and moaned, and then it began to howl and strain against the ropes that held it.
“What is it?” Sorac asked.
“Man’s ancestor, perhaps,” Toache shrugged.
The kradok struggled uselessly and then lay back in the mud with its head raised in agony and its suffering eyes fixed on Toache’s face, seeing the golden aura round his head.
“I will give it a draught, to make it sleep,” Toache said.
He fetched a small flask. He poured some of the greenish liquid into a cup. He mixed it with some water and then he knelt down by the creature’s head and held the cup to its thick lips.
“You do understand me, Kradok,” Toache directed his thoughts at the suffering creature: “I wish you no harm. Drink. It will take away the pain.”
The kradok obeyed him. Almost at once its straining neck muscles relaxed. Its head fell back and in a few minutes it was sleeping. Toache waited until he was sure the draught had taken effect and then he looked up.
“I have given it enough to kill two men. It will sleep for a quite a long time.”
“Make sure those ropes are strong enough,” Tyl said.
“It knows the jungle,” Toache said. “That river is very dangerous. This creature may be our best chance. We may not need the raft.”
Sorac nodded. “Sleep now, Toache,” he said. “I’ll stand guard for an hour or two then wake you.”
“Nay, H’zaan. I cannot sleep,” Toache replied.
The kradok lay unconscious. Tyl made tea and they talked for a while until at last Toache’s eyes dulled and he fell asleep. Tyl put an arm around Sorac’s waist.
“It’s securely tied and drugged,” she said. “Sleep now. I’ll wake you if it moves an inch.”
She sat near the fire while Sorac slept.
The forest dripped. The heavy flowing river made a sloshing sound. The night wrapped her around as she looked into the glowing coals. Her eyes moved to the kradok: unconscious, filthy, in the mud -- and then back to Sorac.
She looked at his sleeping face in the light of the fire. He has no cunning, she thought: no guile.
The tent flap was open. She stood in the open doorway of the fire-tent and looked up into the night. The rain had eased for a while. She looked up through the dark encircling trees. Slow clouds opened a bright tunnel to the moon.
She thought of her father. She tried to imagine the blue world he had described. Wet leaves dripped in the jungle. The thick green river sloshed against its banks, and the pale moon cast frozen light through the hole in the clouds.
(end of chapter twelve)
From the Diary of Hamish El Tyrone:
Yes, I was once a governor of a large territory, In those days there was no want and very little strife or fighting in the Aazyrian land of Llozd, where the famous university of Quod attracted scholars and scientists from all over the land. But when Mykros of the Ukonaai took control of the garden kingdom all this changed. In all this Clarissa my now departed wife was always my strongest comfort and support.
Now I am like a floating seed blown on the wind. The earth moves beneath me, shifting, changing as I drift above it watching, looking, never touching.
The light of Eloih contains all good. The doings of this world no longer mean a thing to me. I just go through the motions, wanting nothing but inner peace. This world is not my home.
I’m not a good man or a clever man. But I am a lucky man. Eloih has taken away from me everything, and so given me the key to the narrow door which leads to freedom -- a door that was obscured by the tangled vines and undergrowth of my previous material concerns.
I see buildings, chimneys. Carriages cross an old stone bridge across the river, which is always peace, always the same. The words flow from my pen, as I write upon the empty page of yesterday.
+++++++++++++
Sorac and Tyl and Toache were on their way at dawn.
By midmorning the jungle has thickened. They found they often had to dismount to clear a way and by noon they could no longer ride and had to lead their horses as they tried to cut their way through the tangle of vines and branches, but making little progress. Though the lyn kept them safe from mira, they were wary of other predators and were tormented by biting, stinging insects.
By late afternoon the jungle was still getting thicker and Toache was no longer sure of the way. Darkness would come quickly. They decided to make a clearing and a fire as soon as they found water. Tyl stood exhausted, a machete hanging limply in her hand. She wiped her cheek with her wrist, smearing dirt and sweat. Sorac took her in his arms. She rested her forehead against him.
“We’ll soon be clear,” he offered. But his words sounded uncertain, especially to himself.
On reaching a slow stream they spent the last hour of daylight clearing a space for the camp. As the shadows darkened they made a fire and prepared the lyn potion. Afterwards they ate something and then slept wearily.
They set off again at dawn. By noon they had progressed into a very dense area where they would have to abandon the horses. They decided instead to try and cut a way around it. They were hot and short tempered, their faces sore with insect bites. They retraced their progress. By night they had not got very far. They camped again.
By noon of the next day Toache was forced to admit that he was lost.
They had reached a wide green river. Tyl wanted to bathe. Toache replied with furious sign language which she translated for Sorac: “That river is too dangerous. There are fierce predators below the surface.”
The air was humid, thick and close. They were all itchy with insect bites and streaked with dirt and sweat. Toache stood with a machete in his hand, a miserable expression on his big, dumb face, as if the whole thing was his fault, as hot, fat raindrops began to fall.
“How shall we get across this river?” Sorac asked.
Toache responded with hand signals, that Tyl translated: “It should be possible to build a raft big enough to carry over one horse at a time, and then ourselves, H'zaan."
For the first time he used the Aazyrian word H’zaan – Chosen One.
And so Sorac and Toache started cutting down trees for the raft, while Tyl helped trim the logs. She was hot, dirty, wet and completely exhausted. The trees groaned and came down, and the rain continued as they cut the logs to size and Toache the boatmaker expertly fitted them together into the beginnings of a stout raft.
Later the rain stopped for a while and Sorac struggled to make a fire with wet wood while Tyl stared heavily at the sluggish green river. He had just succeeded in coaxing a grudging flame when the rain came down again.
They worked on in the rain. They were blistered, sore and wet when they stopped for a short break and stood in silence, listening to the sounds of the darkening forest. A big leaf let go a pool of rainwater that it had been holding and sluiced a warm, heavy runnel down onto another leaf with a depressing spattering sound.
Tyl called them to eat, and they put down their tools.
They ate flat corn cakes with a little cheese, huddled uncomfortably in wet clothes without fire or, for Sorac, the prospect of a pipe. They decided to use offcuts from the raft they were building to make a crude lean-to shelter of leaves and branches to give them partial shelter from the rain for the night that was quickly coming.
Once they had a crude shelter built Toache brought out his flask and three mugs. Tyl shook her head. He poured a little of the spirit into each of two mugs and passed one to Sorac, who accepted it gratefully, swatting savagely at a mosquito that was whining around near his ear. The unpleasant implosion on his eardrum added one more small pain to his overall discomfort.
The forest dripped around them. He clapped again at the side of his face.
The rain continued without let-up and they slept uncomfortably under their leaking shelter.
Tyl woke before dawn from the unconscious sleep of pure exhaustion to renewed awareness of her discomfort. Her joints ached, her feet were sore, her hands were scratched and her face was puffy from insect bites. Rain denied the comfort of fire or hot water.
Toache began to arouse himself. Sorac woke and started grumbling about the rain, the jungle, the insects, and life’s overall worth. Toache’s expression agreed, and so Tyl decided to take it upon herself to be bright and cheerful.
The greyness around them began to fade as somewhere above the clouds the sun was rising, its rays absorbed by cheerless skies long before they reached the earth. They ate a quick cold meal and then set to work. The rain persisted.
While Sorac and Toache went back to building the raft, Tyl squelched about in the rain, finding poles. She stitched together horse blankets. When she had completed the task to her satisfaction she took one of the long straight branches she had found and asked Sorac to trim it for her. He looked at her questioningly.
“The main support,” she said: “For a fire tent."
Sorac performed the task. She thanked him and he went back to work on the raft. A few minutes later she came back with another branch. When he had trimmed for her about a dozen poles altogether, she allowed him to go back to work.
She erected a reasonably waterproof structure and then busied herself scratching for small dry scraps of wood buried under the sodden forest humus. By noon she had a fire going inside the tent, while the rain continued unabated.
Her mood had improved.
She collected bigger bits of wood and laid them out around the small fire to dry. Later she was able to call Sorac and Toache into the fire tent for hot soup, to the profuse gratitude of her two sodden companions.
Afterwards they drank as tea the lyn infusion, having come to enjoy its taste, and also its peculiar effect -- which seemed to quicken their senses, as it did the horses. Sorac and Toache worked all afternoon while Tyl put together another tent to sleep in, away from the smoke of the fire.
Now, with their senses heightened by lyn, they all became aware of something. Perhaps the jungle was unnaturally silent. Their nerves, alert for danger, cried a warning. One leaf dripped upon another leaf -- leaf upon leaf, dripping out a tune.
When at last they came in for supper the jungle was getting dark. They stooped gratefully into the smoky fire tent and dried themselves off before changing into clothes which Tyl had dried by the fire. They ate without talking much. Their earlier unease was now much worse. They sensed they were in danger, but from what they did not know.
Tyl reached out a sleepy hand for Sorac and pulled him down beside her and rolled against him. Sorac knew he must stay awake. Moments later he was sleeping.
He dreamed he saw a man alone in a dark balloon, silhouetted in an aura of golden light against the darkness of the sky, rising into regions where the air was so cold that flesh turned to ice -- rising to where the sky was only darkness and even an eagle could not spread its wings.
++++++++++++
Toache ducked out of the tent into the rain. Though he was exhausted and his eyelids felt like heavy nutshells, he knew he must stay awake to face the unseen danger. He hoped the rain would keep him awake for a few hours, after which he would wake the shepherd to take over guard duty for a shift.
He filled a mug with water and rinsed out his mouth with it. He took a piece of charcoal from the edge of the fire and crumbled it. He mixed the charcoal with a little salt and then with a thick finger began rubbing the mixture against his few remaining teeth to clean them.
At that moment came a crash of breaking branches from the jungle and an apelike creature lurched into the clearing, bellowing loudly.
It was a Kradok.
The shepherd was out of the tent in an instant -- and had already loosed an arrow at the throat of the huge, hairy creature. The kradok’s hide was so tough, and its muscle so solid, that the arrow failed to penetrate. It tore the arrow out with a scream of rage, but the delay gave Toache time to dive at its legs and bring it down in the mud.
Toache’s roaring mixed with the bellowing of the kradok as he struggled to pin the powerful creature down with his own weight but the kradok threw him off like a rag.
Tyl emerged half asleep from the tent and screamed.
“Get behind me!” Sorac shouted.
He loosed another arrow at the creature’s neck as it was rising to its feet.
Again the arrow failed to penetrate, and again the kradok tore the arrow out, bellowing in rage.
And again the arrow slowed it for an instant.
Desperately Toache reached for the nearest weapon he could find -- an axe -- and this time he made no mistake. With one swing of the axe, he severed the creature’s foot.
Tyl was screaming, Sorac was shouting, Toache was roaring incoherently and the kradok was bellowing and howling as it toppled over backward, spraying sheets of blood into the rain.
Toache stepped up and raised the shining axe to split the kradok's skull.
But something in the creature’s eyes made him delay the stroke. Half animal half man, it ceased to rage and stared up at Toache with brutish brown eyes, writhing on the ground while blood gouted in thick spurts from the terrible wound and churned with mud.
The kradok saw Toache surrounded by a golden aura of light, and behind him Sorac and Tyl surrounded by the same light.
It tried to rise upon its stump, but Toache gestured with the axe: “Stay down!"
The kradok, like most wild beasts, was mostly concerned with its own stomach. Now on the precipice of death, its mind found a different concern, and in the instant before it lost consciousness it prerhaps took the first step towards becoming something greater. Toache let his hand fall to his side, still holding the axe.
“We must bind it securely.” He heaved for breath.
“But it wants to eat us?” Tyl objected.
“It did indeed -- but now I think it just wants to live,” Toache said, in the sign language that Sorac was starting to understand.
He let the axe fall and stood panting, with his hands on his knees: “I must cauterize the wound, or it will bleed to death.”
“But why?” Sorac asked him.
“I just can’t kill it,” shrugged Toache. “We’re going to need your ointment now, H’zaan.”
He applied a tourniquet before binding the unconscious creature, and then he expertly sealed the bleeding stump and stitched the wound, after cleaning it with hot water and smearing it with the ointment. The Kradok stirred and shifted while he performed the operation, but mercifully did not regain consciousness.
++++++++++++
From the diary of Hamish el Tyrone
Black curtain in the sky. The writer, trying to find words: to cage the swift bird of thought, before it is gone, flown out the window. Moth flutter. Velvet wings. The booming fog horn. The rattling wind. Candle in a bottle. Words. Nothing can stop the words.
Honesty. Simplicity.
Images.
Spin spider, spin.
I know so little.
Candle flame. Darkness. Lessons in the night sky. Eternal truth. Now is the truth. This pen is the truth. I am a mirror. In me you see yourself. Timeless self. Words fall onto the virgin page, accumulating. Cloud billowing in over the saddle of the mountain.
I am an ordinary man, bound to the natural world. I sit in silence here in my room early in the morning while the sky is still dark, wanting only to feel better than I do. Joy is missing. I am nothing. I just want peace of mind.
Nothing can stop the words.
++++++++++++++++
As the kradok began to recover consciousness it shook its head and moaned, and then it began to howl and strain against the ropes that held it.
“What is it?” Sorac asked.
“Man’s ancestor, perhaps,” Toache shrugged.
The kradok struggled uselessly and then lay back in the mud with its head raised in agony and its suffering eyes fixed on Toache’s face, seeing the golden aura round his head.
“I will give it a draught, to make it sleep,” Toache said.
He fetched a small flask. He poured some of the greenish liquid into a cup. He mixed it with some water and then he knelt down by the creature’s head and held the cup to its thick lips.
“You do understand me, Kradok,” Toache directed his thoughts at the suffering creature: “I wish you no harm. Drink. It will take away the pain.”
The kradok obeyed him. Almost at once its straining neck muscles relaxed. Its head fell back and in a few minutes it was sleeping. Toache waited until he was sure the draught had taken effect and then he looked up.
“I have given it enough to kill two men. It will sleep for a quite a long time.”
“Make sure those ropes are strong enough,” Tyl said.
“It knows the jungle,” Toache said. “That river is very dangerous. This creature may be our best chance. We may not need the raft.”
Sorac nodded. “Sleep now, Toache,” he said. “I’ll stand guard for an hour or two then wake you.”
“Nay, H’zaan. I cannot sleep,” Toache replied.
The kradok lay unconscious. Tyl made tea and they talked for a while until at last Toache’s eyes dulled and he fell asleep. Tyl put an arm around Sorac’s waist.
“It’s securely tied and drugged,” she said. “Sleep now. I’ll wake you if it moves an inch.”
She sat near the fire while Sorac slept.
The forest dripped. The heavy flowing river made a sloshing sound. The night wrapped her around as she looked into the glowing coals. Her eyes moved to the kradok: unconscious, filthy, in the mud -- and then back to Sorac.
She looked at his sleeping face in the light of the fire. He has no cunning, she thought: no guile.
The tent flap was open. She stood in the open doorway of the fire-tent and looked up into the night. The rain had eased for a while. She looked up through the dark encircling trees. Slow clouds opened a bright tunnel to the moon.
She thought of her father. She tried to imagine the blue world he had described. Wet leaves dripped in the jungle. The thick green river sloshed against its banks, and the pale moon cast frozen light through the hole in the clouds.
(end of chapter twelve)
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Chapter Thirteen
Sumadji emerged into the innerspace to find himself surrounded by a golden light.
Before him was a childrens' world of of gorgeous birds and unicorns and magical trees -- of glowing butterflies and fiery rainbows. He was in a field and was surrounded by children of all kinds. The children clustered around him, touching him and pulling at his sleeves.
They wanted him to go with them.
Sumadji followed them and they led him through green fields up to a beautiful palace.
At the door of the palace, he sensed the invisible presence of an immortal Ranger.
“What are you looking for here?”
“I don’t know,” Sumadji answered.
The Ranger seemed to laugh: "Pass then, and find what you are seeking."
The room inside was filled with warmth and light. The walls created scenes of light and colour. The children’s noisy boisterousness faded suddenly to silence, and a boy and a girl came forward and they stood looking at Sumadji, examining him in the candid way that children have.
“Who are you?” the boy enquired.
“I am Sumadji, of Erlos.”
A brightly coloured bird flew in and around. Sumadji thought he had never seen anything so beautiful, but for some reason he also felt greatly distressed. The bird fluttered upward and a shining feather spun down slowly.
The girl spoke: “We have never seen an Erlotian before.”
They looked at him, then back at each other, then back at him. She laughed: “You’re so funny.”
There was another pause of examination.
“Are you going to stay here?” she asked him
“No,'' he said. ''I must be with my friends.”
There was another pause.
“They will worry about me,” he explained.
The two pairs of eyes examined him. It was the boy who spoke next: “Are your friends the same as you?”
“Yes, in most ways.”
“Why don’t you call them?” the boy suggested.
“There wouldn’t be room for them all here,” Sumadji replied.
They looked at him in puzzlement.
“I’ve told you my name, now tell me yours,” Sumadji said.
“I am Kadmon,” said the boy.
“And I am Bina,” said the girl. “Did you bring me anything?”
Upon his finger, Sumadji wore a silver ring -- his squadron commander’s ring, engraved with the rising firebird of Astra City. He took it off and gave it to her.
“I will plant this and it will grow into a wishing tree,” she told him.
“Oh.”
“You can call your friends now,” she said.
The Three Cities appeared overhead and he children gathered to watch the lights.
The city populations emerged in their thousands of millions and soon a feast was in progress beneath a magical firmament bright with unknown stars. Sumadji was given a place between Kadmon and Bina. They questioned him continuously, in a world where no cup was ever empty and no tree ever without fruit.
The feast had been going on for some time when Sumadji spotted Ai some distance away. She was wearing a white dress and had a wreath of flowers on her head and she was laughing. She turned and her laughing eyes met his. She forgot her companions and her expression changed. He signaled that he wanted to be with her. Ai nodded and he went over to her.
“I have always loved you,” he said.
She smiled. She squeezed his hand. They drew away from the festivities, walking hand in hand. They found a field of flowers and Sumadji threw himself down among the flowers and pulled Ai down beside him. They embraced beneath the bright stars and he kissed her while she snuggled against him like a warm little animal. He held her against him, inhaling the scent of her. As his hands began to explore her body, she shivered.
“Not now,” she whispered. She curled against him. The night was sweet and warm: “It must be safe,” she said.
They lay together in silence and gazed up at the stars until they saw the boy and the girl running somewhere, along a hillside, on a path. After a while the boy returned, panting with exertion, followed by the girl.
“Let’s see where they went to,” Sumadji said.
"Behold the fatherless, spinning alone in space, rising like sparks from a fire," the voice of a Ranger said.
Sumadji and Ai followed the course the two children had taken, up a hillside path until they reached a place where there was a stairway inside a mountain. Sumadji led the way up. Ai tried a side door but a Ranger said to him: "This door is not for mortals. Follow your companion."
They climbed the stairwell and came out onto a ledge on the mountainside. Something was happening in the sky. Sumadji and Ai were standing on the rock ledge when a globe seemed to form in the atmosphere. Light shone through the lens of air and, inside the wonderful celestial globe, luminous pink clouds began to come alive, vibrating with huge power. The event was peaceful and incredibly beautiful. The colours kept changing while the forms inside the globe shimmered and vibrated.
"The children call it 'The Hourglass of the Sun," a Ranger said: "They race each other until the sand runs out."
Looking at the lighted vessel, they saw that there was a figure-of-eight movement of the glowing forms inside. But words could not explain it. He crawled further out on the ledge to get a better view. But by then the sun had returned to normal.
They walked back down the mountainside on an outside path, passing one or two hideous caves which stunk of abomination and dead flesh. As they came up over the hill, they paused to marvel at the incredible spectacle of Erlos’ six thousand millions feasting with the children beneath the lights of the cities.
They had all needed a break from tension, Sumadji thought: what lay beyond?
After two days and nights the feast began to draw to a close. A new sense of wonder had begun to settle upon the Erlotians, as they made their way back to their cities and began to prepare themselves to continue their journey.
The children were getting bored with the Erlotians now.
Even the lighted splendour of the cities no longer captured their awe. The sun began to dip red towards the horizon and the shadows of the day to lengthen. The air was warm and sweet.
Now the girl yawned and took Sumadji’s hand: “Come with me.”
She led him away to a peaceful grove beside a silver stream where gnarled trees, wise with years, sheltered a silver sapling.
“It's your wishing tree,” she told him: “It will grow big.”
Sumadji took a deep breath of the future, whatever that was going to be.
-------------------------------------
Back on the planet Aelutia, Sorac woke inside their makeshift jungle tent. Tyl was sitting cross legged beside him and she had a stack of wood within easy reach drying by the fire.
The kradok lay outside. Rain dripped and trickled down around the tent. But they were mostly dry, in the flicker and shadow of fire’s light. Toache slept in the other tent, out of the smoke.
“How long did you let me sleep?” Sorac asked her.
“I think it will soon be dawn,” she replied.
He rolled up onto an elbow. She moved to cradle his head in her lap, like a child. She stroked the hair on his forehead, until he sat up. Fire illumined their bodies and faces in warm shadows and valleys.
He reached for her and she responded to him. They lay back down together and made love on the floor of the tent. Afterwards she cradled her head in his arm.
“Tell me about your mother,” he said.
"I just remember her as kind, with shining eyes," she said. "I was very young."
"Your father does not like to talk about her."
"He reveals little of himself to most people," she said: "He lives … somewhere … inside himself.”
“What about you?”
She rolled her body against him. “ I know I need to be with you. I know I stand my best chance with you -- anywhere."
“You’re so certain?”
Dawn was coming to the forest, although outside their tent the trees still held a screen of night. Sorac turned his head to make sure the kradok was still sleeping.
“I can’t help hoping it never wakes,” she said.
“I know,” he agreed.
Just at that moment the creature moved. Tyl sprang up with a cry and they quickly got dressed. But the kradok was still asleep. Tyl built up the fire and put the kettle on.
The whole thing suddenly seemed to her a turgid and contorted dream -- the mira bats, the hot, humid shadow world of jungle -- and now the kradok. It felt to Tyl like a trick of the elements, a deception of light and shadow, a dream from which she must soon wake.
Yet there was: him.
Toache lumbered into the fire tent. Tyl passed him a steaming mug of tea. The three of them stood shoulder to shoulder around the fire, drinking tea in the early morning. Toache stepped out to examine the kradok, and seemed satisfied with its condition.
“He will wake soon.” Toache sipped from his mug. “We’ll have to feed him, or he’s going to want to eat us again. And then we have to get him trained.”
“Care to repeat that?" Sorac said: "Surely I did not hear you right."
“It won't take long, H’zaan. But he has to learn to trust us first.”
"And of course you have the menu planned?" said Sorac.
“Our new friend going to have to bait his own trap,” Toache replied. “Let’s move him down to the river while he’s still asleep.”
With exaggerated patience Sorac shredded tobacco carefully and rolled it unhurriedly into the bowl of his pipe. He lit it with a glowing twig from the fire and puffed up a cloud of smoke before speaking: “And then?”
“Then we arm ourselves and wait for whatever comes out of that water,” Toache grinned toothlessly. “Thus shall be able to serve our Kym Myaan his breakfast.”
“Kym Myaan! Oh, so it has a name now? ” said Tyl: "Kym Myaan – Child of Laughter!"
“Well, he must have a name,” Toache said.
Tyl went back into the tent, shaking her head in disbelief.
“His mind is bestial and confused, H’zaan -- but it is a mind,” Toache reasoned: “It is not the simple brain function of a simple animal. Our Kym Myaan is a very rare creature and would fetch a great price from a Llozdian circus.”
They dragged the kradok, which was now starting to move, down to the river and then retired to watch. Toache armed himself with an axe and Sorac with his bow. The kradok was starting to regain its senses. It started to groan and pull against its bonds, and then suddenly it forced its way up through the last layer of consciousness and was fully aware.
The creature bellowed and struggled against the ropes that held it for a while, and then lay still.
Sorac was uneasy to recall how he and Tyl they had lain, in the embrace of love, so close to it during the night. He watched. The minutes dragged by. His sense of keyed anticipation began to fade as he realized they would have to wait, maybe for hours.
The kradok moved and moaned intermittently but lay mostly still, in obvious pain from its wound – but which Kierien’s magical ointment was helping rapidly to heal. An hour passed while Sorac scanned the riverbank and the water, and then he saw a ripple on the water. It was barely perceptible but Toache had already seen it.
The ripple became a V-shaped path on the surface of the water, heading straight for where the kradok lay in the mud on the riverbank.
Toache was signaling to Sorac.
“It is a liga,” Toache signalled, as a big reptilian creature with a tail twice as long as its thick body, emerged from the river onto the muddy bank: “Watch out for the tail. It strikes like lightning and can break every bone in your body,”
Four squat waddling legs supported the scaly body and the ugly triangular head with pointed jaws lined top and bottom by rows of ragged yellow fangs, as it came out of the water onto the muddy riverbank, while the kradok bellowed and fought desperately against the ropes.
Sorac fired three arrows, in as many seconds, deep into the liga’s throat, and then Toache charged in while it flopped around, flicking the wicked tail in all directions, and killed the liga with several axe blows to the head, eventually penetrating the tiny brain. The tail lashed around in reflex and it caught Toache’s shoulder and threw him sprawling into the mud, but the stroke had no power, only bruising him.
He got up, panting: “Well done, H’zaan.”
They dragged the angry kradok up away from the river and then they dragged the the liga up and then they began to hack the carcass into chunks and feed them to the kradok, which ate ravenously until it could eat no more, and then again began to bellow in pain until Toache gave it another draught of sleep.
The jungle had all the while been dripping around them like a wet glove but now the darkening sky began to crack with thunder from mighty clouds that sailed the whole of Aazyr and clear clean rain washed down in drenching sheets upon them.
++++++++++++
The rain, the insects, the sight of the filthy kradok and the oppression of the jungle made Sorac desperate to move on. But he saw the wisdom of waiting. After seeing the liga he understood that to try the river on a raft would indeed be to risk death. Toache was certainly no fool. He would have to trust Toache’s feelings about the kradok.
For now Sorac wanted only stillness. The time was late afternoon. He went and sat down inside the small tent, out of the constant rain. Tyl and Toache sensed his mood and knew to leave him alone. Sorac began to view the thoughts as they entered his mind as if they were individual boats on a river. When a thought came into his mind he concentrated on tracing the thought back to where it had started, and then back to emptiness. The thoughts became less frequent, and less trivial, and he became a whiteness on which each thought made its temporary mark in brilliant colour or with muddy streaks.
It was nearly dark when Toache came in through the tent flap and handed Sorac a mug of tea.
“Thanks. Where’s Tyl?”
“Making supper.”
“And your friend?”
“Kym Myaan is learning my sign language even faster than you did, H’zaan,” Toache enthused. “He is a wonderful, is he not? He understands that if he helps us, I will help him but if he does not, I will have to leave him, which for him means almost certain death, though his wound is healing fast.”
The shepherd filled his pipe and puffed up a cloud. Tyl came in drying her hands on a towel. She brushed back a strand of hair and blew out a sigh. Whatever she was going to say was prevented by the kradok’s roaring. She stood frozen with the towel in her hand. Sorac sprang to his feet, but Toache did not move from where he lay on one elbow. He took a slow sip from his mug and then he put it down on the ground before rising casually.
“Don’t worry about our Kym Myaan. He’s just telling me he’s hungry again.”
He went out to feed the kradok great chunks of liga meat, speaking to it in his language of thought and gesture: “How will you live without us, Kym Myaan? You have no foot.”
The kradok raised its close-set eyes to meet his.
“You do understand me well,” said Toache. “So now listen to me. I will feed you, then I will give you sleep to stop your pain. But I cannot keep you tied up forever.”
He cut the creature free. Tyl and Sorac watched, numb with apprehension. The kradok reared and tried to rise upon its stump then howled with pain and fell back into the mud.
Toache said, “I am much faster than you, Kym Myaan. If you ever try to harm any of us I will kill you, and that will be the end of it. Do you understand?”
The kradok stared dully back at him
Toache signed: “Nod your head if you understand me – like this.”
Unbelievably, the creature nodded back at him.
“Very good,” said Toache: “Now I will make you a foot so that you can walk again, but you will never be able to move fast enough to hunt as you have done. You are going to need us to teach you to make weapons, so that you can hunt for yourself. Do you understand me?”
The kradok nodded.
“Now I will give you sleep,” Toache said.
When he had given the kradok a sleeping draught, Toache ducked back out of the rain into the fire tent. His dripping clothes made a new puddle on the ground. After they had eaten they sat around the fire, Toache wrapped in a blanket while his clothes hung up to dry. An orange moon was rising above the dark trees.
++++++++++++++++
Later when Sorac wakened Toache to take over the night vigil, the boatmaker occupied himself making a foot for the kradok. He worked quickly, with great skill -- making the foot with a hinged ankle -- whittling away with a knife and whistling tunelessly to himself. Many thoughts passed through Toache's mind, while he worked. Kym Myaan was to him a sign, an omen.
Toache was not like any other man. While he hoped to teach and uplift the ugly kradok into something almost human, he also knew the kradok would be able to teach him things that he would never otherwise know. He wanted to probe the kradok’s mind and to learn about it. There was a bond between them.
By the time Toache was satisfied with the foot, dawn was near. He put the kettle on the fire and then he woke the others, inside the tent. While Tyl and Sorac raised themselves, Toache went outside again to visit Kym Myaan.
The creature was awake, and eating what was left of the liga they had killed two days previously.
The stump had healed well but Toache now came to the realization that, although he could attach the wooden foot and that it would fit well, he would still have to support Kym Myaan -- if the creature were to be able to stand and walk. The prospect of allowing the dangerous kradok to lean on his shoulder for support did not appeal much to Toache, but he could see no other way.
When the Kradok’s eyes fixed on Toache’s, they were no longer angry as they had been the day before, but now showed faith and trust. In that moment of eye contact Toache’s spirit leaped with an emotion akin to love. But he knew he must be careful not to display any emotion which Kym Myaan might take for weakness, though inwardly he now loved the ugly beast.
“Can you think of nothing but your belly, you foul creature? “he said: “See, I have made you a foot?”
As he reached out with his own mind, Toache felt the kradok’s mind opening to his. He was able to draw some answers to his questions from the turgid mental images he found there.
Tyl and Sorac came out from the fire tent to see what was going on.
Suspicion immediately shadowed the kradok’s mind.
“Go back inside,” Toache ordered.
They shrugged and went back inside the tent, and Kym Myaan’s expression of animal trust returned.
“There is nothing to fear from them,” Toache said. “They want to help you, as I do. But you must help us too.”
He quietened his own mind to absorb Kym Myaan’s thoughts.
Perhaps thought was not a right word for Kym Myaan’s mental process. To stay with it needed a lot of mental endurance. Toache had to keep pulling his own mind away from the contact, to rest from the tiredness and sickness that the effort caused him. But the kradok understood the bond uniting them.
Later, when Toache went back into the tent, he said to Sorac and Tyl: “Kym Myaan has revealed that deep inside the earth there are tunnels which connect with the deepest and most ancient. There are creatures there that live within the earth, strange to man, which know no light. Kym Myaan knows the caves. He will lead us through them, out of this jungle.”
It was still raining. They were a sorry sight, covered with scratches and cuts and insect bites. Their food was gone and the hot oppressive rain mixed with their sweat.
“How soon can we leave?” Sorac said.
Now they were forced at last to abandon the horses, but they were confident that Liere lead the other two horses back to the village by the lake, and the horses had by now learned to eat the lyn leaves straight from the bush. would lead to safety.
They bundled up what they could take, leaving the tents and most of their possessions in the clearing by the river, and were soon on their way -- hacking a path through the jungle – while Toache supported Kym Myaan, who made even the giant boatmaker look small.
In the afternoon Sorac’s machete cut into a wasps’ nest. The angry creatures emerged by the dozen and stung all their faces, which at once begun to swell up. It was at this point that Tyl lost her last shred of patience and began to shriek hysterically, more with frustration than with pain from the stings.
She had fallen to the ground, as if to try to burrow away from the wasps, and now she lay there on her face -- screaming and crying -- kicking her legs like a child and beating the earth with her fists.
Sorac went to pick her up; the wasp attack had not lasted long and apart from a few painful lumps had done no real damage. He held her shoulders while she sobbed and beat her fists against his chest.
The kradok, which had not been stung because his skin and fur was too thick, leaned against a tree for support and stared at the source of the racket with uncomprehending eyes, while Toache squatted down on his haunches with his head in his hands and groaned.
“Tyl,” Sorac stroked her head: “They’re gone.”
“Sorry,” she sniffed.
“Hush,” he said.
+++++++++++++++++
Eldrinda Benkilte of Erlos had never asked that anything should be easy for himself, only that he should learn by it. Now his whole being seemed filled with blue light as The Three emerged from the innerspace dimension of the world of the children into the dark, dying vortex of the planet Bueloess.
The three Erlotian cities appeared first as glowing spores, tiny pinpricks of light that came together, the light building intensity, until they were fully formed -- locked together in a triangle of power that blazed blinding white light in darkness. They came swiftly down through the solar vortex of the red Buelotian sun, into the Bueloetian planetary vortex.
Their plan was to waste no time scanning and trying to make sense of the Bueloetian dimension that would be completely alien to their own Erlotian senses, but simply to get close enough to the planet either to employ their weapon or else to force surrender -- and if they had to fight, they would.
They came determined only to win -- depending on speed and surprise to give them advantage over their ancient and powerful adversary.
The huge red sun around which the planet Bueloess orbited was in fact a dying star. Bueloess had once been an outer planet, located a very great distance away from the sun at the centre of its own planetary system.
But in the final hundreds of millions of years of the life of a sun, as the nuclear processes within its core begin to burn out the sun flares up and expands into a giant red ball -- in the first stage of its death throes -- before gradually shrinking to become an exhausted cinder of heavily compressed atoms, in a process that takes many millions of years.
When the Buelotian sun had flared up it had incinerated all the other planets within its vortex, before starting to shrink and fade. The inner planets, closest to the expanding sun, had been completely destroyed but although Bueloess had been burned at the outer limits of the sunburst, its distance had allowed some forms of insect-like life deep within the planet’s scorched crust to survive the heat and pressure of the sun’s expansion.
Over millions of years -- for a dying sun dies very slowly -- these life forms had evolved, to become an intelligent life-form upon the planet Bueloess.
From then onward over hundreds of thousands of years they had evolved to learn to build spacecraft -- a very short time in the life of a sun, or of a planet. When the Bueloetians had consumed all the lithos from their own planet, they had been forced to find it elsewhere: at first from asteroids and then from nearby planets, and then ever further from their home world.
Eventually, over millennia, the generations of the crews of the outer Buelotian spacecraft had long since died -- but not before the spacecraft had been taught how to repair and replicate and multiply themselves. And then began a new process of evolution -- over millions of years -- of outward expansion into space in search of lithos, with each new generation of spacecraft superior to the old one.
Dark and ugly was the heart of Bueloess, and foul were the ancient creatures that swarmed within it. A shrieking wind echoed from jagged parapets and black ravines. So deep were the lithos excavations in the black rock of the planetary surface, and so numerous, that red streams of magma oozed and spewed from fissures and volcanoes.
But Bueloess was a freezing world. Little heat reached it from its distant, dying sun. There, buried deep beneath a desolation of black ice-cliffs and empty chasms falling to abysmal depths, stood Bueloess’ control centre and the heart of the Bueloetian Empire.
(end of Book Two: The Three)
Sumadji emerged into the innerspace to find himself surrounded by a golden light.
Before him was a childrens' world of of gorgeous birds and unicorns and magical trees -- of glowing butterflies and fiery rainbows. He was in a field and was surrounded by children of all kinds. The children clustered around him, touching him and pulling at his sleeves.
They wanted him to go with them.
Sumadji followed them and they led him through green fields up to a beautiful palace.
At the door of the palace, he sensed the invisible presence of an immortal Ranger.
“What are you looking for here?”
“I don’t know,” Sumadji answered.
The Ranger seemed to laugh: "Pass then, and find what you are seeking."
The room inside was filled with warmth and light. The walls created scenes of light and colour. The children’s noisy boisterousness faded suddenly to silence, and a boy and a girl came forward and they stood looking at Sumadji, examining him in the candid way that children have.
“Who are you?” the boy enquired.
“I am Sumadji, of Erlos.”
A brightly coloured bird flew in and around. Sumadji thought he had never seen anything so beautiful, but for some reason he also felt greatly distressed. The bird fluttered upward and a shining feather spun down slowly.
The girl spoke: “We have never seen an Erlotian before.”
They looked at him, then back at each other, then back at him. She laughed: “You’re so funny.”
There was another pause of examination.
“Are you going to stay here?” she asked him
“No,'' he said. ''I must be with my friends.”
There was another pause.
“They will worry about me,” he explained.
The two pairs of eyes examined him. It was the boy who spoke next: “Are your friends the same as you?”
“Yes, in most ways.”
“Why don’t you call them?” the boy suggested.
“There wouldn’t be room for them all here,” Sumadji replied.
They looked at him in puzzlement.
“I’ve told you my name, now tell me yours,” Sumadji said.
“I am Kadmon,” said the boy.
“And I am Bina,” said the girl. “Did you bring me anything?”
Upon his finger, Sumadji wore a silver ring -- his squadron commander’s ring, engraved with the rising firebird of Astra City. He took it off and gave it to her.
“I will plant this and it will grow into a wishing tree,” she told him.
“Oh.”
“You can call your friends now,” she said.
The Three Cities appeared overhead and he children gathered to watch the lights.
The city populations emerged in their thousands of millions and soon a feast was in progress beneath a magical firmament bright with unknown stars. Sumadji was given a place between Kadmon and Bina. They questioned him continuously, in a world where no cup was ever empty and no tree ever without fruit.
The feast had been going on for some time when Sumadji spotted Ai some distance away. She was wearing a white dress and had a wreath of flowers on her head and she was laughing. She turned and her laughing eyes met his. She forgot her companions and her expression changed. He signaled that he wanted to be with her. Ai nodded and he went over to her.
“I have always loved you,” he said.
She smiled. She squeezed his hand. They drew away from the festivities, walking hand in hand. They found a field of flowers and Sumadji threw himself down among the flowers and pulled Ai down beside him. They embraced beneath the bright stars and he kissed her while she snuggled against him like a warm little animal. He held her against him, inhaling the scent of her. As his hands began to explore her body, she shivered.
“Not now,” she whispered. She curled against him. The night was sweet and warm: “It must be safe,” she said.
They lay together in silence and gazed up at the stars until they saw the boy and the girl running somewhere, along a hillside, on a path. After a while the boy returned, panting with exertion, followed by the girl.
“Let’s see where they went to,” Sumadji said.
"Behold the fatherless, spinning alone in space, rising like sparks from a fire," the voice of a Ranger said.
Sumadji and Ai followed the course the two children had taken, up a hillside path until they reached a place where there was a stairway inside a mountain. Sumadji led the way up. Ai tried a side door but a Ranger said to him: "This door is not for mortals. Follow your companion."
They climbed the stairwell and came out onto a ledge on the mountainside. Something was happening in the sky. Sumadji and Ai were standing on the rock ledge when a globe seemed to form in the atmosphere. Light shone through the lens of air and, inside the wonderful celestial globe, luminous pink clouds began to come alive, vibrating with huge power. The event was peaceful and incredibly beautiful. The colours kept changing while the forms inside the globe shimmered and vibrated.
"The children call it 'The Hourglass of the Sun," a Ranger said: "They race each other until the sand runs out."
Looking at the lighted vessel, they saw that there was a figure-of-eight movement of the glowing forms inside. But words could not explain it. He crawled further out on the ledge to get a better view. But by then the sun had returned to normal.
They walked back down the mountainside on an outside path, passing one or two hideous caves which stunk of abomination and dead flesh. As they came up over the hill, they paused to marvel at the incredible spectacle of Erlos’ six thousand millions feasting with the children beneath the lights of the cities.
They had all needed a break from tension, Sumadji thought: what lay beyond?
After two days and nights the feast began to draw to a close. A new sense of wonder had begun to settle upon the Erlotians, as they made their way back to their cities and began to prepare themselves to continue their journey.
The children were getting bored with the Erlotians now.
Even the lighted splendour of the cities no longer captured their awe. The sun began to dip red towards the horizon and the shadows of the day to lengthen. The air was warm and sweet.
Now the girl yawned and took Sumadji’s hand: “Come with me.”
She led him away to a peaceful grove beside a silver stream where gnarled trees, wise with years, sheltered a silver sapling.
“It's your wishing tree,” she told him: “It will grow big.”
Sumadji took a deep breath of the future, whatever that was going to be.
-------------------------------------
Back on the planet Aelutia, Sorac woke inside their makeshift jungle tent. Tyl was sitting cross legged beside him and she had a stack of wood within easy reach drying by the fire.
The kradok lay outside. Rain dripped and trickled down around the tent. But they were mostly dry, in the flicker and shadow of fire’s light. Toache slept in the other tent, out of the smoke.
“How long did you let me sleep?” Sorac asked her.
“I think it will soon be dawn,” she replied.
He rolled up onto an elbow. She moved to cradle his head in her lap, like a child. She stroked the hair on his forehead, until he sat up. Fire illumined their bodies and faces in warm shadows and valleys.
He reached for her and she responded to him. They lay back down together and made love on the floor of the tent. Afterwards she cradled her head in his arm.
“Tell me about your mother,” he said.
"I just remember her as kind, with shining eyes," she said. "I was very young."
"Your father does not like to talk about her."
"He reveals little of himself to most people," she said: "He lives … somewhere … inside himself.”
“What about you?”
She rolled her body against him. “ I know I need to be with you. I know I stand my best chance with you -- anywhere."
“You’re so certain?”
Dawn was coming to the forest, although outside their tent the trees still held a screen of night. Sorac turned his head to make sure the kradok was still sleeping.
“I can’t help hoping it never wakes,” she said.
“I know,” he agreed.
Just at that moment the creature moved. Tyl sprang up with a cry and they quickly got dressed. But the kradok was still asleep. Tyl built up the fire and put the kettle on.
The whole thing suddenly seemed to her a turgid and contorted dream -- the mira bats, the hot, humid shadow world of jungle -- and now the kradok. It felt to Tyl like a trick of the elements, a deception of light and shadow, a dream from which she must soon wake.
Yet there was: him.
Toache lumbered into the fire tent. Tyl passed him a steaming mug of tea. The three of them stood shoulder to shoulder around the fire, drinking tea in the early morning. Toache stepped out to examine the kradok, and seemed satisfied with its condition.
“He will wake soon.” Toache sipped from his mug. “We’ll have to feed him, or he’s going to want to eat us again. And then we have to get him trained.”
“Care to repeat that?" Sorac said: "Surely I did not hear you right."
“It won't take long, H’zaan. But he has to learn to trust us first.”
"And of course you have the menu planned?" said Sorac.
“Our new friend going to have to bait his own trap,” Toache replied. “Let’s move him down to the river while he’s still asleep.”
With exaggerated patience Sorac shredded tobacco carefully and rolled it unhurriedly into the bowl of his pipe. He lit it with a glowing twig from the fire and puffed up a cloud of smoke before speaking: “And then?”
“Then we arm ourselves and wait for whatever comes out of that water,” Toache grinned toothlessly. “Thus shall be able to serve our Kym Myaan his breakfast.”
“Kym Myaan! Oh, so it has a name now? ” said Tyl: "Kym Myaan – Child of Laughter!"
“Well, he must have a name,” Toache said.
Tyl went back into the tent, shaking her head in disbelief.
“His mind is bestial and confused, H’zaan -- but it is a mind,” Toache reasoned: “It is not the simple brain function of a simple animal. Our Kym Myaan is a very rare creature and would fetch a great price from a Llozdian circus.”
They dragged the kradok, which was now starting to move, down to the river and then retired to watch. Toache armed himself with an axe and Sorac with his bow. The kradok was starting to regain its senses. It started to groan and pull against its bonds, and then suddenly it forced its way up through the last layer of consciousness and was fully aware.
The creature bellowed and struggled against the ropes that held it for a while, and then lay still.
Sorac was uneasy to recall how he and Tyl they had lain, in the embrace of love, so close to it during the night. He watched. The minutes dragged by. His sense of keyed anticipation began to fade as he realized they would have to wait, maybe for hours.
The kradok moved and moaned intermittently but lay mostly still, in obvious pain from its wound – but which Kierien’s magical ointment was helping rapidly to heal. An hour passed while Sorac scanned the riverbank and the water, and then he saw a ripple on the water. It was barely perceptible but Toache had already seen it.
The ripple became a V-shaped path on the surface of the water, heading straight for where the kradok lay in the mud on the riverbank.
Toache was signaling to Sorac.
“It is a liga,” Toache signalled, as a big reptilian creature with a tail twice as long as its thick body, emerged from the river onto the muddy bank: “Watch out for the tail. It strikes like lightning and can break every bone in your body,”
Four squat waddling legs supported the scaly body and the ugly triangular head with pointed jaws lined top and bottom by rows of ragged yellow fangs, as it came out of the water onto the muddy riverbank, while the kradok bellowed and fought desperately against the ropes.
Sorac fired three arrows, in as many seconds, deep into the liga’s throat, and then Toache charged in while it flopped around, flicking the wicked tail in all directions, and killed the liga with several axe blows to the head, eventually penetrating the tiny brain. The tail lashed around in reflex and it caught Toache’s shoulder and threw him sprawling into the mud, but the stroke had no power, only bruising him.
He got up, panting: “Well done, H’zaan.”
They dragged the angry kradok up away from the river and then they dragged the the liga up and then they began to hack the carcass into chunks and feed them to the kradok, which ate ravenously until it could eat no more, and then again began to bellow in pain until Toache gave it another draught of sleep.
The jungle had all the while been dripping around them like a wet glove but now the darkening sky began to crack with thunder from mighty clouds that sailed the whole of Aazyr and clear clean rain washed down in drenching sheets upon them.
++++++++++++
The rain, the insects, the sight of the filthy kradok and the oppression of the jungle made Sorac desperate to move on. But he saw the wisdom of waiting. After seeing the liga he understood that to try the river on a raft would indeed be to risk death. Toache was certainly no fool. He would have to trust Toache’s feelings about the kradok.
For now Sorac wanted only stillness. The time was late afternoon. He went and sat down inside the small tent, out of the constant rain. Tyl and Toache sensed his mood and knew to leave him alone. Sorac began to view the thoughts as they entered his mind as if they were individual boats on a river. When a thought came into his mind he concentrated on tracing the thought back to where it had started, and then back to emptiness. The thoughts became less frequent, and less trivial, and he became a whiteness on which each thought made its temporary mark in brilliant colour or with muddy streaks.
It was nearly dark when Toache came in through the tent flap and handed Sorac a mug of tea.
“Thanks. Where’s Tyl?”
“Making supper.”
“And your friend?”
“Kym Myaan is learning my sign language even faster than you did, H’zaan,” Toache enthused. “He is a wonderful, is he not? He understands that if he helps us, I will help him but if he does not, I will have to leave him, which for him means almost certain death, though his wound is healing fast.”
The shepherd filled his pipe and puffed up a cloud. Tyl came in drying her hands on a towel. She brushed back a strand of hair and blew out a sigh. Whatever she was going to say was prevented by the kradok’s roaring. She stood frozen with the towel in her hand. Sorac sprang to his feet, but Toache did not move from where he lay on one elbow. He took a slow sip from his mug and then he put it down on the ground before rising casually.
“Don’t worry about our Kym Myaan. He’s just telling me he’s hungry again.”
He went out to feed the kradok great chunks of liga meat, speaking to it in his language of thought and gesture: “How will you live without us, Kym Myaan? You have no foot.”
The kradok raised its close-set eyes to meet his.
“You do understand me well,” said Toache. “So now listen to me. I will feed you, then I will give you sleep to stop your pain. But I cannot keep you tied up forever.”
He cut the creature free. Tyl and Sorac watched, numb with apprehension. The kradok reared and tried to rise upon its stump then howled with pain and fell back into the mud.
Toache said, “I am much faster than you, Kym Myaan. If you ever try to harm any of us I will kill you, and that will be the end of it. Do you understand?”
The kradok stared dully back at him
Toache signed: “Nod your head if you understand me – like this.”
Unbelievably, the creature nodded back at him.
“Very good,” said Toache: “Now I will make you a foot so that you can walk again, but you will never be able to move fast enough to hunt as you have done. You are going to need us to teach you to make weapons, so that you can hunt for yourself. Do you understand me?”
The kradok nodded.
“Now I will give you sleep,” Toache said.
When he had given the kradok a sleeping draught, Toache ducked back out of the rain into the fire tent. His dripping clothes made a new puddle on the ground. After they had eaten they sat around the fire, Toache wrapped in a blanket while his clothes hung up to dry. An orange moon was rising above the dark trees.
++++++++++++++++
Later when Sorac wakened Toache to take over the night vigil, the boatmaker occupied himself making a foot for the kradok. He worked quickly, with great skill -- making the foot with a hinged ankle -- whittling away with a knife and whistling tunelessly to himself. Many thoughts passed through Toache's mind, while he worked. Kym Myaan was to him a sign, an omen.
Toache was not like any other man. While he hoped to teach and uplift the ugly kradok into something almost human, he also knew the kradok would be able to teach him things that he would never otherwise know. He wanted to probe the kradok’s mind and to learn about it. There was a bond between them.
By the time Toache was satisfied with the foot, dawn was near. He put the kettle on the fire and then he woke the others, inside the tent. While Tyl and Sorac raised themselves, Toache went outside again to visit Kym Myaan.
The creature was awake, and eating what was left of the liga they had killed two days previously.
The stump had healed well but Toache now came to the realization that, although he could attach the wooden foot and that it would fit well, he would still have to support Kym Myaan -- if the creature were to be able to stand and walk. The prospect of allowing the dangerous kradok to lean on his shoulder for support did not appeal much to Toache, but he could see no other way.
When the Kradok’s eyes fixed on Toache’s, they were no longer angry as they had been the day before, but now showed faith and trust. In that moment of eye contact Toache’s spirit leaped with an emotion akin to love. But he knew he must be careful not to display any emotion which Kym Myaan might take for weakness, though inwardly he now loved the ugly beast.
“Can you think of nothing but your belly, you foul creature? “he said: “See, I have made you a foot?”
As he reached out with his own mind, Toache felt the kradok’s mind opening to his. He was able to draw some answers to his questions from the turgid mental images he found there.
Tyl and Sorac came out from the fire tent to see what was going on.
Suspicion immediately shadowed the kradok’s mind.
“Go back inside,” Toache ordered.
They shrugged and went back inside the tent, and Kym Myaan’s expression of animal trust returned.
“There is nothing to fear from them,” Toache said. “They want to help you, as I do. But you must help us too.”
He quietened his own mind to absorb Kym Myaan’s thoughts.
Perhaps thought was not a right word for Kym Myaan’s mental process. To stay with it needed a lot of mental endurance. Toache had to keep pulling his own mind away from the contact, to rest from the tiredness and sickness that the effort caused him. But the kradok understood the bond uniting them.
Later, when Toache went back into the tent, he said to Sorac and Tyl: “Kym Myaan has revealed that deep inside the earth there are tunnels which connect with the deepest and most ancient. There are creatures there that live within the earth, strange to man, which know no light. Kym Myaan knows the caves. He will lead us through them, out of this jungle.”
It was still raining. They were a sorry sight, covered with scratches and cuts and insect bites. Their food was gone and the hot oppressive rain mixed with their sweat.
“How soon can we leave?” Sorac said.
Now they were forced at last to abandon the horses, but they were confident that Liere lead the other two horses back to the village by the lake, and the horses had by now learned to eat the lyn leaves straight from the bush. would lead to safety.
They bundled up what they could take, leaving the tents and most of their possessions in the clearing by the river, and were soon on their way -- hacking a path through the jungle – while Toache supported Kym Myaan, who made even the giant boatmaker look small.
In the afternoon Sorac’s machete cut into a wasps’ nest. The angry creatures emerged by the dozen and stung all their faces, which at once begun to swell up. It was at this point that Tyl lost her last shred of patience and began to shriek hysterically, more with frustration than with pain from the stings.
She had fallen to the ground, as if to try to burrow away from the wasps, and now she lay there on her face -- screaming and crying -- kicking her legs like a child and beating the earth with her fists.
Sorac went to pick her up; the wasp attack had not lasted long and apart from a few painful lumps had done no real damage. He held her shoulders while she sobbed and beat her fists against his chest.
The kradok, which had not been stung because his skin and fur was too thick, leaned against a tree for support and stared at the source of the racket with uncomprehending eyes, while Toache squatted down on his haunches with his head in his hands and groaned.
“Tyl,” Sorac stroked her head: “They’re gone.”
“Sorry,” she sniffed.
“Hush,” he said.
+++++++++++++++++
Eldrinda Benkilte of Erlos had never asked that anything should be easy for himself, only that he should learn by it. Now his whole being seemed filled with blue light as The Three emerged from the innerspace dimension of the world of the children into the dark, dying vortex of the planet Bueloess.
The three Erlotian cities appeared first as glowing spores, tiny pinpricks of light that came together, the light building intensity, until they were fully formed -- locked together in a triangle of power that blazed blinding white light in darkness. They came swiftly down through the solar vortex of the red Buelotian sun, into the Bueloetian planetary vortex.
Their plan was to waste no time scanning and trying to make sense of the Bueloetian dimension that would be completely alien to their own Erlotian senses, but simply to get close enough to the planet either to employ their weapon or else to force surrender -- and if they had to fight, they would.
They came determined only to win -- depending on speed and surprise to give them advantage over their ancient and powerful adversary.
The huge red sun around which the planet Bueloess orbited was in fact a dying star. Bueloess had once been an outer planet, located a very great distance away from the sun at the centre of its own planetary system.
But in the final hundreds of millions of years of the life of a sun, as the nuclear processes within its core begin to burn out the sun flares up and expands into a giant red ball -- in the first stage of its death throes -- before gradually shrinking to become an exhausted cinder of heavily compressed atoms, in a process that takes many millions of years.
When the Buelotian sun had flared up it had incinerated all the other planets within its vortex, before starting to shrink and fade. The inner planets, closest to the expanding sun, had been completely destroyed but although Bueloess had been burned at the outer limits of the sunburst, its distance had allowed some forms of insect-like life deep within the planet’s scorched crust to survive the heat and pressure of the sun’s expansion.
Over millions of years -- for a dying sun dies very slowly -- these life forms had evolved, to become an intelligent life-form upon the planet Bueloess.
From then onward over hundreds of thousands of years they had evolved to learn to build spacecraft -- a very short time in the life of a sun, or of a planet. When the Bueloetians had consumed all the lithos from their own planet, they had been forced to find it elsewhere: at first from asteroids and then from nearby planets, and then ever further from their home world.
Eventually, over millennia, the generations of the crews of the outer Buelotian spacecraft had long since died -- but not before the spacecraft had been taught how to repair and replicate and multiply themselves. And then began a new process of evolution -- over millions of years -- of outward expansion into space in search of lithos, with each new generation of spacecraft superior to the old one.
Dark and ugly was the heart of Bueloess, and foul were the ancient creatures that swarmed within it. A shrieking wind echoed from jagged parapets and black ravines. So deep were the lithos excavations in the black rock of the planetary surface, and so numerous, that red streams of magma oozed and spewed from fissures and volcanoes.
But Bueloess was a freezing world. Little heat reached it from its distant, dying sun. There, buried deep beneath a desolation of black ice-cliffs and empty chasms falling to abysmal depths, stood Bueloess’ control centre and the heart of the Bueloetian Empire.
(end of Book Two: The Three)
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