THE WIND STOPPED ALTOGETHER

Scene 1

“Nassa! Come back!” Darvelia screamed to her daughter against the bitter wind. A vast wall of clouds bore down on them, bending in from the north around a massive outcrop of granite above, and Darvelia clutched the sheet around herself and her son Shellane. He quivered and dragged his feet in the gathering snow.

They had no boots, no layers of thick cloth, just thicknesses of useless Citywear made for the warmth of the underground streets thousands of kays behind them. Nassa had run back to see where her father had gone, and Darvelia looked anxiously over her shoulder. Dennon had disappeared when they’d crossed the last rise, telling Darvelia, “I’m going to try to deal some scrip for a blanket.” But now the wind was up, ripping at them with knives of chill, and he hadn’t returned, and now Nassa had gone to look for him.

“Nassa! Nassa!” Darvelia stopped and pulled Shellane close to her body. He clung to her, shivering so hard it made her knees knock together. Her feet in their City shoes no longer felt anything.

Guards were strung out along the long line of “pioneers”, grumbling in their overcoats and shouting to the slower walkers to speed up. Rumbles from the heights on either side of the long line told of snow masses slumping toward the pass they walked. The guards began firing ballistic weapons into the air, a burst here, a shot there, trying to urge the walkers along, until a top barker roared at them, “Damn it, you want this place to bury us? Do that any more and it’ll trigger the snow down, and then we’ll all be dead!” More grumbling, and a guard stamped up to Darvelia.

“Move on, Mother, or you’re going to get left here alone.” He grabbed Shellane‘s arm and yanked the boy away from Darvelia, shouting at him, “Come on, boy, if your mama won’t move, you’re gonna have to grow in a hurry! Be a soldier and get moving!”

“Easy, man.” An older man dressed in a long coat was beside them. “He’s just a little kid. Here.” He extended his hand to the guard, who took something from him so quickly that Darvelia couldn’t see what it was. “I’ll keep an eye on them.”

“You do that, Father. And keep yourself and them moving, will you? This stuff is getting heavier and colder.” The guard moved away as Nassa came running up to them, her lips blue with cold.

“I can’t find Dad,” she stammered. “He’s gone somewhere and I can’t find him.”

Darvelia bit her lip. She said, “He’s just back there looking for some warm coats. It may take him a long time. Come on, we have to keep moving. Here, let me--“

“I’ve got something for her,” the older man said. He pulled out a scarf from his coat. “She needs this a lot more than I do.”

“You shouldn’t do that,” Darvelia protested. “You need it too.”

“My name is Derizan Alumaras Uni Junusium,” the man said.

Arcus! Darvelia wanted to hug him. “I’m Darvelia Ans Kerran Ovu Gazurium. This is Shellane my son, and Nassa my daughter. Are you alone out here?”

The man called Derizan smiled as they moved forward against the wind. Snow clung ropelike to the ends of his long drooping mustache, accenting the white in its mixture with dark hair. “Not with you here. And my wife and family are over there.” He gestured into a thickening, flying soup of bitter flakes. “Come and walk with us.”

Darvelia followed him as they trudged onward and came side by side with a group of vague shapes. Derizan waved expansively, his coat flying open. “Here is my wife Astina Tee-Tee Harridium, and my extended family.” He introduced them all, and gave them Darvelia‘s name.

“Hana-jo,” she said, bowing her head in acknowledgement as they moved along. “Honor to you all.” She named her children, and then paused.

“Hanaan,” they said to her, a soft chorus of tired voices.

“We were supposed to go to the Marshes,” Derizan said, “but some unpleasant events forced a change in plans. That’s why we’re up here with you.”

“We were told that we’d be in a forest village,” Darvelia said. “This doesn’t look like a forest to me.” The wind had lessened slightly, and now she could see one or two thousand meters up to where the peaks vanished in the roiling cloud cover. Shellane pressed tightly against her thigh as he stumbled onward, and Nassa clutched her hand with a frozen grip.

“No,” Derizan said. “It’s no forest. Your husband — was he active in the coll? Which clan is he?”

“He’s Imzendium. They were--“

“I know them well.” Derizan‘s hand on her arm said, Not here and now. “My cousins were Imzendium, and they got sent this way three months ago, from Gran Dar.”

“How are they doing?”

Derizan shook his head and said nothing. The wind gusted a few times, and then stopped blowing altogether, plunging everyone into a silence so abrupt that everyone, even the guards, stopped moving to listen. Only a soft sighing of distant air hinted at the force of the storm glowering high over their heads.

Darvelia hugged her children, and leaned to whisper to Derizan, “Then it’s as bad as we’ve imagined, isn’t it? They’re sending us up here to die.”

Derizan drew away. His dark eyes flashed a deep and horrible anger. “Yes,” he said. “Welcome to the relocation.”

HIGH ON THE PASS

Scene 2

Following Derizan and his family, Darvelia picked her way in the snow-footsteps that led onward, each hand on a child’s shoulder beside her. Her husband had still not caught up with them.

It had been a while, well before she’d met these people. They’d been let off the train at a valley station several kays back, down the pass. She’d faced the guard on the platform. “Where’s our shipment? There’re no freight cars on this train, just people.”

He’d shrugged, smiled lamely. “The furniture and belongings usually come separately. Don’t worry.” He glanced at Shellane, then Nassa, then again at Darvelia, started to speak, and turned away. He slung his beam rifle, kicking sharply at the walls of plowed snow by the platform.

“We need to get blankets,” she called to him. “These clothes aren’t warm enough for this wind.”

“Don’t worry,” the guard called back, his voice wavering in the gusts. He picked up his pace and disappeared through the line of relocated City dwellers moving out ahead of Darvelia.

“Don’t worry.” Her husband’s mocking voice had startled her.

“Dennon! I thought you’d missed the train at the last stop. What’s that?”

He’d handed her three packets of fried tubers. “Got these from a stand just before I got on board. They’re good, but it took a lot of our scrip.”

She hadn’t asked how much, as she and the children had sunk their teeth into the slightly soggy, oily delights still warm from Dennon’s body heat.

But now she was high on the pass, moving forward through the terrible chill with Nassa and Shellane, and Dennon was gone again. She looked back for him again and again, her fear growing each time.

ARCUS FAMILY MEETING

Scene 3

Derizan heard the shots from the guards, and peered into the wind. An angry voice stilled the guns. A guard stalked over to a woman and her child, grabbing the boy by the arm. Derizan said to his wife, “I’ll be right back,” and trudged up to the three.

“Easy, man, he’s just a little kid.” Derizan fished in his pocket for the last few energizers he carried. The guards loved these – the one in Derizan‘s hand vanished in a second. “I’ll keep an eye on them,” Derizan assured him.

The guard grumbled and headed off. A thin girl stumbled into the woman’s arms, muttering something that made her mother look up wildly, straining to see back down their trail.

As the troubled mother soothed the girl, Derizan approached them, unfastening his scarf.

“I’ve got something for her, Mother. She needs this a lot more than I do.” He handed her one of the energizer packets.

The woman’s eyes widened. She thanked him and they exchanged introductions in the Arcus way. He said to her, “I won’t let an Arcus child die of cold as long as I’m alive.”

She looked impossibly weak, her City clothes patched and wound together in a hopeless tangle, trying to fend off the wind.

“My wife and family are over there,” Derizan said. Where was this woman’s, Darvelia‘s, husband? The relocs rarely took parts of families. He took her arm, led her and her children to his family, and introduced them all as they slogged onward.

Darvelia followed him as they trudged onward and came side by side with a group of vague shapes. Derizan waved expansively, his coat flying open. “Here is my wife Astina Tee-Tee Harridium, and my extended family.” He introduced them all, and gave them Darvelia‘s name.

“Hana-jo,” she said, bowing her head in acknowledgement as they moved along. “Honor to you all. Here is Nassa, and here is Shellane.”

“We were supposed to go to the Marshes,” Derizan said, his anger coming up under his words.

The woman told him they were expecting to be in a forest town somewhere.

“No,” Derizan said. “It’s no forest.”

Darvelia told him her husband was Imzendium clan. That would get him killed quickly out here if the guards found out.

He interrupted her, lowering his voice. “I know them well. My cousins were Imzendium, and they got sent this way three months ago, from Gran Dar.”

“How are they doing?” She hadn’t understood his hand on her arm.

There was nothing he could say, not now, with the guards close by. The air went still, as if to pick up every word. This woman had no idea how close to death they all stood right now.

Suddenly she leaned up close to him as if to huddle from the biting air, but her whispered words corrected his misunderstanding of her. “Then it’s as bad as we’ve imagined, isn’t it? They’re sending us up here to die.”

At first, choked with rage, he couldn’t speak. “Yes,” he finally grated. “As I said to you before, welcome to the relocation.”

ALL WE HAVE TO DO IS GET THROUGH

Scene 4

Derizan pondered. It would be an avalanche, probably, or that’s what the guards would report. If the wind kept growing, and the storm became all that the sky promised, maybe they wouldn’t need an avalanche — everybody would just freeze in mid-stride, and the snow would cover them in white graves.

But he had the gun, and that would change a few things. Years ago, he’d seen a map of this pass, and there was a narrow defile tucked up at the left just past this rise. It led downward back the way they’d come, back toward the railhead, and then with a few of the Arcus beside him, he’d see what they could do to make their own relocation. He nudged Denzari, his taller brother walking beside him. “Up there.”

Denzari looked back, then forward along the line, and said, “We’re clear.” The next group of relocatees had fallen back beyond their view, and the shouts of guards echoed up the pass toward them.

“Now!” Derizan urged, and his whole family followed him in a trot towards the tight opening up in the rock to their left. He and Denzari waited as they passed, preparing to brush away the telltale footsteps, and then Darvelia, the woman from Sobi Zone, came up to him.

“Where are you going?”

“We’re getting out of this deathtrap before it kills us all. You’re coming with us, with your children.”

She looked back wildly. “My husband hasn’t returned! I can’t leave him here!”

Derizan looked back down their trail. “We can’t wait for him. If they see where we’ve gone, they’ll hunt us down. We’ve just got this one chance. Right now.”

She drew back, and the cold fury and power in her unblinking eyes made Derizan lower his head. “Then you leave,” she said. “I’m his woman, he’s my man. These children are ours. I’ll die before I let him go, and before I let them go. You just leave.”

“Please,” he asked her, surprised at the depth of his feelings for her. “It’s your only chance. You’ll all die if you don’t.”

“Please come with us,” a second voice said beside him. His wife Astina. “Your children are ours too, and you’re our sister. We can’t leave you here to--“

“Die?” Darvelia hissed in the wind. “Do you really think they’d let us die up here? We’ve got new places waiting on the other side of this pass! It’s not far! Once we get through this storm, all we have to do is get through…" Her shoulders started to shake.

Her son, Shellane it was, turned abruptly and started running back down the trail. “Father!” he called. “Father!” His voice echoed in the pass, and his sister ran after him.

Derizan swore, and swung around to where his family was edging through the opening in the rock. “Go on, hurry up!” He spun back to where the woman, Darvelia, had been, but now she was chasing her children down over the last rise, the gusting wind pushing them all along in swirls of white.

Derizan turned again, and now the air tasted bitter and dark to him. He felt for the gun in his coat, and slipped in behind Denzari and Astina, sweeping away their trail behind him, taking a plunging, snow-clogged path that turned back on itself again and again; thoughts of death fell through him now, making his guts burn and twist in pain. I won’t let an Arcus child die of cold as long as I’m alive. He hesitated, then finally followed the others. His words smirked at him, staining his soul.

PRUNE A FEW RED BRANCHES

Scene 5

They wound their way down along a slowly-widening crack in the mountain rock, gloved hands out to balance on the shingles of blown, icy snow. Derizan kept one hand ready for his wife Astina in case she needed it, even though he knew she'd rather fall and hit her head than to be forced to depend on him that much. Even here.

Seven elders from one Arcus family. What would Ezzar do when she found out? She was so young for all the heartbreak she'd already had, and so full of rage. Boren had been just the right man for her, and then... Derizan thrust the thought aside as distant shots echoed, and a soft rumble began to build into a roar. He and the others looked wildly up to the hanging snows, eyes wide in the wind, but nothing moved.

His brother Denzari wiped ice from his eyebrows. "It was on the other side. The fool guards must  have triggered it."

"How much farther?" Alumaras came to his sons, his white hair kinked in the soaking cold. "Our women need some warmth soon, and so do we."

Derizan took his father's hand. "We've got just the one map, and it shows a network of caves, but I don't know what's in them. They're about twenty feet around this–"

"Caves?" It was sister Ajina's husband Selech. "My feet are nearly dead."  He stumbled as they moved forward.

Derizan caught his arm. "You shouldn't have given away your extra socks to that Hejji kid. At least it could have been to somebody Arcus – then you'd be freezing your toes for a good reason."

Selech grinned. "Can't help it. A kid's a kid, and this one was turning blue." He hobbled alongside Derizan, his coat flapping, his scarves loose in spite of the driving winds.

"Here." Daryuz, Astina's brother, pointed to a tight, low hole in the snow, almost invisible behind an outcrop of tumbled boulders. He got down on hands and knees and vanished inside. Derizan waited until the others crawled in, then trudged back to obliterate their trail as best he could. The wind would do what he couldn't, he decided, and he finally wriggled into the darkness after the others of his family.

The light surprised him. He blinked twice, squinted, and a man he didn't know came to him and helped him to his feet. At that moment his knees nearly buckled.

"Slowly," the man said, with a slight Monford accent, a bit of Arcus cadence in his wording. "You've just been through hell, and you're blest to find us here."

"Who are you?" Derizan asked.

"We come here to help anyone who gets out of the columns. The corpos don't know about this place yet, and we have to keep it that way. Call me Inkurisar." The man walked over to the low entrance, beckoned a solid woman to join him, and they rolled a pair of boulders into a locked position in front of the opening. "That won't open now, not unless they blow it open with a rockmuncher."

Derizan introduced his family, as two women joined Inkurisar, who said, "This is my wife Nakiran and her sister Munizkara."

"Han," everyone said together, nodding slightly.

Derizan said, his face warming slowly in the still air, "Now is the time when we ask each other what we're doing here. We were supposed to be bound for the Northwest Marshes, but they shoved us on the train north instead. Some excuse about engine breakdowns. A woman I knew had a map showing the caves here, but that was all. Better caves than snow."

Inkurisar shook his head. "They lie to you. There's no rail line to the Marshes. We found that out months ago, but there's no way to communicate back to the cities and the colls. What we do is shuttle people between here and a takeoff point back down the pass. With some good hard work, everybody gets down to the plains, and there's a road out to Purusil. A long, hard trip. If you get that far, you've got a chance to get on down one of the deep crevasses through the Great South Fall. After that, I don't know. There are no cities down there, and not much news coming back."

"Why haven't the corpos found this place?"

"We keep coll discipline. Nobody tells anyone who isn't Arcus, and even then we screen everyone. We've had to prune a few red branches." Inkurisar looked down at his feet. "My own brother..."

Selech burst out, "You've shed Arcus blood?"

"We had to. Do you know how many have come through here? Thousands. A Harridium chieftain overheard my brother talking with a Novander guard about the caves – they were negotiating. We killed them both under a rockfall. If they'd made a deal, you wouldn't be here - they'd have shot all of you."

Selech looked disgusted and said nothing. Derizan asked, "How will we leave here?"

"We wait two days without opening the cave. There's a huge storm setting up right now, and it'll roll through this reloc like the breath of the Taker. The guards will haul tail as soon as they're sure no one can follow them, and they'll go on back to the railhead. The next reloc up here will simply take another pass through the mountains, and the bodies from this one will still be standing where they froze. We leave here just before the storm ends, at night."

Derizan remembered Darvelia and her children. "There's Arcus kids out there dying right now," he said. "We have to try to get them here."

Inkurisar glared at him with reddened eyes. "No. That door stays sealed. If we open it now, we'll all die. I've seen it happen too damn many times. If those kids didn't follow you, they're not going to get saved now. Were they alone?"

"No. Their mother was with them."

"She had a choice. She made her choice. Turn your face to the wind and move on."

The old Arcus saying made Derizan want to gag. "I won't forget this. I'll make those bug bastards pay for it all."

Inkurisar came to him and brought his face close. His eyes, red and tired, still held gentleness. "Out here, you go one foot at a time. When you get free from this, then you'll have a chance. Just don't try anything too soon. Friend, it's time for some food. Come and eat."

IN THE CAVE

Scene 6

Derizan chewed at the dried strip of hill ox meat. Forgotten hunger rose in him. He ate rapidly. Inkurisar, sitting beside him in the cave, chuckled.

“Easy. There’s more of that. Here – water will help.”

Derizan thanked him. “We’re holed up here for two days?”

“Two days in this cave??” his sister Ajina erupted. “With nothing but this leather to eat?” Her husband shook his head and reached to pass her a water jug.

“Two days with luck, you mean,” Inkurisar told them. “If the reloc troops find us sooner, we won’t get two days. We’ll get dead.”

Derizan listened to the muffled roiling of winds. “Won’t the storms drive them off?”

Inkurisar shrugged. “That’s just it – you can never tell. These mountain snows stop and start. And so do the troops. But we’ve learned the hard way that none of the soldiers come up here after two days.” He raised his voice to cover the gusting wail of the outside air. “All of you, hang in here until we get you out. Then we can roll back the rocks and see what’s what. Over there in the back, round that outcrop, there’s pots for your waste. We’ll empty them and clean up when we get out."

Derizan pointed to a dusty piece of cloth on the cave floor, with a dark stain. “It looks as if someone was here not long ago.”

Inkurisar came over. “Hmm. See that?” A few purple drops glistened nearby. “That might be andro blood. Looks as if we’re not the only ones going this way.”

Derizan caught the grimace on his wife Astina's face, just as Inkurisar added, "Good thing we won’t need to climb to the high pass. That’s probably where the andro was headed. Let’s get settled while this storm passes over.”

Ajina turned to Derizan, bending close. “Listen, my dear brother. My husband is not taking this very well. Could you talk with him?”

Derizan went over to Selech, shifting uneasily where he sat on the stone floor of the cave, and squatted beside him. “You look frustrated.”

Selech, his narrow face stubbled with short beard, glared. “I hate this running away. Why didn’t we fight for ourselves back in the City? We could have blocked this whole relocation. Too many of us act like sheep!” He tossed a rock at the wall opposite him, and Daryuz recoiled, giving him an angry look.

Derizan took a deep breath. “Look at what we faced. The City forces had most of the corps with them, and there were rumors of aliens in that mix, too. They all knew the City as well as we did. They would have sent our remains to the recyclers in no time. You know it’s true – look what they did to Incarnastar Coll sector last year.”

Selech sighed. “Yeah, that was a bloodbath.” He muttered a string of curses. “It doesn’t help us now, knowing that, does it?”

To Derizan’s relief, Ajina came to them. “We’ve got some water warmed. You can have a bit of tea. Inkurisar and the women with him bring tea and tin cups.”

Gratefully, they sipped. Derizan said to Selech, “Right now we need to focus ourselves on getting through this escape. That’s our best first step. If I could tell you what the next step will be, neither of us would believe it – we just have to feel our way. It’s the only next step we’ve got.”

Selech stared straight ahead, saying nothing. Finally he nodded. “I’m with you,” he said.

ARRIVALS

Scene 7

A great chunk of snow landed on Derizan’s head as he, Denzari, Selech, and Inkurisar tilted the last boulder aside from the cave entrance. He shook the snow away, inhaling the outrush of cave-stench as brilliant, bitter-cold light hit his eyes. He gulped the icy-fresh air and called back, “We’re out!” The upslope they had descended to get to the cave was choked with heavy snow and ice.

Inkurisar shook his head. “You can’t go back that way. I need one volunteer to scout with me. We need to find a route back to where we can turn southwest.” His wife Nakiran took his arm, murmuring to him. He shook his head. “I’m the only one who knows how to do this, unless you or Munizkara wants to try it.” She slapped his arm and stepped back.

Before Derizan could step forward, Selech said, “I’ll go.” Derizan started to protest, but weariness seized him, and he watched his younger brother-in-law and Inkurisar climb away on a side path not deep in snowfall.

The two men returned an hour later. Selech told the waiting group, “Partway down we spotted the camp. It’s big – a lot of soldiers.”

“There’s no way back,” Inkurisar said, rubbing his eyes. “They’ve built permanent shelters and fanned out guards. Trying to shut off the route we took.”

“So what do we do?” Nakiran’s tone to her husband was sharp. “Try to go over the pass? Hah!”

Before he could answer her, Derizan saw movement on the side path and pointed. “Look!”

A woman and a man descended, slipping and staggering as they approached the others.

“Stop!” Inkurisar raised his rifle. “Who are you? Were you followed?”

The woman collapsed to the snow. The man bent over her, looked up at them.

“Were you followed? Tell us who you are!”

“We’re Arcus, from the City. We hid during a blizzard and waited for the column to pass us. When the snow came, we looked for another path and got away. We just saw you when you were at the camp, and we followed you. No one saw us.”

The woman groaned in pain, and he added. “My wife is almost full-term. Please help us! We need to eat and rest!”

“Your names?”

“I’m Mentrianos and she’s Tellina. I’m Harridium clan, she’s Yaviures.”

Astina muttered to Derizan, “Yaviures clan! That baby will have a better chance.”

He whispered back, “Only if Father accepts them.”

Inkurisar lowered his head, shook it, and said, “All right. Come on. Join this family – we’ll take you along. Do you still have anything to eat?” He turned to Alumaras, head of Derizan’s family. “Will you consent?”

After a long pause, Alumaras nodded. “Our family consents. We offer protection and support.” And Derizan finally exhaled a breath he had been holding for too long.

“Yes, we have a little food and drink,” the woman Tellina said softly. “We will share what we have.”

Astina, taking Derizan’s arm, replied, “As will we also.”

They all returned to the cave, where a small, smokeless flame allowed them all some ox broth, made with dried meat softened and boiled in melt from the snows.

TELLINA

Scene 8

She sipped the ox broth slowly at first, then finished her tin with two good gulps. Her baby gave a series of little kicks, as if in pleasure. She patted her belly where the kicks had come. Are you happier now, she mouthed. She and Mentrianos sat near the tiny fire, their backs against an uneven stone wall.

“Tellina,” her husband whispered. “Is everything going well with your lively little thing?” He cleared his throat as light smoke wafted through the cave.

“Oh, Meni, if we could only get to shelter soon! These collines have taken us in, but they’re running just like us. What’ll happen if I have to deliver in a place like this? And stop calling her “little thing”. I’ve given her a name.”

Mentrianos looked surprised. “A ‘she’? How did you decide it’s a girl?”

Tellina shook her head. How am I going to explain this to him? It’s not as if I’ve ever been told any of this. She sat up straight, facing him. “You’ve got to hear me out. It’s strange. Nobody has ever told me about things I’ve been through with this baby. But please, just listen.”

He nodded, his hand on hers. “Tell me.”

What a sweet man I have. “You told me I talk in my sleep. A lot. The dreams I’m having don’t feel like dreams at all. They feel real, more real than this life itself.” She paused.

“You’ve said this before.”

“Yes but now they’re about… our baby. I’m sure of it. Before we got swept up and put on the train, you know, the last night in the City, I was in a dream walking up this long, wandering path up through a forest. A woman was standing in the path ahead of me. I came to her and her face started to shine like a light, all radiant. ‘Mother’, she said, and she put her arms around me, and I felt her warmth and light all through me. ‘Mother, I am Samantine. You will bear me soon. Honor and blessing is yours.’ I repeated, ‘Samantine’, holding her close. ‘Samantine’, I asked her, ‘Tell me of your light.’ She looked in my eyes, and I saw into time and… out of time. I started to shake and tremble with the shock of it. ‘Forgive me!’ I cried to her, and she vanished, and the dream ended.”

Mentrianos didn’t speak. Tears ran down Tellina’s face. Then he said softly, “Samantine. What did she look like?”

Tellina stared, blinked away tears. “Just – I don’t know… she smiled, her face was so bright! Too bright! But what does this mean? I don’t understand at all.”

“Maybe we can learn more about it from the Fandarinn weirds,” he said. He looked away.

She snorted. “Those witch women? Hah!” What is bothering him?

Astina, sitting nearby, had heard Tellina’s dream story. She came closer and said softly, “This sounds important. Why not enter more dreams, look for the stories of others, or search the traditions and the records?”

Tellina tilted her head back, looking up through the smoke at the cave’s rough ceiling. “I hope we can learn more before she comes out of me. This is a hard flight out of a bad place.”

Astina nodded. “May I share this with the other women? Maybe they’ve learned something you’ll need.”

Tellina nodded. It felt good to have others help her. She looked up as Munizkara came and held out a tin cup.

“More broth? Your little girl would like that, wouldn’t she?”

Tellina took the tin, glancing again at Mentrianos. He didn’t turn to her.

A MEAL AND ITS VISITORS

Scene 9

Inkurisar finished his broth, sipping from the tin from his kit. He stood up. “Good broth, but not enough meat. I’m going hunting. Mouths to feed.” He inclined his head towards pregnant Tellina.

“It’s getting late,” Derizan stood also. “I’ll join you.”

“All right. Here’s my spare handgun. Can you use it?”

“Show me. I’ve used others like it.” The two men huddled for a moment, then ducked out the cave opening.

Inkurisar led the way up a steep slope to a jutting rock slab above the cave, kicking away the snow. The sun, now low in the winter afternoon, cast long mountain shadows that obscured parts of the upslopes the men faced as they looked northwest. Between steep mountainsides Derizan glimpsed twilight-dim lands far beyond. “Not up that way,” Inkurisar said. “That’s through the High Pass.” He turned to look southwest and down, and pointed. Not too far below them, Derizan saw what looked like five heaps of snow moving against a slope that faced the two men.

“Queeves.” Inkurisar raised his rifle slowly, braced, and fired one shot. Four of the heaps leaped gracefully away ahead and behind as the fifth sank slowly to the whiteness, almost invisible in the fading light except for one tiny dark mark now expanding on it. “Now for the hard part: getting to it and bringing it back.”

“Are these like the ones we shear for wool?” Derizan recalled his childhood visit to an uncle’s farm.

His companion laughed. “About the way a shereking is like a lakepuss. These can weigh over a hundred kilos. The one I shot looked bigger. We might have to get help to cut it up and haul it back, but it will last us for days, especially in the cold.”

With the help of some others from the cave, they struggled through the descent and ascent to the carcass, carved it and cleaned it, and carried large chunks of mountain mutton back to the cave. Two of the men foraged for whip-pine wood to build a real cooking fire in the cave, the moving air outside drawing the cooking-smoke out and away. It was now dark on the mountainside, with only the steady thrumming of wind and the fire’s crackle to clothe their conversations.

At last Tellina belched, patting her swollen abdomen. “Ah, I needed this, and I’m getting kicking. I think my baby is happy again.”

Inkurisar asked her, “How long have you got? We have a long way to go.”

“It’ll be soon,” Tellina shifted onto her side where she sat. “I’m not sure. Our womens’ terms seem to run long.”

Derizan muttered to Inkurisar, “We don’t even have a direction or a route picked out yet, do we?”

“There’s one I want to try tomorrow. If it works out, we’ll be coming down into big woods northwest of here. We’ll make better time there.”

Nakiran hummed an old Arcus song over the wind. Astina picked it up and her voice raised words.

Ten thousand years,

Ten thousand years,

Long and deep are the ten thousand years,

Long with the longings of long-loving hearts,

Deep with the blood of the sacrificed loves…

The women all came to singing. Then, a long discordant note wove in, undulating, ragged, soon joined by others. The singers stopped.

“Wolves.” Inkurisar grabbed his rifle and stepped to the cave opening, his fire-shadow flaring and shrinking ahead of him. “Let’s get these boulders in place with just a vent at the top. They got the scent of our mutton.” He sighed and looked around as Selech, Daryuz, and Derizan helped him shove the boulders into place. “We need to get rest now. It’s going to be a busy day tomorrow.”

MEETING THE ESCORTS

Scene 10

The night crawled as the winds blew outside the cave. Derizan could not sleep. Sounds of snuffling and scratching shot him awake and alert more than once, with Inkurisar’s handgun at ready, but he settled back when he’d hear a companion turning restlessly on the gravelly cave floor, sometimes groaning or muttering. The boulders blocked nearly the whole cave entrance, so the smoke from the damped fire wasn’t venting well, even with the gusts tearing at the bitter air, and coughs punctuated the long night.

At last Alumaras struggled to his feet, relieved himself in the back of the cave, and put the last sticks of wood on to burn and warm them all.

“What do you hear outside?” Daryuz, to Astina as she stood on tiptoe listening at the opening above the boulders.

“Nothing but the wind.”

Ajina wrapped her coat close. “Are those… wolfbreeds?”

“Not up here,” Inkurisar said, “They’re wild wolves, but I have an idea.” He motioned Astina aside and came to the opening with a long chunk of cooked meat.

“You’re not going to open for them to come in!”

“Watch and listen.” Inkurisar paid out the meat strip through the vent opening. As he did, his voice rose into a three-note song that repeated, undulating gently, in tones the wolves had used in their howls. He released the meat strip, and it slowly slid out and disappeared. Moments later, the wolves responded, their tones dropping lower at the end of each belling.

“Open the way,” Inkurisar told the others. “I’m friends with this pack. We’ve shared food. Stay still, and let them get acquainted. They’ll travel with us. We’ll share food.”

Derizan looked around at all the wide-eyed City faces, and asked the obvious. “They won‎’t attack us?”

Inkurisar laughed. “Not these. Others, yes. But the others won’t come near us when we travel with this pack.”

Selech, Denzari, Daryuz, and Alumaras rolled back the boulders, and stood back. With slow, cautious steps, seven wolves entered the cave, their eyes taking in the travelers, their noses inhaling the many scents of human life. The first came to Inkurisar, who offered his hand in greeting. Denzari clutched his handgun in his pocket as another wolf approached him. “Give him an open hand,” Inkurisar prompted, and Derizan released the gun, slowly opening his extended palm to the wolf, trying to keep from trembling. The wolf’s gray eyes stared into Derizan’s for a moment as if to say, “It’s okay.”

In this way the wolves and the members of the party greeted and came to a pause, and then the wolves lapsed into dogginess, all of them circling the cave, inhaling the aroma of the leftover meat, sniffing into all the corners of everything, getting the pungent scent signals from the latrine corner, adding their own, and even wagging tails now and then as the humans started to relax.

Daryuz started to reach to the head of the wolf nearest him. The wolf swiveled away and stared at him. “Don’t pet them,” Inkurisar warned. “They will let you know how and when to approach. Treat them as equals.”

Denzari asked, “Do you speak with them? I heard you before.”

“Only a few things. Their language is rich, and they make fun of me.”

“The wind has lessened,” Nakiran said. “Inkiu, dear, shouldn’t we get started?”

The party filed out into the snow. The winds had dwindled to a gentle, steady, chilly flow, and the sky was brightening to its best blue-violet. “Aaahh – this is a lot better. My old bones feel it.” Alumaras stretched. “Are we going down, finally? That would feel good.”

“The news is not quite that good,” said Inkurisar. “The ways down are blocked with troops. We follow the wolves. It looks as if we’ll have to take the High Pass.”

THE CLIMB BEGINS

Scene 11

Derizan blurted out, “You said we didn’t want to take the High Pass.”

“Yes, I did,” said Inkurisar.”And we don’t want to, but now there’s no other way to go.”

Selech erupted. “We got this far! Can’t we find some way past the troops? We got away from them and got here, didn’t we?”

Inkurisar raised both hands as the others gathered around him. The wolves played in the snow, yipping and tossing gobs of flakes at each other. “Listen, all of you. I’ve been doing this through one reloc after another. I’ve seen whole coll families die when they didn’t listen.”

He glanced up at the clear sky, and then he glared at Selech. “This is how it happens. You know that column you were walking in, with the military escort? You didn’t have to walk, but they don’t tell you that. There’s a rail line one valley away between the City and the North Mines, same direction you were going, and it stops in Burunisil, halfway. But the orders from the City are to make everyone walk, because it drains away any energy and hope of attacking the troops and forcing a way for themselves. And some die on the way.”

Silence. As Inkurisar glanced up again, Derizan followed his gaze. A huge black tononnsar, a carrion-bird of the high peaks, circled placidly above them on a mountain updraft.

Inkurisar went on. “Even if you rode the trains and got to Burunisil, you’d find nothing there but more soldiers. And after that, the mines and a life as short as an andro. Most folks don’t even last five years. That’s your relocation.”

“See that big filthy eater of the dead drifting around up there, that tononnsar? That one grew his twelve-foot wingspan off the flesh of City people just like you. And he has friends and family up here. So when I tell you to follow me and the wolves, you listen and do it. Does anyone have any questions?”

Silence.

“All right. Let’s go.”

Derizan walked through the snow alongside Inkurisar. “Do we have enough for the wolves?”

“Oh, they finished off that carcass from our hunt. They’ll last right on over the Pass if we make decent time." He scanned the sky; some long cirrus streaks were growing where wind was coming to them from the west. “I don’t think this lovely day will last when night comes.”

The stronger men, with Inkurisar’s wife Nakiran and Munizkara, beat down the snow they faced, easing the way for the others. They were high in thin air, often panting and gasping; they stopped frequently, and Mentrianos and Daryuz helped Tellina, supporting her arms, as she trudged heavily onward.

The wolves ranged now around them and ahead. The brilliant sun passed noon, starting to draw up shadows of the crags to their northwest. They stopped, exhausted, puffing, chilled, and hungry. At this height all but the most tenacious of the forevergreens were gone, but Inkurisar managed to kindle one in place, its tarry resin catching flame from the small beamer he carried.

As the fire reluctantly built into full heat, Derizan warmed and massaged his hands, huddling with his father and others with backs to the cold wind. He watched Inkurisar and his wife and sister-in-law busily getting meat cooked over the flames, wondering how they withstood this relentless, frigid height of the world. Anxiously he surveyed the young couple that had joined the party as they drew closer to the fire. How long would it be before the woman would go into labor and try to deliver her baby? The family he had lost earlier came to mind again, and the memory brought him pain.

Alumaras coughed. He had been slowing as the climb went on, and now his brown face seemed gray, his beard’s pale stubble seeming almost to blend into his skin. Derizan had never seen his father like this.

“Father, how can I help you? You look wasted away.”

Alumaras closed his eyes and said nothing. Derizan took his arm and shook it a little. “Father?” He turned to see Munizkara approaching them.

“Let me close to him,” she said, in a tone that made Derizan get out of the way without question. The woman straddled Alumaras as he sat, pulled open his wrap, opened her coat and underlayers, and pressed her two ample breasts against his cold, bare skin, wrapping her arms around him. “This will bring him back,” she said, “and it should help even more once he’s had food and warmer water.”

Alumaras stiffened; his eyes opened wide; he seemed to straighten; his mouth opened, gulping air; finally he rasped, “I’ll be all right.”

Munizkara held him for many heartbeats, finally letting him go, closing up his wrap and her clothing, saying over her shoulder to Inkurisar, “Get him the first food. When there’s enough heat, some tea.” She turned to Derizan. “Keep him from the wind. Stay with him.” As Derizan brought his father closer, she rummaged in her pack for a tin and the tea.

While all this unfolded, Nakiran left off helping Inkurisar with the fire and went to the pregnant Tellina and her husband, gathering both in her arms inside her outer coat, making a huddle of three with Tellina’s unborn in the center. She held them, swaying the huddle back and forth slowly, as Inkurisar, Astina, and the others worked to cook the meat, heat water, and offer some of the meat to their wolf escorts.

Derizan got up and approached Inkurisar, who had stepped away to stare and scan down the route they were taking. “What do you see?”

Inkurisar pointed ahead. “Once we’ve rested, its down toward a village I know. The going should be much better.”

As if called by their thoughts, the biggest of the wolves came to the two men, faced them, and gazed first into Inkurisar’s eyes, then into Derizan’s. An image, a sense of emptiness came to Derizan. He blurted out, “You are leaving us?”

Inurisar nodded. “You sense well. Their range ends here. We will have to fend for ourselves on the descent to Fornonck – that’s the village we’re trying to reach.”

“More wolves?”

“Possibly. I’m not as well-acquainted with the ones on the way down. Keep your eyes open and stay calm.”

Astina called to them. Finally closing into a tight group around the flickering wood fire, facing away from the wind as much as they were able, they ate, drank, warmed themselves and each other, and rested at last.

DOWN TO FORNONCK

Scene 12

“We have to move now,” Inkurisar said. The winter shadows were rising ahead, across the forest below and ahead of them. The trail sloped and twisted down and along descending tiers of granite, snow over fallen rubble, in the darkness.

Derizan looked closely at his father. Alumaras seemed more aware. His ashen pallor had turned to better color. But Derizan, turning to the trail downward, saw only a dangerous struggle ahead. To Inkurisar he called, “Can’t we protect the burdened ones?” He gestured to his father and to Tellina, whose husband was trying to get her to her feet.

Inkurisar pointed. “You, Daryuz, Selech. Help these two. Nakiran and Munizkara, you too. Ajina, Astina, you’re with me. Mentrianos, stay by your wife.” He looked at Derizan and then at Denzari. “You two are brothers, right? You take the rear and keep a good lookout behind and beside us.”

As the afternoon passed, the wind lessened, giving them some relief from the cold. The rock-strewn path, covered with uneven snow, slowed them to a stumble winding back and forth, often holding each other’s arms for balance, especially where the trail narrowed as it traversed past a steep dropoff.

“We never thought this far ahead,” Denzari muttered, steadying Derizan past a gravelly snowslide. “Now look at us. Night is coming, it’ll be cold, there are wolves who are not our friends, and we don’t even know where we’re going.”

“Our guide must know,” Derizan said. “He’s done this before.”

“I’m sure he has. But he hasn’t told us everything, has he?”

“If we stop talking and keep walking with care, we’ll be in Fornonck an hour after sunset.” Inkurisar’s voice came back to them as clearly as if he had been beside them. “Now shut up. Wolves have good ears and better noses. We’ll make better time below the whip-pine tree line, but we’ll get there just when the wolves are hunting.”

Rounding a bend past a bushy mound of foervergreens, Derizan looked downslope and outward to an unending sprawl of dark green whip-pines reaching to the far northern horizon, streaks of gray and open land punctuating it here and there. High strata of shadowing clouds lay above it all, open here and there to the dimming sky and a few of the brightest stars. Wind curled past him with a faint tang of resins. He stopped.

All this life I had in the City, curled up underground, huddled with my family, and now this fills my eyes and all my senses, and my heart. I will never go back there. Let me live and die where life sings this great song, where the stone and the trees and the creatures rise and move everywhere in the wind I feel, and the cold snaps me awake.

As if responding to him, a gust of air slapped his skin, and a few icy flakes blew past.

“A good view of the Sleethe, isn’t it?” Inkurisar came back beside him. “Underneath this wooded range the Gellin towns are tucked away. The Gellins are still exploring the underground cave networks – they know how to fortify and keep out invaders. They don’t trust City authorities at all. Get ready to be challenged.” He returned to his lead position.

There were no signs or sounds of wolves when they reached the pines. After a brief pause for water and rest, they started on their way again, relieved that only a modest layer of snow lay over their now-smoother path. By now the darkness had crept over the forest, and through the treetops Derizan could see stars wink among the branches ans the cloud cover seemed thiiner. He took a deep breath, exhaling gustily, and at that moment a howl sounded behind them.

In a flash Inkurisar was back beside the brothers, his rifle at the ready. He handed Denzari the small beam weapon he’d used earlier to start the fire at noontime. “You know how to use these?”

“Yes.”

As Denzari checked the weapon’s cartridge feed, Derizan asked him, “When did you…” He got only a mysterious grin. Derizan pulled out the handgun Inkurisar had given him. Another howl.

Nakiran had halted and silenced the party the moment her husband had joined the two rearguards. Everyone stayed still, their whispers lost in the light wind. Inkurisar’s hand, raised in a warning, waved back and forth. Something’s coming.

From the trees at left burst a leaping series of one-horned goats – voltiari – racing frantically past Derizan and the others, one bounding straight over his head, to disappear into the trees at right, pursued closely by a pack of the mountain wolves, silent but for their breathing.

As the wolves bounded past, a shock ran through Derizan’s head, electric, bright, and the clear thought bit through him: We will be back to see you – we’re busy. Derizan stammered to Inkurisar, “They said they’ll be back!”

Inkurisar turned to him. “You have quite a gift with the wolves! I only have a little of it. I never heard of City people with it.” He held up both hands, turning to the others. “We’re safe for now. They’re hunting the goats. Let’s go. We have to get to Fornonck. No time to waste.” He strode back to lead them, kicking vigorously at the snows under the drooping heavy needles of the trees.

On his first step, blinding light flared across their path, and an explosion of bark burst from the nearest pine. A man’s voice shouted, “Stop! We’ll shoot!”

SURPRISES

Scene 13

Inkurisar, not moving, called out, “Who are you? Wolves are hunting here.”

“First you tell us who you are and why you’re here.” Another male voice, higher, strained.

“We’re traveling to the next village,” Inkurisar said. “We’ve just come over the High Pass. We’re hungry and cold, and we have a pregnant woman with us.”

Derizan heard the wolves, their belling far off in the trees. A pine cone fell on his shoulder, bounced away. The first male voice called, “We won’t shoot. We came down from the pass yesterday. Militias were chasing us. Please don’t attack us, and we’ll put away our weapons.”

After an exchange of suspicions and confirmations, two shadowed men appeared from behind large trees at the party’s left. In the dimness Derizan could see their bloodstained, tattered, and ripped City militia uniforms. One wore an Arcus Coll badge, and the other one the mark of Darko Hell Coll. Both carried rifle-sized beam weapons.

Inkurisar, waving to Derizan and the others to stay back, approached them. Derizan, not wanting to remain where he was, joined the three. “I’m responsible for most of these people’s safety,” he said as he came forward. “This man beside me is our guide and we rely on him. My name is Derizan Alumaras Uni Junusium,”

Inkurisar introduced himself, adding, “And now, you two? Who are you? I see Arcus and Hejji badges, and a lot of wear and tear. Talk to us.”

The man with the Arcus badge spoke. “I’m Arcus, and my name is Guinban Garvea Yaviures. I… we were in Sobi Zone in the City with my wife and family. This is Piotras. He’s Hejji.”

The other, his voice still tight and high, spoke quickly. “We ran away when a bomb killed the rest of the militia unit we were in. Our families don’t know where we are, but we can’t go back. We’ll be stuck in prison, probably one of the Signo mines. Our food ran out after we got here, and we don’t know what’s ahead of us.” He bowed his head.

“You kept your beam weapons,” Inkurisar growled. “You’ll die for that alone if they catch you. And if you’re with us, it falls on us too.”

“Check him,” Nakiran called to him. He grabbed Guinban’s right arm and bared it to the elbow, as the man pulled his beam gun away.

“Where’s your knifescript? You’re not Arcus. Come on, we’re not enemies.” Every Arcus child received at puberty a personal inscription carved into the right forearm.

Guinban backed away, leveling his weapon at them. Inkurisar raised his hands. “Easy, now. Just be straight with us.”

Derizan stepped forward, facing Guinban. “Look at us. We just got away from the same people who are after you. They’re chasing all of us. No need for fighting – no one will win this.”

At that moment, hot-headed Selech called out, “You know, Piotras, you look awfully light-skinned, even for a Darko boy. Any paler, and I’d say you were andro.” Andros, the short-lived, vat-grown servants of humans, were treated poorly and with suspicion in the City.

Now both beam weapons were pointed at the party. Piotras spat, “You’re not leaving us a choice, then, are you?” He aimed directly at Selech. “We got this far, and we’ll go on without you.”

Silence. Derizan said softly, “Just tell us who you are, and we’ll take you in. I don’t care if you’re Hejji or andro, we’ll take you with us …” and he raised a hand ‘No’, first to his father Alumaras and then to Inkurisar as both started to protest his words.

Guinban and Piotras exchanged looks. Guinban nodded. Then he said, “All right. I’m Darko Hejj myself. My wife was Arcus Coll – that’s why I had her badge. I was guarding the column back there, and I took off. Now you, Pioti. Tell them.”

Piotras, his head bowed again, said, “You’re right, whoever you are with the good eyes. I’m andro. I killed a militia man in the City when he was beating me. There’s a big price on my head.” He nodded toward Guinban. “He gave me his coll badge.”

A pause. Inkurisar shook his head. Then Nakiran said matter-of-factly, “You bring guns and andro power, we bring numbers and food. Come on, Inku. Let’s deal and go. We need to get to Fornonck before the wolves get their appetites after us and before Tellina gives birth right here.”

Inkurisar shook his head, looked down, and finally nodded. “All right.”

Derizan said to Guinban and Piotras, “Walk with me up front.” Into the darkness, down the sloping starlit trail, moving steadily towards a dim lamp in the distance, they all went.

THE DESERTERS

Scene 14

“Talk to me,” Derizan said to Guinban. Just ahead of them, Inkurisar scanned the woods on either side, glancing back now and then when Derizan spoke. “What made deserting your wife and your life so appealing? Why’d you join up with an andro with a price on his head? Your story had better make some sense when we get to this village, or we’ll all be in much deeper trouble.”

His face grim, Guinban spoke slowly. “You know how the Hejjis get all the scum jobs. When this big City reloc was called, they were short of escort guards to keep the people in line on the way out to the Mines. Nobody was to tell the Arcus people under guard where they were really going. The story was about new settlements…”

Derizan nodded. “Yeah, that’s what we were told, all right. Some of us knew it was a lie, but we didn’t know what we could do about it after the trains dumped us off in the snow to march.”

Guinban shook his head and chuckled. “So you knew. We were chasing after a family, up through the storm, through this crack in the mountainside. We’d just passed some others going the other way, back to the line. This woman, the last one, was running back, yelling ‘Nassa!’ or something like that.”

Derizan stumbled, started to speak, clamped his mouth shut. Darvelia – the one I left behind. Oh. God.

Guinban looked at him. “You don’t look so good. Something wrong?”

“N – No. Go on, tell me the rest.”

“Well… I was one of three guards. We were all Hejjis. The blizzard blinded us and we stopped. When the air cleared, I was alone, and I thought, This is bloody shit. I’m not doing this anymore. The other two guys had gone back down. I turned and headed up. That’s when I found this spook hiding above the trail.” He tipped his head towards Piotras. “He thought I was hunting him. He nearly killed me with his bare hands.”

“You were easy prey,” Piotras said. “You’re no andro hunter, not one of Gullinder’s Hounds, that’s for sure. Those people are the spooks, not me.”

“So you two joined forces?”

“It took us a little slammy-jammy-balkie-talkie, but we worked out that we needed each other.”

Derizan looked at Piotras. “Your turn. Talk.”

“When I killed that guy who was beating me, something broke inside me. I knew right then I would never go back to the City. The Hounds came after me, and I ran. I stowed on the reloc train – there were a lot of bunks for the militia left vacant, a whole car of them, actually, and once it was underway I picked and ransacked the gun locker for the beamers and their ammo.”

“Glad you got me one,” Guinban. “The bally rifle I had wasn’t good.”

Derizan asked, “Why weren’t there more soldiers on the train?”

Guinban snorted. “The City and the corpos had their hands full – there’s a rebellion going on, down in there. The relocation was meant to empty out some of the troublemaking colls. Like yours. They must have figured that once they dumped you people out here, they could put more force on the fighters and terrorists still in the City.”

“So, once we’re dumped, we die, and the problem gets easier for them.”

“That’s the way they think. War crime is what I call it.” Guinban spat a hole in the snow. “Hey, Piotras, sing us a song. Something that marches us along.”

Inkurisar looked back at them. “Not too loud. We don’t know who or what is listening.” He scanned the woods on either side.

His voice soft, Piotras began, his three sets of vocal cords weaving harmony.

“Oh, little one, put your feet on the trail,
Listen to your mama sing,
Soon we will come to a sweet little spring,
Where I will tell a tale.”

As he sang, hushed voices from the women and men behind joined in the familiar lullaby.

“My little love, please hold my hand,
And never let me go,
We’ll drink sweet waters and wash our toes,
And walk across this land.

When morning comes, and brings the sun,
We’ll be inside our dream,
With fruits and honey-sweetened cream,
And then we’ll know we’ve won.”

“There!” Inkurisar stopped them, pointed ahead to a lamp-post. “We’ve reached Fornonck. Now let me go ahead to talk with them. If things go as they have before, they’ll be waiting, and they’ll already know a lot about us.”

GREETINGS FROM THE GELLIN

Scene 15

Night had shadowed everything under the trees. The starlight, diffused by the snow-clung needles of the pines, brought only a ghostly veil of light to the travelers’ faces. Inkurisar held up a hand. “All of you wait right here. The Gellin Sintherou folks on this route take their security very seriously. If any of you try to follow me, or wander off, this whole trip will get turned around and sent back. Do you understand me?”

Everyone slowly nodded. Inkurisar slipped off into the darkness ahead. Minutes passed. A groan from Tellina as Mentrianos helped her to sit against a tree. He turned to Astina. “She needs to rest. Do we have some water?”

Nakiran came to them. “Here. Inkui always carries extra.” She handed the skin of water to Tellina, who drank with relief.

As she handed back the skin, soft lights came up around all of them, and a woman’s voice, accented, said, “Greetings to you all. We have some questions for you.” The woman stepped out to face Derizan. “Are you the leader here of this family? I already know Nakiran and Munizkara. Will you introduce everyone else?”

He went through his own family first. When he came to Mentrianos and Tellina, the woman stopped him. “These two must come with me right now.” She led the two off into the shadows ahead as a man stepped out to replace her.

Derizan gestured to Guinban and Piotras. “Introduce yourselves.” Before either one could speak, a second man, smaller but moving quickly, emerged silently from the darkness and approached Piotras, sniffing.

After stroking Piotras’ left arm, he turned to the other and said, “No sign of the Hounds on him.” Then he vanished, but as he turned to go, Derizan saw a momentary flash of neck tattoos on him, and the sight made the hairs on his neck rise in fear.

All the lights faded but one, and a man’s voice said, “Follow this light. Quick and quiet. No talking. Single line.” The light bore left and down, and Derizan and the others followed it through an arch of roots into a narrow passageway. A thump sounded behind them; he guessed that the way had been closed. Dim mazes of tree roots arched over their heads as they went on, in a gradual descent.

After a while the passage expanded and they could stand and walk upright The man leading them stopped at a wall ending the passage, signaling them to stay quiet. They waited. A minute passed. The wall opened, showing a hidden door and a softly-lit room beyond. “Come on in,” a woman’s friendly voice said. “Welcome to a home of the Gellin Sintherou Coll. We offer you sanctuary as you go.”

Gratefully, Derizan, his family, and the two deserters came in. Their hosts sat them at a table and brought food and drink. Mentrianos and Tellina were nowhere to be seen.

TELLINA AND HER BABY

Scene 16

“Where are you taking us?” Mentrianos asked the woman escorting him and Tellina. They were led silently down the root corridor and turned aside into a second passage, ending up in a small chamber with beds and a table, the ceiling woven of knotted roots.

They cleaned up, and Tellina sat on one of the beds with relief. Her baby kicked a few times, and she crooned a few notes in response.

The three of them sat, the couple on one bed, the woman on the other. She said to them, “I’m Galanaisa. You are Arcus Coll, yes?” She wore a long purple wrap with a hood curled back to show her gray hair. Her brows rose as she spoke.

“Yes,” said Mentrianos. “We got caught in the relocation. The rest of our family moved out of our City zone and got away before the soldiers and the corpos came.”

Galanaisa nodded. “A familiar story. They must be targeting Arcus Coll now. We’re all Gellin here, all but a few of us. But I took you aside because of your baby. It’s an unusual situation.”

“It is, for us!” Tellina gave a bright smile.

“Of course it is! But it’s more than you know. She needs special protection and care. You have named her Samantine, yes? ‘Divine Spark’ in Arcus dialect?”

Tellina gaped, spreading both hands over her belly. “How did you know all that??” Mentrianos bristled.

Galanaisa smiled. “Don’t worry, be at peace now. She’s safe in this place. There are corridors through time here, and once in a while we traverse them.”

“I dreamed, and she told me her name. Did you have that dream too?” Tellina, bending forward in curiosity.

“As I said, there are corridors, passageways through time – and space. Dreams take us through them. But there are other ways too.” Galanaisa showed a half-smile. “We also learned that safety here may be short-lived, and you must take Samantine north and east, and soon.”

Mentrianos challenged her. “Why haven’t you told the others too?”

Galanaisa shook her head and held up her forefinger. “We’re not sure of the loyalty of some others in your group. We take no chances.”

“So maybe that soldier and the andro aren’t what they tell us?” Tellina spoke, remembering that she had told Astina and Munizkara about her dream.

“I’m not saying that. Even in the best of coll families, there are betrayals. Please,” she said to the couple, “Don’t tell them anything, except maybe that I wanted to check the baby’s health. Oh, and I’ve done that already. She’s fine. Here, let me get you some good clothing for this cold. You have a long way to go.”

Mentrianos looked away. Sometimes it feels as if this baby is taking over everything. As if I don’t matter. As if I’m not… And the forbidden thought circled in him, like a mosquito of doubt.

ON THE SCENT

Scene 17

“Oh, man, this is slow.” Bunjaian called the wolven back again. “We’ve been over this trail and beside it and into all the caves. Why can’t these doggies work faster?” He shouldered his beamer again, right where it chafed his skin under his City uniform.

“Stop calling them that,” Jaman snapped. “They pick up on your tone. And your words.” He straightened his ArCorp knit hat and called to the canines, “Tiri, Siri, Willi, Walli, come back to me. Come.” Out of the swirling snow the four hulking wolven came up to him, nosing his foodpack as he gave each a strip of soft meat. He scratched each one under the jaw and behind the ears. “Good work,” he told them. “Now, downslope!” He pointed ahead on the trail, and turned to Bunjaian. “Patience, buddy. We’ll find him.”

“Chasing a deserter in the snow. I shouldn’t have signed up for this.” Bunjaian grumbled. “My toes! These boots are trash. I don’t hear you complaining – Arlen’s corp takes good care of you guys.”

“Don’t dig too deep on that,” Jaman spat, “They give us orders that would kill you in seconds. I lost my partner that way.” He stared away for a long moment. “Not all the andros run. Just be glad we’re not after any of them.”

A howl brought them stumbling down toward the wolven, The four animals stood before a low cave opening. The two men led the way in. The leavings of a party littered the cave. “Aha,” said Jaman. “Progress.” He picked up a scrap of cloth and held it for the wolven to inhale. They seemed excited, sniffing everywhere. “This should speed things up a little.”

Bunjaian surveyed the litter. “There were a lot more than two people here. Refugees, I’d guess.”

“It looks that way. Get ready for a bigger payday. Wait.” Jaman reached down and brought up a dark-purple smear. “We might have a problem.”

“What?”

“This is andro blood. Recent. This guy may be traveling with an andro.”

“So? Probably serving him.”

“Come on, you’re not that dumb. Andros only come out this far when they’re free. Out here they’re locked in the mines, and they’re all watched by the hawks – the mine guards. This one is a fugitive. That makes him dangerous, and we’re not andro hunters. We’ll need to send back for the Hounds.”

“He must have followed that soldier we’re chasing. It’ll take time to get back and get in touch.”

Jaman finally said, “If we stick to our own orders, we’ll stay clear of any andro. All we need to do is catch this AWOL and bring him back. Nothing else, understand? If any andro gets in the way, we break off, go back, and report so the Hounds can deal with it. Agreed?”

Bunjaian nodded. “That’s perfectly fine with me. Getting dead is not in my plan.”

UNDERGROUND NIGHT

Scene 18

Derizan lay in a warm bunk, well-fed, and well-covered with blankets. This was the first night in weeks that he had found peace, safety, and comfort. Here in the subterranean maze of halls and chambers the Gellin Sintherou had burrowed out down in Fornonck, he relaxed his vigilance and got ready to sleep. In the bunk above him, Astina breathed slowly and steadily. Below him, his father snored softly now and then.

He turned onto his side. The image of lost Areesa’s frightened face haunted him. Ever since that moment when she broke and ran back, ran away from him, it seemed that he had fallen from grace, that somehow he could have turned her to him, corralled her children, drawn them along with the rest of his Arcus family. But she had raced off to find her husband, panicking, and he had lost her and her children. By now they were dead with all the others.

No comfort came. Grief and guilt and shame washed through him. He turned again. Would he come to another crisis and fail again like that, with his wife, his relatives with him now? A snore reminded him of his father Alumaras and his words as they boarded the relocation train, “Derizan. I am old now. You are the eldest son, a good man, and I turn to you now to lead the family. Lead us well, and I will follow you.” The words were ritual, standard among those in the Arcus family’s generational changes.

Denzari looks to me. So does Selech, when he isn’t overheated. Daryuz – he seems distracted sometimes, or maybe he’s just waiting for me to slip. Again. I should ask Astina about the men – my sister won’t tell me anything. If only Ezzar…

An ache came in his gut.

Ezzar. My beloved, fiery daughter, When her husband Boren and her baby were killed, she tore herself away from us, from her own parents. Nobody could reach her. Now she’s going to war as if she wants to die fighting, fighting everything. I’ve lost her too.

“Deri?” Astina, whispering. “Can’t you sleep?” Her face appeared above him in the dimness, looking down from her bunk. She reached an arm down to him.

He took her hand. “So much loss. And death. And Ezzar… what could I have done to…”

“It wasn’t yours to take on,” Astina said firmly, “any more than you could have saved that woman when we came up here.” Her voice wavered, and then firmed again.

“Areesa.” His gut clenched again.

“Here.” And Astina came down from her bunk to join him in his. “At least let’s share some love and get a little more warmth back in us. You won’t get any comfort from the past.”

They nestled together, soothed one another, and comfort came.

MAN AND ANDRO

Scene 19

Inkurisar, his hunger and thirst finally gone, sat beside Viantos Garr, a Gellin screening officer in a small, root-ceilinged interview chamber in Fornonck. Facing them, Guinban and Piotras answered the officer’s many questions well into the night. Viantos finally said to Guinban, “I’ve heard your story from a lot of folks, and it holds up well. You’re welcome here.” He turned to Piotras. “Your tale has some holes in it. Let’s get a little deeper before I go any further with this.”

Inkurisar leaned closer, listening. I hope my bringing him here doesn’t cause trouble. I did the best I could.

Viantos opened his mouth slightly, and from him came a lasting, layered musical chord with notes as high as silver and beyond. Shock ran through Inkurisar. He’s andro himself! Guinban’s eyes widened, his hands splaying on his knees in amazement. Viantos looked at them. “I’m asking him details about the Hounds who were chasing him. I’m using anjive speech to make my questions clearer to him.”

Breaking in, Guinban blurted, “You’re … andro?”

Viantos smiled. “Half and half – parents broke City law. That’s why I’m out here and not getting chased and killed. All right, Piotras. You can share with them. They’ve both seen a lot. Inku here can confirm that. Let them hear too.”

In everyday speech, Piotras started, his words coming slowly and haltingly at first, gradually turning smoother and more settled.

“My master was full of rage. It consumed him. When his drug business started to fail, he got violent with me, beating me every day.” Trembling, Piotras shrugged off his wrap, exposing his back with long grooved scars running from shoulders across to hips. “He used a blade. Once I almost died. When I recovered, he came again with the knife, and something tripped in me, and the next moment I saw him lying on the floor, red human blood everywhere, his knife in my hand, and this surprised look on his face. ‘You…’ he said, and he stiffened, his eyes rolled, and he was dead.” Now Piotras was shivering uncontrollably.

Guinban put an arm around him, comforting. “He got like this just after we… met. He almost killed me, but he stopped, thank heaven.”

Viantos nodded. “Piotras, I understand. When did the Hounds come for you?”

“The next day. When he didn’t appear at his business, his associates guessed – they’d seen this with him before, except that he’d ordered the Hounds himself. This time they must have realized that he’d waited too long.”

Viantos. “Tell me your master’s name.”

Piotras told him, and he nodded again. “Oh, yes. I know all about him.” A slight shudder. “Did you actually see the Hounds when they came?”

“Only for a moment, down the passageway as I looked out. I would have missed them if I didn’t know how silently they can move. A man and a woman. Like panthers, and incredibly fast. I slipped out the back way and found an airshaft – it cut my scent – and I got to the surface as fast as I could. A long climb – maybe 300 levels. I found a stream up topside, followed it away from the City. Guinban has told you the rest.”

“So they’re still chasing you.”

“I’m afraid they are. They don’t stop.”

“Oh, I know. I know.” And Viantos shivered, his eyes fixed on a far-off place.

ANDRO AND MAN

Scene 20

Viantos and Inkurisar left the interview chamber. Guinban still had his arm around Piotras’s shoulders. “Are you all right?”

“Yes. It just takes me time to push all that away again.” Piotras lowered his head, dark hair falling around his pale face. He looked up, stared straight ahead. “All that waste – five years of my short andro life.”

“How much more time do you have before…?”

“I don’t know. Two andro-human partnerships were my grandparents. Instead of ten years, I’ve got maybe fifteen more now. No idea. But I’m on the Clock.” Clock – a song popular among andros.

“What’s it like for you? I don’t know anything much about andros, even if I saw them every day in the City. Vat-bred, right?”

Piotras looked for a long moment at Guinban. “Did andros ever matter to you?”

“Andros were everywhere. I never noticed much. Now I wish I’d known,” Guinban said. “I’m afraid for you, with these… animals chasing you.” His hand touched Piotras on the arm. “Help me understand. What’s it like for you?”

Piotras drew a deep breath. “Where do I start? Life with basic humans is just slavery. Your kind treats us like soft machines they can use and throw away. But that’s the outside part of the story. We live more on the inside of ourselves and each other. That’s how we survive you, until the Clock strikes and we wither.”

“What do you mean, ‘live inside’?”

“We have innerspace. It’s … like an imagination world, but we share it with other andros nearby. It’s our own reality. It’s where we can keep from going insane.”

“So you and Viantos were in it together?”

“Oh, yes. He spotted me right away. He wanted to be sure I wasn’t one of Gullinder’s Hounds, because if I was, he’d be dead now, and the City forces would be sent to destroy this place. The moment he saw me in innerspace he knew I wasn’t a threat to anyone. And I saw him and I realized he was safe for me.”

“Wait. Do you see me in innerspace? Or Inkurisar?”

“Of course! But there you look like shadows. We look the same way there that we do here, but… brighter.”

Guinban leaned closer. His sense of wonder grew. “What are those tiny pale flecks in your irises? And the dark ones?”

“You ARE curious!” Piotras laughed, a soft polytonal chuckle. “Only andros notice these. We have words for the two kinds, but they’re only pronounceable in anjive, out of range of your hearing. The pale ones are for seeing into the ultraviolet spectrum, the dark ones for the infrared. Humans know we can do this, but they don’t care.”

“This sounds beautiful! All that sound, all that color! I’d love to be able to…” Guinban’s voice trailed off.

Piotras looked sad. “It comes at a high price. We are made to be your servants. I broke your laws, even though I was supposed to be conditioned all my life to serve and obey you.”

Guinban reflected in silence. These gifts to andros seem like bribes or apologies or… just something precious to lose. A short life with so much beauty in it, putting up with us somehow, and then it all goes away. He looked down, closed his eyes.

“Did I say something that bothered you?” Piotras.

“Oh, no! I was thinking – we have these longer lives, but most of us are caught in the City serving and obeying, getting punished or getting little crumbs for the work we do. It’s nothing like what you go through, but our lives feel short at the end anyway. I’d love to… to make all our lives more bearable.” Guinban sighed. “And then after that, after it ends, then what?”

“We’re told – trained – that life just ends,” Piotras spoke, and now his arm and Guinban’s were in warm contact.

“I don’t think that’s true,” Guinban said. “Whether or not you’re like me or like you, something of us both goes on. Maybe without these bodies, we’ll be free.” He looked again into Piotras’s eyes. “Could we be friends and stay together, help each other? This trip we’re on now is going to be tough.”

And Piotras slowly nodded, smiling a little. That night they rested and comforted one another.

A TROUBLING DISCOVERY

Scene 21

The Gellin surveyor adjusted the optical-beam orienter. “I can’t get this aligned. Terrenci, is there another way to check the way this hatch is facing?” A tilted, circular, metal hatch door, with scattered bits of rock from their excavating, lay in the floor ahead of them.

The hatch door was a mystery. Their sensors had found the metal of the hatch, well below Fornonck, but the space they had made around the corroded hatch had been earth, stone, and gravel, as if it had along ago been at the surface and covered by ages of glacial change in the land.

Terrenci, his engineer, inspected the orienter, designed to determine compass directions. It used a reference beam reflected down pipes from a fixed source near the surface above. She said, “It’s working as far as I can tell. Why do you think there’s a problem?”

“It doesn’t make any sense the way it’s tilted. It ought to be lined up between the City and Kiliasil to the west-northwest, but it’s just about at a right angle to that. Here – Fornonck – is almost on that line.”

“Well, are we ready to see what it hides? Let’s get this thing open” The engineer beckoned to the four miners standing nearby and resting from their breakthrough into the low chamber where the hatch lay. They brought tools over.

One inspected the hatch and its fastenings. It had no hinges, but appeared to open upwards. Five flat, round, raised studs circled the center of the hatch door. After some cleaning, dusting, chipping, trying different tactics for moving the studs, the five men pushed the studs radially inwards. A cracking sound, and the hatch rose, floating, into the air above the metal ring of the circular opening it covered. It hovered there as the men and the woman gaped at it. “Never seen that,” Terrenci said. She pushed it to one side, and it returned to float about a meter above the opening.

A moment later a rich odor of long decay, a fruity miasma of mold and rot, assailed them all, and they backed away to the walls of the chamber. “Masks!” the engineer shouted as she slapped hers on. A few breaths, and the group eased as the masks filtered their air. The surveyor said to her, “You’re the lead on this. You’re the engineer. Do you have any idea what this is?”

The woman turned to one of the miners. “Do you have a vid probe?”

“I always carry two. Here.” He handed her a flying drone with lights and camera. “I wouldn’t want to go down in there, not just yet.”

The engineer linked her datasheet to the drone, and sent it down into the opening, barely squeezing its props under the levitating lid. She studied the screen; the others gathered behind her to watch.

“It’s a big, smooth, straight tunnel. It’s heading, just like the hatch here, is north. That would run it under the Great Curl Ridge and toward the North Mines. Wait. See that? And that? Those look like rails under a lot of debris.”

She brought the drone up again, wiping a coating of dark dust from it. “Ugh. Bag this and clean it when we get back up. The council will have to get this to discuss what to do about it.”

“We’re over a hundred meters down, in here,” the surveyor said. “Why don’t we drop in there and get more data for them before we have to do the descent and climb all over again?”

The engineer snapped, “Look. Who wants to drop into a filthy, unknown, risky place like this without good preparation?” Murmurs of agreement from the others. She added, “We’re looking for more ways to get refugees and exiles away from the City – that’s why we’re doing this. To make it safe for them, we have to make it safe for us first. Let’s get back up to Fornonck and the council. Can we get that hatch back in place?”

It took all of them to force the hatch door down into place and dog it securely again. As they packed up and turned to climb out of the chamber, a deep bass moan, undulating, shook dust from the walls and ceiling. One of the miners muttered, “If a team comes back down here and opens that thing, they’d better come well-armed.”

DREAMS AND THE BABY

Scene 22

In her bunk in the Gellin Sintherou refuge, Tellina dreamed. She reclined in a high place, warm cushions around her, soft light almost like a bright fog filling her vision. I’ve been here before.

A shining presence came near to her, hovered over her, radiating light that felt like love itself. Warmed, she stretched, arched her back, saying to the presence, “It is good to see you again.”

A laugh that made music. “It is all one moment. You are remembering the instant we gave you this gift.” The presence touched her waist momentarily, and her whole being began to sing, and she knew herself in its lyrics. “You are bearing a daughter,” the presence told her. “She will speak to you. She will tell you things that no one knows.”

“Who are you?” Tellina asked, knowing that no answer had come. The presence drifted away, back into her memory. She drowsed, hearing her husband’s slow breathing from his bunk above her, a whisper of air from the vent in the chamber’s ceiling. The darkness was lit only by a small glowlight on the wall opposite the bunks.

“Mother.” A gentle voice. Tellina turned her head, but saw no one. Her belly stirred, and she rested her hand there. “Mother, they are waiting for us. You are traveling to them. Be patient. I will be with you soon. Choose your flowers well.”

She murmured sleepily in response, “Samantine.”

The voice hummed in agreement. “Honor and blessing are yours, my mother. Here,” and Tellina sensed an insistent flow of lyric song run through her, and past and future and depths of time bloomed in it, and then it faded, its enchantment dissolving into the air around her as a single word came clearly: “Derizan.” She muttered the name.

Half-awake above her, Mentrianos heard.

WHERE TO GO

Scene 23

“You must decide.” Galanaisa looked around at the fugitives, from Derizan and his family members to Mentrianos and Tellina and finally Guinban and Piotras. They all stood in a domed, underground chamber of Fornonck, one large enough to hold several times their number, roots interlaced and woven supporting the ceiling. “We’ve spotted a larger group fleeing the relocation column, and they are a day or two behind you. Some of them seem injured, and they are moving slowly. We need the space for them, and that means getting you on the way to the next station.”

She pointed to a map on the stone wall behind her. “Most fugitives follow the series of our settlements north-northwest, through the Sleethe, up to meet the Kiliasil road. There you can choose to go west and south toward Purusil – not a bad choice, if you can avoid the City militia patrols – or you can turn northeast toward the North Mines. But that way is bristling with military and corp muscle, and you will most likely get captured and put to work digging plute with the andros.”

“Those are the only choices?” Daryuz snapped.

Galanaisa looked grim. “No, you can always cross the road and head for the Northwest Marshes, but that takes you through wild arctic country. Lots of lakes up there, but settlements and food and shelter are hard to find.” She looked sympathetically at Tellina. “You will be traveling with a baby, too. The easiest and safest path is through our settlements to the road toward Purusil.”

“Isn’t there any other choice?” Now Astina stood beside Daryuz, sister with brother.

“We’re always looking for alternatives,” Galanaisa said, pointing at the area of the map north of Fornonck. “We’ve just uncovered what may be a very-deep, very-ancient underground transportation tunnel that runs north and south through here. We don’t know where it leads or lets out. It might make a temporary hiding-place for now, but the air down in it is terrible. We also have no idea what may be alive down there.”

“Not much of a choice, is it?” Derizan. He scanned his family members, and all of them looked unhappy.

“Not yet. But this world has a lot of buried surprises. The great City you’ve left was the biggest, but Purusil and Monford are as well.”

“Surprises? We’ve lived in the City for generations! What are you talking about?” Daryuz again.

Galanaisa said, “All the underground cities show plain signs of nonhuman habitation dating back many thousands of years, even before we humans colonized the surface of this planet. Ancient history.”

“How does ancient history help us?” Daryuz.

“We’re researching another possible refuge for you. It’s the poorly-explored underground city of Escaondar in the far north, past the Mines. The corps and the government aren’t established there at all.”

“Past the Mines? How would we get past the Mines?” Now Piotras spoke quickly, his voice strained. “Andros die there digging plutonium, all the time! For us it’s a death sentence.” He turned to Guinban. “It would kill you too. Nobody comes out of there alive. Even the guards stay out on the walls and fences.”

“How long before you know more about this deep tunnel?” Derizan asked.

Galanaisa turned to a woman beside her. “Tell them what you know, Terrenci.”

The engineer responded, “It’s so deep down that it may pass underneath the Mines altogether. The Mines are relatively shallow under the plains facing the mountains, and we were over a hundred meters down. It slants even deeper. But its size and features tell us it predates humanity here. It might lead to Escaondar. That’s what we’re hoping to learn in the coming weeks.”

“Weeks! How does that help us if we have to leave today or tomorrow?” Selech’s agitation contorted his lean face.

“You can buy a little more time,” Galanaisa said, her voice steady, “if you follow the usual path through our settlements. We can offer you good transportation. That way we can get word to you about the new tunnel findings, and see if that helps. You could come back here and take that route if it turns out possible.”

Derizan turned to face the group, holding up both hands, thinking, I hope this won’t make for a split in our group. He said, “Let’s discuss this on our own. I like her last suggestion because it buys time and gets us more information. Galanaisa, thank you.”

She and Terrenci nodded and left the chamber.

Now Denzari spoke. “Our chances don’t look good no matter what.” The others all nodded.

“Never mind,” said Derizan. “Our chances were less than zero when I got you out of that column. It may be a long way to good, but now it’s a much-longer way away from being dead. Come on, let’s think this over. We have some hours we can use, and we’d better use them well.”

Shouts erupted from the corridor, then shots and blasts. Dust rained down from the root ceiling. Two heartbeats, and Terrenci burst into the chamber. “Follow me. We are under attack.”

FLIGHT

Scene 24

Gunfire. Derizan shouted through it, “Follow her! Go! Go!” The family hurried out of the chamber and off after Terrenci. Derizan, coming last, glanced back down the corridor to the fighting and froze in astonishment.

The mysterious man who had sniffed at them when they arrived in Fornonck moved like swift and silent death. He faced three armed corp soldiers, and in seconds all three lay broken and smashed, dying on the dirt floor. A bullet passed his fast-moving head as he dodged. He called to Derizan, “Take these! I’ll get more!”  He hurled three heavy backpacks, winked, and vanished around a bend.

“Come on!” Astina cried out. Derizan threw packs to her and Denzari, following the others, descending a spiraling tunnel leading down and away from the fighting. They passed chambers filled with excavation equipment. Further on, Terrenci stopped them.

“We have to seal ourselves off here,” she said, breathless. “We can’t go back. I saw a big force of soldiers. corpos. It looked as if they disguised as refugees to get in here. Our guards are probably dead.” She found some gel explosives and fuses. “I’ll get these deployed and ready to blow. You wait here.”

Selech called to her, “How will we get out?”

Terrenci called back, her arms embracing cakes of explosive, wires, detonators, and more, “Not back up. They’ve blocked our ways out to the town network – all probably occupied. Hang on!” She vanished back up the corridor. A few moments passed, and she returned, unreeling wire, gesturing. “Get over there – to the side, squat, cover ears, curl tight!”

As the family huddled on the floor, Inkurisar, his wife and her sister, and the unnamed fighter hurtled into the room to join them. Shouts rose from the corridor they had left. Terrenci, crowding next to them all, cried, “Now!” and a thunderous blast deafened everyone. The corridor they had left caved in, bringing down part of the chamber’s ceiling, and then a groaning tumble of rock on top of it all.

Derizan’s whole head rang. Dust filled the air. He coughed, and as the ringing subsided he heard the choking and coughs of the others. “We’ve got to get good air!” he called to Terrenci. He saw another opening opposite the collapsed corridor. “Where does that go?”

“That’s where we’re going,” she answered. “Follow me. Turtuz, you take the rear, just in case.” The mysterious man, his neck incisions now clearly showing the Argazindar symbol with a slash through it, waited as the family all moved past to the downsloping passage Terrenci was taking.

Derizan came last, just after Inkurisar, who seemed dazed. Turtuz said to them in a growl as they went by, “I’m here, and I’ll make sure no one will be chasing you. I’ll join you.” 

Terrenci had passed along some soft lights to carry, and the glow kept everyone together. The descent took many minutes, the passage twisting, turning, and undulating unpredictably. It was unfinished rock excavation, shored up here and there with wooden beams and joists. Water dripped and trickled, leaving muddy pools on the uneven, gravelly floor. The air was breathable, but as they descended it took on a miasma, a fetor, and soon a stench that Derizan found scarcely bearable. Mutterings from the others.

Shuffling as best he could behind Terrenci, Alumaras asked “Where are you taking us?”

“Away from the fighting,” she said, “and down to a possible way of escape.”

Derizan heard them, and worked his way up the line to join his father. “Did you say ‘possible’? Does that mean you don’t know?”

Terrenci said, “We just discovered this, and we don’t know much yet, but it should get us away. Ah, here we are.” She stopped, held up her glowlight. The passage ended in a small space where Derizan saw a slanted hatch door with five studs on it. “Here’s our exit. We can get out and follow it, but we haven’t had time to explore it. We don’t even know why this hatchdoor is here, buried so deep. We’re over a hundred meters below our own digs. I think we’ve found something very, very ancient.”

Daryuz interjected, “So we’re going to drop into some stinking, buried hole and hope we find our way back up to the surface in some safe place? This is a nightmare!”

Derizan put his hand on his brother-in-law’s arm. “Easy now. We’re still alive, thanks to these good folks. Let’s stick together and see what we need to do.” An uneasy pause, and he thought, Why are they putting in such effort for us, when they’ve probably faced all this before? And why are the corps putting in all this effort to catch us?

Turtuz came in without a sound, whispering to Terrenci and then stepping back.

She bowed her head. “Galanaisa was killed. These butchers came very hard after you.” She stared Derizan in the eyes, her face lined with stress and grief. “What could they possibly want so badly from a little bunch of reloc refugees?”

He bowed his head in turn. “I have no idea.” And as their glowlights shuffled their shadows on the chamber wall, Terrenci got them to work opening the hatch.

DOWN THE HATCH

Scene 25

The five hatch studs clicked. The hatchdoor rose, levitating a meter above the opening. The odor brought most of the party to nausea and gagging. Derizan swallowed bile. “Down THERE?” Protests filled the stinking air.

Looking sickened herself, Terrenci shot back, “Yes! Or die right here! I’ll take Turtuz and we’ll investigate, and maybe the air will be better down there.” She leaned in under the hatch cover. “I see metal rungs on the left. This is an access shaft that opens out about two meters down. Then it’s about three meters to the floor where there are rails.” She coughed. “Come on, Turri.”

Turtuz went first, his face set, and Terrenci went down after him. Derizan’s eyes watered, and he tried to draw up his clothing to use as a filter. It didn’t help. Tellina threw up, and Ajina was spitting as if to relieve some flow of mucus.

Soon Terrenci’s voice echoed up to them. “The smell is better down here, and there’s air movement along the tunnel. I think opening the hatch vented some of the worst of it. It’s dark and quiet. Come on down.”

One by one they descended the rungs into the dimness. As the last of them descended, a clank from above signaled that the hatch door had dropped and secured again, by itself.

“Wait here for me,” Terrenci said. She vanished up the shaft, tools at her side. A few minutes later she returned. “No one will get that hatch open without major explosives now. I plasma-welded it shut. Buys us some time.”

The tunnel was a wide oval in profile. Their glowlights found few surfaces to illuminate except the walls, which were bare and stony except for excrescences of what seemed to be fungal bloom, fringed with threads of a faint blue glow. At their feet, two sets of rails led off in either direction. A rivulet flowed between each pair of rails. “This way,” Terrenci said firmly, and holding her light high, she followed the little stream as it flowed down.

“Why this way?” Derizan asked her. “Don’t we want to get to the surface sooner?”

“Two reasons. First, surfacing too near Fornonck is risky, because there will be patrols following up on that… operation that hit us. From what we’ve found, that way leads south and curves east towards Gran Dar. The City you came from. Not a good destination. Second, this direction takes us north, towards the Mines and at this depth, well beneath them. It’s a long way, and we didn’t have time to gather supplies, so we will need to find ways to reach the surface as we go. That won’t be very easy.”

Inkurisar was just behind them as they walked carefully between the left-hand pair of tracks, avoiding chunks of stone and some reddish growths extending out from the rails and the stone under them. He muttered, “Under the mines. No way to the surface. No food. How long will our water last going like this? And what about the baby?” His tone turned biting. “No, that won’t be very easy.”

Derizan said, “Look, you were fine when you had a plan and knew the ways to go. This is different. Let’s try to adapt to what we find. It might not be as bad as you think.”

“Or it could get worse.”

“So can anything. It got a lot worse when that attack came.”

The party walked and rested, walked and rested, keeping most of their glowlights shut off, for several hours, until Terrenci stopped and pointed to the left wall just ahead of them. “Rungs. We’ve found a shaft upwards.”

Turtuz slipped up beside her, said, “Wait here,” and went nimbly up the rungs. His soft, ascending steps went on and on – Derizan counted well over a hundred until they could not be heard, and they waited twice as long again. Then he could be heard coming back down.

“It’s another chamber hatch. It worked.” His growl had a slightly-musical feel in Derizan’s ears. “I came up at the side of a large circular space with a domed ceiling and a pedestal at its middle. I didn’t see any exits. The pedestal had symbols on its top – it was flat – and they all had a dull glow except one that was bright, white light. I didn’t touch any of it.”

Terrenci asked, “You saw no other ways out?”

“None.”

She nodded. “We need a rest, especially you – Alumaras, is it? And you, Tellina. Derizan? What’s your thought?”

“Given that we only have a lot of walking ahead of us down here, why not find out more about this pedestal and the room it’s in? I’d like to take Denzari up there, and Ajina and Selech. While everyone rests, we’ll see what we can learn.” I’ll do well with them. Ajina finds things, Selech plays with everything, and Denzari can look at something and tell you how it works.

“Come on,” he told the three, Let’s go up there and see what we can find out. Maybe Turtuz missed something,” And he grabbed a higher rung, put his foot on a lower one and started to climb. “This is going to take a while.” And up they went. After he had climbed several meters, a rumbling sound echoed below him, and he stopped.

“Everything all right down there?” he called. Silence, and then Astina called up to him.

“We’re okay. It felt like a minor quake. Nothing now. But don’t take too long!”

“We won’t,” he called back, reaching for the next rung, feeling its thin coat of rust flaking a bit, and thinking, I sure hope we find something that helps.

UP THE SHAFT

Scene 26

The climb wearied Derizan and the others, forcing them to stop again and again, wheezing and gasping. The air seemed clearer, except for dust motes dislodged by their climb that sparkled blue-white in the dim glow of their lights. At the stops, Ajina passed around a waterskin, and everyone sipped.

A glow from above grew in size and brightness each time Derizan looked up, and at last he climbed to step out into the domed chamber. Its central pedestal shed enough light from the one symbol on it that the four climbers, coming out, could turn down their glowlights, saving their stored energy.

Selech immediately came over to the pedestal, looking at the glowing symbol. As Derizan shouted “Don’t!” he touched the symbol with a fingertip.

The whole chamber welled into blinding blue-white light that flicked off and on, off and on, five times, in a few heartbeats. Then the chamber faded back again.

“Look,” Derizan warned. “Don’t touch anything else! We don’t know anything about this place or these things!”

They all looked around in wonder as their eyes readjusted to the low level of illumination.

Denzari said, “No exits except the way we came in. It makes me wonder why this is here at all – it must have some purpose or function. The marks on that pedestal make me think of the lifts in the City, with their panels of buttons for choosing a level for a destination. Could this be some kind of transport or communication node?”

“If it is, we don’t know how it works or what it does,” Derizan. “Let’s be very careful.” He glared at Selech, who was hovering near the pedestal.

Ajina inspected the walls, her hands hovering just above the grimy-looking surfaces. “There are patterns here underneath a layer of dust. Oh, look at this.” She relit her glowstick, holding it close to the wall. The others all came over.

On the wall opposite the shaft entrance, sketched under the dust and grime, the faint outline of a naked, male, standing human figure became apparent, its right hand extended to the right and open in a gesture of invitation. The four stood staring at it for a long moment. “Selech, don’t touch it,” Derizan warned again. Ajina took her husband’s arm as if to restrain him.

“It may be a trigger,” Denzari said. “Not everything is a button to be pushed.”

Derizan moved a little closer, moving his hand to align with the extended hand of the figure, keeping a hand’s-length away from the wall. Maybe it’s a sensor, or…

Kicking out dust and dirt, the hand and arm of the figure stretched the wall out to seize his hand, and he faded away.

INNERSPACE

Scene 27

Brilliant light bathed Derizan where he lay. He shut his eyes protectively, and tried to draw a breath. A sweet and pungent aroma flooded his mouth and nostrils with a spicy tang. He moved arms and legs a little, slowly gathering himself to look for Ajina and the others. Squinting, he looked up.

Light surrounded him. Facing him, a vertical pillar of gold took on human form and spoke.

“Good. It is good. You have come at last.” The golden figure held its right hand out in the same gesture as Derizan had seen on the wall. “I am one of the Zashinhalh, long set to assist you in your journey for the Child.” Its voice was soft, gentle, its whispered consonants the stirrings of leaves on some autumn tree. Derizan sensed a warmth: the figure was smiling. “You are time-bound, and I will answer your questions. But first you must choose to take me into you.”

“What do you… Who are you… What do you mean?”

“Hardships lie ahead of you, all of you. If we are embodied together, I will ease your travels and your trials. I cannot do that when I am separated from you.”

“What if I don’t want you inside me?” Derizan felt both his own petulance and his need for caution.

“You will fail.” The tone was flat, final.

“I’ve heard about you, whatever you are. Your kind are all over the City, they say. Some of you are close with the leaders. You control some of us like puppets, I’ve heard.” He tried to rise to stand, but weakness overcame him.

A feeling of sadness, a dimming of the light, came over Derizan. Words, formed in sorrow, came. “You are right about these others of my kind. We are not of one… mind. The ones you hear about have broken our way. They suffer an… illness – that is your word for it – one that devours our light. Maybe ‘addiction’ is a better meaning.”

“So, tell me, what is this Child you are telling me about? Before I decide anything, I want to know more.”

A silence as the light welled and diminished, bringing hints of color and fragrance. The golden figure spoke again. “I will give you a shorter form of my name. I am Fiarsinhilh, one of the protectors sown in this planet in its youth to nurture its life. For millions of years I have coursed across the seas and the lands, feeding the skeins of each life-tale, coming at last to this place to be bound to the wall-creature, and await you.”

An immense weight seemed to bear down on Derizan as the figure spoke. He gasped and his head sank down. He heard, “Ah, I am overburdening you. Here, breathe.” And the heaviness vanished.

“Who is the Child?” Derizan whispered, still sprawled, still gathering air.

“A woman travels with you, the life quickening in her. She will bear the Child in human form. In dreams it has told her of you... and me. This Child will begin the transformation of your world. Before it begins its task, it will need you. You are its… Gellincarn, its living outer armor. Without you, its task will overcome it.”

Derizan’s words poured unbidden from him. “I am nothing more than an ordinary man! I have no power, no powers, no weapons! My family, my friends – I rely on them to help me! How am I going to do anything more?”

The light blazed. Fiarsinhilh said, “With me, you will be strong, and you will be prescient. Take me into you. There is no price to pay for this. Those of my kind in the City force a price on those they occupy. I do not occupy. I share presence. I am a song of the Singer.” As these words came, a great coruscation of color and melody bore over Derizan with scent and softness.

Stupefied, he murmured, “The Singer?”

“Yes. The Singer utters all things.” The light stilled and stayed, drawing the golden figure toward pure whiteness.

Derizan drew in a great fearful breath, feeling a mighty hunger for truth. “I take you in,” he said, and he exploded.

CONTACT

Scene 28

Time froze everything for Derizan. His senses wandered freely through a presence that stood still for him. A voice spoke softly inside him, “Thank you. I am Fiarsinhilh, now your inner partner. You see now, briefly, with my eyes free of time.”

Past and future stood around Derizan like furniture in a rich, royal room. He moved, trying to stand. His movements sent out small energies; pieces of the future drifted to new places and forms, while pieces of the past gained or lost focus.

With great effort at first, then more easily, he stood. At his right the pedestal of the buried chamber displayed its top tablet of symbols, all glowing brightly in changing colors. He reached to it reflexively, but his inner voice said firmly, “Stop. Do not touch this. If you do, you will never return to your family, your loved ones.”

Derizan formed a reply that seemed to speak itself inside him. “I’m afraid my kin will touch the one we found.” As his words came, Fiarsinhilh gave agreement.

“Do not be concerned. You will return to them in time.” The pedestal evaporated into pale fog.

“Where am I now? Is this some other world?” Derizan sensed a smooth white enclosure around him, but he had no idea of its size. He took a step.

“It is best if you stay still. Movement will hinder your return to your people.”

Derizan stepped back again. “Please tell me more about that pedestal. What does it do?”

“I will be brief – you must return soon. You cannot thrive here for long. The pedestal is a transportation device across worlds – you might say “across planes of existence”. Each symbol on it activates to move everyone and everything in the chamber to another such chamber. Some chambers are in the same world, in the same flow of time. Some are in a later or earlier time flow. And some take the room’s contents to another world altogether.”

Derizan felt weak, and his breath came hard. “How is this known? Who built these? Where do they lead?”

Fiarsinhilih spoke quickly in him, “Questions! We can learn more after you return. One last thing – it is important. Call on me when you are in need. You will not remember much of this place. Call on me!”

Derizan fell to the floor, and then through the floor, through pitch darkness, and onto dust and mold.

# # #

“Derizan!” Ajina bent over him. He lay face up next to the wall where the hand had clutched him. “What happened?”

He shuddered, sucking in a great breath of the chamber’s thick air. The glow from the pedestal lit Denzari’s face, and Selech’s behind him. He croaked out, “Do not touch that pedestal!”

Ajina felt his forehead. “Are you all right? You were standing by this drawing on the wall, and then you fell flat. Did something hit you? A shock?”

“Was I lying here for a while?” A haze obscured Derizan’s memory.

“No, you fainted, and a few seconds passed before I could reach you,” she said. “Just a few seconds.”

You were outside of time, a voice murmured in Derizan’s head.

“It felt like… longer,” he answered Ajina. He got to his feet and looked around the chamber. At the base of its circular wall, a thick incrustation of fungal growths glowed here and there. He spoke without thinking, pointing at them, “These plants are edible, nourishing. Let’s take some of them back down with us.”

Denzari asked, “How do you know this? You’ve never been here before. Is that really a good idea? We don’t know whether or not they’re toxic.”

“I don’t know how I know, but I know.” Derizan gathered some of the fungal blooms into a pouch. Ajina and Denzari joined him. He tasted a morsel of the fungus – it was musty and sweet, with an odd tang of herbals, and hunger came over him, but he resisted.

Selech still hovered near the pedestal. “These symbols! I’ve never seen anything like them. They must mean something, in some language.”

Ajina crumbled a small piece of a bloom, and tasted it. “It’s like the edible mushrooms we gathered when I was little. We were visiting my mother’s family just outside Purusil…”

“Not the funny mushrooms, were they?” Ajina made a face at Denzari, and he chuckled. Derizan shook his head. Denn knows his mushrooms, and we all know why.

Selech’s finger grazed the pedestal’s glowing panel.

OUT OF PLACE

Scene 29

The whole chamber flared with orange light, the walls and floor shuddering, the ceiling dripping thick, pale-green, transparent fluid that ran down to the surrounding walls and the floor. Derizan, Ajina, Denzari, and Selech stared around wildly. The dim coloration of the chamber’s surfaces had gone from a dark brown to a deep blue-black. The light from the pedestal had changed to a fiery-bright red-orange.

“Selech! What did you do!” shouted Derizan. He looked for the shaft up which they had climbed. It was gone – the floor was flat everywhere. He muttered into himself, I’m calling you, Fiarsinhilh, if you’re there. He felt no response.

“I didn’t think I touched it!” Selech waved his arms, panicked. “I was trying to be careful!” Fury rose in Derizan, but he took a deep breath. No sense in feeding the panic right now.

Denzari pointed. “There! It looks like some kind of door in that wall.” Derizan and the others came over to see a vertical oval outline, its edges pitted with the passage of immense ages. Mounted on it was a waist-level metal bar across its width, apparently for opening and closing it. The bar had rotted and weakened showing broad streaks of dust and decay.

“What do we do now?” Ajina asked. “Can we get back again?”

A calming presence came to Derizan, and Fiarsinhilh whispered in him, “Oh, dear. That took you a long way in time and space, and finding you was hard.”

Derizan turned away from the others and whispered, “Where are we? Is there some way to get back to our family?”

“You don’t need to whisper – just think your words and I can understand. It will be safer.”

“Oh. All right. Do you hear me now?”

“Yes, that’s fine. When you triggered the panel, you traveled many thousands of years and many light-years. This world died long before your kind took ship to find Tarnus. Its beings, human and other, perished. It was another place much like Earth – the Earth where your kind first rose to spirit.”

“But you found us in a few moments!”

“I live where time and space take different sizes. But that is not for you to understand.”

“Derizan!” It was Selech, his voice strained. “Do you think we can get back?”

“Let’s look at the panel,” Denzari suggested. “Maybe it gives us some clues.”

They gathered around the pedestal. “Look,” Ajina said, “Two of the symbols are different from the others. They’re more complex.”

“Yes,” said Selech, “That one – the top one of those two – was the one that was bright when we came up here. The orange one,” and here he pointed at the one above and to the left of the one that was bright before, “must be where we are now, because now it’s the one glowing brightly. It’s the one my finger must have contacted.”

”But it’s a different color,” Denzari pointed out. “We don’t know why there are different colors.” They stood and studied the panel in the light of its symbols.

Fiarsinhilh said into Derizan, “This place was called the Wylwood Station by its makers. Most of these symbols transfer between places on the same world. I know this world well.”

Derizan felt awe. How did this alien thing live across so much time and space. How old was it? Questions piled into his mind, and he sternly suppressed them. He said into himself, “What’s outside that door here?”

“The Wylwood Station sat in a mound adjacent to a clear river, in a very-dense hardwood forest. That river flowed north to join a larger one. I do not know the time period in which we arrived here, so my memory may not match anything we might find out there. But this chamber looks much the same as I recall it.”

“Would it make sense to see if we can open that door and get outside?”

Fiarsinhilh paused and said, “Many creatures and humanoids lived in and around this forest. It was not a safe place for others like this group to explore, not without strong defenses. It may still be dangerous.”

“Derizan?” Denzari’s voice seemed anxious. “Are you all right?”

Derizan sighed, answering his brother. “The only way I see to recover ourselves is to reverse the process. If we try anything else, it is going to get us deeper in trouble.”

He pointed to the panel. “Those two symbols that Ajina noticed are apparently back on Tarnus. The one we touched was there.”

Denzari frowned. “Let’s not be too quick to act.” He glared at Selech.

“I agree with Derizan,” Ajina said. “We don’t know how time passes in different places. We may wait too long, and we might never see the family again.” She pointed to the more-complex symbol Selech had first indicated. “Let’s get back.”

Derizan nodded toward Selech. “Just in case there are differences when different people use this thing, you had better be the one to do it.”

Selech stepped up, squinted, and reached toward the complex symbol. In that moment, the symbol marking their current location flared bright red, on and off five times, and then stayed lit. Everyone froze. Derizan felt Fiarsinhilh say, “Something is coming.” He repeated the words to the others, adding, “Let’s get out of here before we dig ourselves any deeper. Now!”

“How do you know?” Denzari asked, just as Selech stabbed at the symbol. Light blazed.

OFF COURSE

Scene 30

The chamber flared again, but this time with blue-white light, the walls and floor slowly bumping up and down a little. As the pedestal’s light settled to a bluish glow, Derizan looked around, letting his vision clear. To his relief, the chamber looked like the one they had first found.

Ajina said in a low tone, “Uh-0h.” She pointed to the panel. “That’s… not the same place we came from, is it?” Denzari and Selech crowded over the glow, with Derizan leaning over them.

Selech said, “I thought I touched the right place!” pointing to the symbol above the lighted one. “Where are we now?”

Derizan had no feeling of Fiarsinhilh’s presence. “I think we’ve come a long way again. At least nothing is flashing red at us.”

“Do you think something detected us where we were before?” Denzari’s words brought a nod from Ajina. “Let’s hope we’re not followed.”

“Please, Deri,” Selech said, “I don’t want to try this again, not this time.”

Derizan stepped between them to the panel. “Let me try.” He pointed one finger directly down on the symbol above the one with the blue glow. He smiled at Selech. “This is the first time I’ve heard you say you wouldn’t try something crazy. I guess I’m the crazy one now.” He slowly brought his finger down.

A flash and a shaking floor, and to everyone’s great relief, the pedestal’s panel showed in its proper place the one bright-white symbol of their first view of it.

The chamber’s shaft from below was now in its original place, and its colors and features, including the inscribed wall-figure, were now apparent.

“We’re back,” Selech breathed.

“But are we in the right time?” Denzari’s words.

Ajina said, “I think we’ve learned a lot here. We should get back to the others and talk about what to do next.”

Derizan still had no feeling of his alien presence. “Before we go back down that long shaft, let’s just take a few breaths. I think the time should be all right – any other assumption leaves us nowhere. But this place and the ones like it may be useful to us, so let’s remember everything we can about them.”

They sat against the wall of the chamber, nibbling a little at the pieces of mushroom-like growths they had taken. Ajina got up and collected more. “I’m taking these back down with us.” The others, one by one, did the same. No change in the lighting or panel took place.

Derizan sensed Fiarsinhilh again, at last. He said in his mind, “You’ve come back!”

Fiarsinhilh made an inner whisper that felt like a grumble. “Your little side trip misled me. I ran across another of your kind – that chamber was in Sirathen. Are you going to tell anyone here about me?”

Derizan paused, and said inwardly, “Not just yet. I need to know more of you and your purpose. It’s not time for trust, not just yet.”

They rested for some minutes, finding the air getting stuffier, and Selech said, “Let’s get back.”

“Yes,” said Ajina, “They’re probably wondering what happened to us.”

Just then Turtuz appeared, coming up and stepping out of the shaft. “Ah! Terrenci suggested that I come up to see what happened to you. It’s been several hours.”

“We’ve come across some… interesting developments,” Derizan answered. “We’ll come down now.”

And they descended the shaft, following Turtuz, who moved down, rung past rung with a lithe, ghostly speed that left them far behind.

THE ALIEN

Scene 31

As Derizan wearily climbed down the long shaft behind the others, he spoke inwardly with Fiarsinhilh. “I’ve trusted you, but I have a lot of questions. You told me you are immortal, didn’t you? What does that mean? And if you have all the powers you seem to have, why do you think humans matter very much? Can’t you just do anything you want to do?”

Fiarsinhilh said, “I am not immortal. To you I seem that way, because you live inside the prison-path of time. But my kind is not immortal. We are… conditional. If one of us changes condition, the change may be to non-existence.”

“Death?”

“No. What you know as death is just a movement out of time and into the conditional – the state we occupy. You would call that state ‘heaven’.”

“Oh. But why are humans like me of any importance to you and your kind – the … what did you say you are?”

“We are Zashinhalh. Zash - that is the word of our shortest name, the one we use with you. But your folk has had other names for us. Angel. Demon. Devil. Vampire. Cannibal. Archon. Master, Demigod. We are none of these things. The Creator – the Singer, we say – composed us of harmony and melody.”

“Tell me more!”

“There are no words or ideas for more, not for you. If I try to tell you much more, I will ruin your body, your mind, and your soul.”

“Just a little more?”

“Stop moving down these rungs first.”

Derizan paused. Into him came a blast of twined light and darkness, stopping his breath and his heart. He clenched in pain, and the feeling passed.

“Derizan!” Ajina called up to him. “Are you all right?” She was many rungs down.

He gasped out, “I just needed to stop and rest. I’m coming.” To Fiarsinhilh he voiced inwardly, “Please don’t do that again!”

“You asked me to. Now do you understand?”

“It was like putting my finger in a power coupling. Look, if you have all that kind of power, why do you care about humans? Can’t you just do everything here yourself? You don’t need me!”

As Derizan resumed his descent, Fiarsinhilh said slowly, “Your kind are seeds of beginnings in time. Our presence here in your flow of time means the nurturing and sprouting of these seeds of the Singer, so that you become more and more like us, and you rise out of time into the eternal. In this we are merely instruments of the Singer. We are bound to serve you.”

Derizan moved down, rung by rung, absorbing this. Then he recalled their first meeting. “You told me of the Child that Tellina is carrying. Is the Child like you?”

“Oh, no! The Child – her mother has named her Samantine – is in human form, but she bears for all of you what you cannot bear yourselves. She will teach you in ways you can bear.”

“So she is important!”

“Very important. So important that many lives will be given for her safe life among you.”

“Should I tell the others all this? They should know!”

“Not just yet. When we reach the others below, there will be a cusp of events. You would say a ‘crisis’. For now. discretion is wise.”

“What if they knew right now?” And Derizan, pondering, slowed his descent in the shaft.

“They would kill you.”

WAITING, WAITING

Scene 32

Astina began to worry. It had been a few hours since Derizan had led the searchers up the rungs of the shaft. She recalled the image of their wedding in the City, twenty-five years before. His long, bony face with its soft smile, her round face and shock of curls, oh, it feels like just a day ago. A nine-thousand-day day. What a place to celebrate our anniversary! We laughed a lot that day. Little Ezzar – Ezzie – wasn’t long in coming!

She sighed. We’re not laughing now.

Sitting on the floor, her back to the tunnel’s wall next to the shaft, she turned to Daryuz, beside her. “Brother, can you hear anything from up there?”

“No – it’s quiet. But I have an idea.” He turned to Piotras, who was sniffing the air as it moved gently along the downslope of the tunnel. “Hey, could you listen for us at the shaft entrance? You’ve got that andro hearing, right?”

Guinban and Piotras both faced him. “He does,” Guinban said. “Maybe if you ask politely…”

“Never mind.” Piotras. “It’s okay. Yes, let me listen.” He came to the foot of the shaft, holding up both hands for silence. He cocked his head. “Someone is coming down – or something. It’s moving fast!” He backed away from the opening just as Turtuz vaulted gracefully past him to stand by Inkurisar.

“They’re coming back down,” Turtuz said. “They’ve discovered something, but they didn’t say what it was. I wanted to get back and let you know that they’re okay. They’re moving down, but they’re tired and moving more slowly.” He drifted away with Piotras, sniffing the air.

Relief flooded Astina. I’ve never seen Derizan this strong. Ever since his father turned to him, he’s taken up the lead for us. Denzi backs him, Daryuz also, and even Selech listens to him now and then, especially when his wife is around. I want to get Ajina alone – she’ll tell me whether that husband of hers has been staying in line.

Inkurisar’s wife Nakiran came over to her. “Can we talk?” She nodded up the tunnel slope, away from the others. They moved out of earshot, barely within the range of the group’s glowlights.

“I’m seeing things with my husband that concern me,” Nakiran whispered. “He seems to have lost his purpose, and he want to go back.”

“Why? We know the way is blocked. Completely.”

“Yes, but he keeps saying we can dig back through and get out of Fornonck going north. He’s insistent. I don’t know what to tell him.”

“When Derizan gets back, they should talk. Denzari and the others will help.”

“I hope you’re right.”

Terrenci and Munizkara had moved along the tunnel’s downslope, exploring a little with a glowlight, and they returned to the group as Nakiran and Astina came back as well. Terrenci said, “This is a long, straight, gentle descent. It goes beyond a fully-lit glowlight’s range – we used up some extra energy to flare – and there’s no sign of a bend or a change in slope. It isn’t blocked, but there are some outgrowths of large fungals at the side here and there.”

“I can smell those,” Piotras said. “Sweet, fruity, a little tang of rot. Something like the ones over there.”

Turtuz grinned. “Like queeve steak and cheese, right?”

A gurgle from Tellina. She passed her hand across her swollen belly, looking nauseated.

Noises from the shaft, first voices, then the clink and chuff of feet hitting rungs. The first to appear was Selech. “Well! We’ve been up and out and back again.” He staggered a bit, then steadied himself against the wall as Ajina and then Denzari came down behind him. To Astina, all three looked weary.

“Where’s Derizan?” Astina said. She moved over to look up the shaft.

“He needed to rest a little,” said Selech, “but he’s coming.”

All the others came over. As Piotras neared the shaft’s opening, he gasped, his eyes rolled up in his head, and he collapsed into Guinban’s arms, unconscious.

“What’s wrong with him?” Guinban looked up, his face strained.

Astina bent over the andro. “He’s in shock! Raise his legs and loosen his waist bindings!” Piotras began shaking violently. Guinban wrapped arms around him protectively.

As they watched over him anxiously, Derizan’s voice echoed down to them. “I’ll be down in just a moment. We seem to have a problem.”

INNERSPACE CRISIS

Scene 33

“Stop!” The voice erupted into Derizan’s brain. He froze with hands and feet not moving on the rungs of the shaft. Fiarsinhilh said in him, in a calmer tone, “You have an andro traveling with you. This is the crisis I felt coming, apparently.”

“Why is that?” A silence lasted for many heartbeats. Derizan tried again. “Well?”

“There is shame in me, shame at my own kind.” Fiarsinhilh’s tone brought sadness in its lowered notes. “The Zashinhalh in the City were given andro flesh to consume freely. The City’s authorities offered this to corrupt the Zash to their own inhuman purposes. They made alliance with them to oppose and neutralize political opposition. It worked. Andros, human in every way, more than human in some ways, are treated as food there. And they know.”

Derizan’s hands tightened on the rungs. His jaw clenched. “Are you like them? Corrupted?”

“I am nothing like them. Nothing.” The words spat out filth. “They are not my kind. Not any more.”

“Can’t I explain this when we get back down there?”

“Not yet! Andros sense us in their innerspace, even from some distance. We terrify them! The andro I sensed may be aware of me already.”

“What does an andro see of you? I saw you just when I took you in. You were like pure bright light. Now you’re an inner voice.”

A soft whisper. “That light for andros is blinding, burning their senses, even when it is hidden in a host the way I’m hidden in you. We can shield it for them when we know they’re near, but the City Zash don’t bother. They like making andros cower.” Disgust.

“Could you shield your light for this andro? His name is Piotras. He escaped the City and he is now one of us in our journey.”

“It takes continued effort for us to maintain that shield, but yes, I can do that. The effort requires added nourishment for me.”

“Oh.” Derizan thought, What does he eat? And how does he eat if he is inside me?

“You subvoiced that thought,” Fiarsinhilh replied, “and I won’t be looking for flesh for you to consume. Also, I notice you are thinking I am male.”

Astina’s anxious call came up the shaft. “Derizan! We need you!”

“I’m coming down in a minute!” he called back. I need to contain my thoughts better. How will I tell them all about Fiarsinhilh? He called back down to Astina, “Come up to me. Alone. I need to show you something.”

# # #

“He’s calling for you to go up to him?” Daryuz came to Astina as she reached the rungs of the shaft.

“Yes. And he said ‘alone’, didn’t he?” Astina’s tone was firm as she took a first step up.

“Wait!” Denzari joined Daryuz. “Some… things happened up there. He fainted, and then recovered, but there’s a lot to tell you, and we wanted him to explain.”

Astina looked back down at them. “He said ALONE! Stay here and listen. If you hear anything besides us talking, come up to us.” Determined, she climbed on and disappeared out of glowlight range.

The two men turned and joined the others gathered around Piotras cradled in Guinban’s arms. Munizkara passed her hand across the andro’s forehead and cheek. “He’s still in shock. It’s as if…” she looked up at her brother-in-law.

“This happens when they sense aliens in the City,” Inkurisar said. “Do you think there’s alien presence here? How would we know?” He turned to the others. “Any ideas?”

Terrenci shook her head. “Aliens?”

Turtuz nodded. “We wouldn’t sense them ourselves, unless one of them occupied one of us, made us its puppet.”

Everyone stared at him. Alumaras said slowly, “You’d better explain that very, very clearly.”

Turtuz scowled. “It’s the reason I left the Argaz and my unit. We were getting paid big money by ArCorp to press City people into service with alien hosts in them. Made the people into cannibals – the aliens feed on certain proteins, and human beings have great protein. But andro proteins are the best.”

Silence.

Denzari and Daryuz went back to the shaft. “It’s quiet,” Denzari said after a few breaths, “Just soft talking up there, but I can’t make out what they’re saying. They seem okay.”

“He’s waking up,” Munizkara said. She helped Guinban raise Piotras to sit. “Can you tell us anything?”

Piotras licked his lips. His voice cracked. “The light blinded me. I think it’s an alien, a Zash. It’s not right here,” he added, as the others looked around, eyes wide. He waved weakly toward the shaft entrance. “That way, I think.”

Selech raced to the shaft, grabbed a rung. “I’m going up,” he said.

SECRETS SHARED

Scene 34

Astina reached up, touched Derizan’s ankle. “I’m here.” His glowlight, pinned to his coat, lighted his face as he looked down to her.

“Thank heaven,” he said. “I have to explain to you so that you can go back down and tell the others, especially Piotras.”

“Are you contagious? And why the andro?”

“We only have a little time before Selech gets impatient the way he always does. We were exploring the chamber above when I fainted, and an alien presence joined me.”

Fiarsinhilh muttered in him, “I like the delicacy of your words.”

“Alien? As in the aliens we heard about in the City?” Astina’s voice broke.

“Not like them! Not at all! This presence is named Fiarsinhilh. He – it – she, I’m not sure which, told me that Tellina’s baby is very important, and I’m supposed to protect the baby. This being is here to help me do that, I think.”

“Why not come down and tell everyone this?”

“If I do, Piotras will mistake this being for one of the City aliens, and everyone else will want it dead. And since I am its host, they will kill me.” His tone was flat.

Fiarsinhilh said into Derizan, “If you pass me to your wife, she will understand. Just kiss her. I will come back to you.”

Derizan stiffened, spoke aloud. “What?”

“I didn’t say anything,” Astina said. “Is it talking to you?”

“It wants me to let you experience it directly. The way I do.”

Astina worked her way up the rungs to face her husband directly, crowded as they were in the shaft. She glared. “Are you crazy? What is wrong with you?” As she spoke those words, she remembered in a flash the instant she had said exactly the same words when she had first met him.

They’d been so young, and he was so foolish. He’d been pranking her friends while his brothers laughed, turning their brewtanks upside down without spilling them, daring them to right the drinks. He’d turned to her and grinned, and said, “For you, I’ll flip them all back up again.”

Now, he grinned and kissed her.

# # #

Light blazed green, gold, red, then pure white in her brain. The shock took her breath away, and Derizan’s arm hugged her close to keep her from slipping. In her a soft voice spoke. “I am Fiarsinhilh, your husband’s guardian. He is himself the guardian of the Child, her Gellinkarn armor.” Before Astina could respond, knowledge flowed like a river into her, and she knew.

As the flow abated, Astina felt certainty move in her. She said inwardly, “But you’re an alien, yes? How is everything so vast for you and still so small?” And as she asked, she knew.

“Kiss him back,” the alien said. “I have given you more knowledge that I gave him. It is for you to keep until you are moved by dire need to share it. I must return to him now. You must go back down and tell your companions what you have learned here, but not all the deeper things. You will know.”

She kissed Derizan, and Fiarsinhilh was gone from her, leaving wisps of longing behind.

PUZZLE PIECES

Scene 35

“I’m coming down,” Astina called. Her mind reeled, burdened with Fiarsinhilh’s rush of story. How am I going to explain all this?

“I’m coming to you and Derizan!” Selech’s strained voice from below her. “Hang on!”

“No! Go back down! I’ll explain everything! Derizan is okay, but…”

“What??”

“Just go back down. I’m right above you.”

Astina looked around at the people gathered at the base of the shaft. Piotras, sitting on the floor outside their circle and supported by Guinban and Munizkara, stared at her. She spoke to him. “Piotras, you know, don’t you?” 

“Y-yes. There’s an alien up there.” His voice was weak.

“It… he… she… I don’t know which, has a message for you and for all of us…” She swallowed.

“But I see it inside me! Its light burns! These things, they eat us!” Piotras, anguished.

“The ones in the City do that. This one is not one of them. It is with Derizan. It has been waiting here for many lifetimes, for him. It was left here as his protector.” She gestured to Tellina. “And it says that Derizan is your baby’s protector. Your baby is very important.”

“That’s a very nice story,” Inkurisar said, “But why believe any of it?” He frowned, and Selech nodded agreement.

Astina held up a hand. She started speaking, mystified at her words coming from some hidden source in her. “The City’s human rulers are at war with the colls, and we all know that. It’s the reason for our forced relocations. But nobody knew that the rulers made a deal with some of the aliens to help them win that war. They corrupted many of the aliens to their cause, offering them human bodies to modify and human flesh to consume.”

Shocked faces. She paused. “The alien with Derizan is not one of these. It is noble. Derizan shared it with me long enough for me to learn much about its kind and their history. It does not want to come among us until Piotras can feel safe and unharmed by it.”

Questions fell like rain.

“Can Derizan come down without it?”

“Does it have a name?”

“What can it do?”

“What does it look like?”

She held up both hands. “It seems to travel with a human host. I don’t know how it was there before it came to my husband. Its name is… Fiarsinhilh, I think that sounds about right.” The inner memory given her spoke itself. “It’s one of a very-ancient kind that lives in many worlds. It can make changes in molecules and atoms. It experiences time in changing ways. It inhabits realms we do not have words for.”

“It told Deri that its presence here in your flow of time is meant to nurture and sprout humanity – us. It said that we humans are seeds of the Singer, so that we become more and more like itself, even greater, and we humans will rise out of time into eternity. It and its kind are servants of the Singer – I would guess that “the Singer” means the Creator. Its kind is bound to serve us. The City aliens fell from service. They were sent back to dissolve and begin again.” She shuddered.

Silence folded around the gathering. Piotras asked, “How will it be for me?”

Astina sighed, and the words came. “It is hard for you because of your enhanced senses. You see so much light! From infrared to ultraviolet! Fiarsinhilh will try to shield you from its radiance, but it will be a challenge for all of us.”

Piotras struggled to his feet. “Guinban, help me over to the shaft. Let me see how it is.” The two went to look up to where Derizan was waiting at the top. Piotras called, “Come down, one step at a time. I’ll tell you what happens to me.”

As her husband cautiously, slowly descended the rungs of the shaft, Astina studied the andro’s face. He’s brave. Such a sensitive, gaunt look to him, with that lank hair and those huge eyes. And it’s beautiful, the way Guinban supports him. Those two seem the best of partners. Oh. There.

Piotras winced, then recovered. He gasped out, “It’s okay. The alien made a shield for me. Tell him to keep coming!”

ANDRO FREEDOM

Scene 36

As Derizan stepped off the rungs, Piotras could not see him – his inner sight had engulfed his outer awareness. In his innerspace he gazed, smitten, on the vast splendor of Fiarsinhilh’s being. The alien seemed a vertical shaft of pulsing, potent light, speaking into him in soft, melting tones, asking, “Are you all right this way?”

“Yes,” he replied, stammering, “Are you some kind of… divine being, one that humans talk about?”

A chiming laugh. “I don’t know. The Singer doesn’t tell us what we are. It is our task to find that for ourselves. It is true for you too.”

“The… Singer? I don’t know anything about that. We die. That’s the end. We’re just andros.”

“No! You move on! You are human! Why do you think you’re not?”

“Our training tells us, from our beginnings in the vats. We die! Our lives are short!”

For a moment, light blazed, and Piotras cried out. Then Fiarsinhilh dimmed, and said, “You were fed lies. The people who corrupted my kind in the City are masters of lies. They lied to you as they trained you.” The tones of the alien’s voice in Piotras carried bitter dissonances. “I must speak with my host.”

# # #

Derizan watched as Piotras seemed to freeze in place, his eyes closed. He started to ask the andro if he was all right, but Fiarsinhilh murmured in him, “He and I are speaking in his innerspace. He is all right. Wait.”

A few moments passed, and then Fiarsinhilh said into Derizan, “I need to repair the damage done to him by the Zash of the City. This means I must enter him temporarily as I did your wife. After that, he will be well.”

“Does this mean I have to kiss him?” Derizan was glad that the exchange was not aloud.

“Yes. Do you have taboos or customs that forbid it? Some of you from my long memory come to mind.”

Derizan’s heart and stomach seemed to reel and change places, but he took a breath. “Well…”

“I know that many City people lack such concerns, but you are from a separate community within the City, a ‘coll’ is your word for it, isn’t it?”

“Yes. We limit such intimacies with strangers. But if it will heal Piotras, I will do it. Let me explain first to the others.” And he did. A few astonished looks, a few fumbled words, and then Astina laughed, dispelling the tension.

“Deriu, my husband, I will remind you of this later on. Whenever you get a bit too pious.” She paused. “If that ever happens.”

# # #

Piotras saw in his innerspace a blaze of blue-white light, and Fiarsinhilh said, “Here. I will reach into you to make some amends for what they have done to you. Let Derizan kiss you. I will come, and heal you, and return to him.”

The two men kissed.

Piotras felt a softness all through his body, as if he were turning liquid, and he heard, “Bear with me and breathe very deeply.”

Deep inside him, Fiarsinhilh touched the vibrant weave of his andro brain. Ever so delicately its knots of ingrained terror came untangled. Even more tenderly its seared alarms of trauma eased. Fear and horror drifted out and away.

Deeper yet, and the andro sensory overburdens of light and sound hushed enough to bring calm and peace.

Down into the genes in every cell, and the ticking clock of programmed andro death was stilled.

As breath after breath came and went, Piotras was drawn into new life, his spirits rising in a spiral of joy and gentle light. Love filled him with the fragrance of freedom.

The next kiss returned Fiarsinhiln to Derizan, and in that moment Piotras felt the uprooting of a great longing that made him call out inside, “Don’t leave me!”

“I’m always here in this greater world,” the alien said. “You speak the last shreds of your fear. Now you are free.”

SHADOWS AND SMELLS

Scene 37

Jaman kicked aside an overturned chair and coughed. “So this is Fornonck. Gellin town. Or it was until we got here.” Smoke and dust draped around the narrow passage.

Bunjaian spat blood from his bitten lip. “Good thing we didn’t come in here by ourselves. The City guys we caught up with took a real beating. Where did everybody go?” He knelt by a still-warm body, found a pistol, and felt for its clips.

“They sealed off the place and went back out,” Jaman replied. “This won’t be a friendly place now. For them, job done, lots of losses, mission accomplished. And we still didn’t find our guy.”

“Well, why don’t we just go back with them? We can say he’s dead. He’s just a deserter.”

“No! They want genesign for him – proof. He must be important for some reason, and that’s the only way we’ll get paid.”

The air around them seemed to sigh, and in a blink, flanking them stood a man and a woman. The two wore dark, dappled skinsuits, and moved with a sudden, lithe, feral grace. The woman smiled at them. The man sniffed them both.

Bunjaian drew a sharp breath. These are Hounds. They hunt andros. Probably after the one with the guy we want.

The woman said, “Our target is traveling with yours.” The man gestured towards an opening to a side passage. The woman said, “Shall we?”

Jaman said, “Who are you? Names?”

The man rasped, “No names.” He glared at Jaman, his eyes dark with great pupils.

“Okay,” Jaman mumbled.

The two Hounds led them into and down a twisting tunnel. It ended in a mass of boulders and rubble. The man sniffed and pointed. The woman said, “They blew the passage. We have to clear this.”

Jaman surveyed the mess. “That will take days of work, even if we had the tools. Forget it.”

The woman took his arm in a tight grip and faced him. “Don’t act the fool. The people here had the tools. Go back, get the tools, and get to work.” She punctuated her words with a clutching stab of an index finger that shot pain from his arm to his skull.

Bunjaian saw Jaman wince. “We left your wolven back at the entrance, remember? Shouldn’t we go back and get them?”

“Yeah, that’s a good… aaahhh!” Jaman’s knees buckled slightly. The woman had stabbed deeper in his arm’s nerves. “No, they’ll be all right. We can get them later.”

After a search through corridors littered with corpses and debris, they found a rockmuncher drill. A day and a half later, they broke through the collapse, and discovered a slanted hatch with five studs.

“Ah,” the woman Hound said, “Now for some real hunting.”

WATER AND RADIANCE

Scene 38

It gushed from her in a flood and woke her from dreams of fish leaping in a fast river. “She’s coming,” Tellina said. Her body clenched, arched, curled. Munizkara and Astina came to her sides at the tunnel wall. Ajina scurried to gather blankets – they had snatched some on the race out of Fornonck – and called to the men. “She’s giving birth!”

Labor was long and slow. Terrenci had located a trickle of fresh-seeming water, and brought a filled skin again and again to Tellina in her efforts. Munizkara and Nakiran held Tellina’s arms, Astina her head, and all three sustained the coll’s main chant for labor and delivery, its cadences urging the contractions onward. Hours passed.

Weakness crept through Tellina. Each new contraction seemed harder than the one before. She cried out, pain splitting her, and as she drew breath, a soft laugh, a child’s laugh rose up inside her. She shouted her pain in cries that pealed down the tunnel to where Turtuz had posted himself to guard.

Mentrianos began to move towards the women gathered around his wife, but Munizkara gestured him back. He turned in frustration, fuming. “Why is it taking so long?” She ignored him and rejoined the chant, her voice hoarsened.

# # #

Derizan, standing across the tracks with the other men, asked inwardly to Fiarsinhilh, “Do you sense anything happening to her?”

“In the innerspace? Piotras and I see all of you there – you seem asleep there, as usual. But – oh that is… there is a light. A dawning light.”

At that moment Piotras, his eyes closed, grabbed Derizan’s arm. “She’s brought the sun! It’s music and scent and color and more. It’s rising.”

In wonder, Derizan said aloud, “Fiarsinhilh is aware of it too.”

“What are you talking about?” Selech broke in. Alumaras and the other men were now close around Derizan, listening. “You’ve been acting strange ever since you came back down to us. This… alien thing, this kissing you did with the andro, what is all that about?”

“Astina explained all that!” A wail from Tellina turned all their heads.

Selech persisted. “She didn’t explain how and why we should trust this thing. Now it’s inside you. How is that good for us?”

“It repaired me.” Piotras broke in. “The City made me, but it gave me scars and weak spots and early death. Now I’m more like you. More human.”

An agonized wail and a sharp cry from Tellina, and a cheer went up in the womens’ voices. “The baby is here!”

In that moment Piotras staggered, placed his hand over his heart, and leaned back against the wall.

Fiarsinhilh murmured in Derizan, “Oh shining singing…” weaving notes with melodies from Piotras, pure flow from two glistening streams.

“We feel the Singer,” Fiarsinhilh said aside to Derizan. “The Singer gives us the greatest of gifts.”

Now Munizkara beckoned. The other women took up the cleaning and comforting of mother and child. Derizan came with the others and stood, looking down at Tellina as she drew her newborn to her breast. The infant’s eyes, closed as it nestled to its mother, opened gazing wide and directly into his, and electricity seemed to fill him to overflowing with sparks. Inside him, he felt words form in soft tones: I am Samantine, the song of the Singer. I welcome you, Derizan my armor, my protector, my servant, my friend.

And Derizan knelt, his head bowed. As if feeling his moment, the other men stood back from him. His heart spoke inside, answering her: I am for you. I am for you. I am for you forever.

Mentrianos went and sat against the wall farther away, looking down at his feet.

DARK AWAKENING

Scene 39

An ancient city, crumbled and broken, stone-deep and mountain-high, rots in the embrace of a monstrous consciousness. Many thousands of years ago, a mighty tree began its slow invasion of the city, now nameless and long abandoned. The tree’s sprawling, ingrown colony of roots and trunks and vines and tendrils and branches inexorably penetrated every tier, every corridor, every chamber of the metropolis, down and through it to drink and suck the murky seas and swamps beneath.

Now the tree, sprawled and spearing high across leagues of land, its many trunks and limbs mounted to great heights, has been engulfed. An alien, conscious, malignant entity, its consuming purpose the devouring of light and air and water and metals, has mined the tree and the city for every glimmer of life, power, and hope. Little remains to be consumed here, and the entity sleeps lazily, sending out slow, bladed rootlets to burrow across fields and hills, seeking more to take.

The entity’s names are cysts in its awareness, treasured away to be spoken into being in the worlds. One of the entity’s innumerable names called it into appearance and being in the city: Ouboson.

Spurred by hunger, Ouboson drives new marches of tendrils deep to the fringes of murky seas locked below over magma heat, where unnamed casts of life surge and ebb, now and then entangled by the monster’s reaching fibers to be sucked empty. The planet’s life is fading, its inner heart continuing to cool. Soon there will be no more sustenance here, Ouboson will sleep forever, and another cyst of the monster will speak itself into being far away, in some newfound world.

A pulse, far off, heralds an arrival. A suborned organelle of Ouboson comes awake. A portal! A portal has lit up, its energies signaling to all the other sleeping portals across this world. A portal! A name surfaces: Wylwood Forest. Beings have come to Wylwood Forest from another world. The news rises, branches, blooms in the tangle of Ouboson’s being. At last. Food. I will send a child of mine.

A spawning comes. The organelle hatches forth a lethal Sending; with fangs and hunger and clutching limbs and poison threads it bursts up through dead soil to race toward the dark Wylwood and the Shades River, inhaling the living scent diffusing now from the portal’s mound. Food at last.

URGENT DEBATE

Scene 40

Crooning softly, Tellina nursed her newborn Samantine. They sat wrapped in blankets at the side of the tunnel not far from the shaft they had explored. As Munizkara stayed with her, Derizan took stock.

He counted seventeen in their party: seven in his family, three in Inkurisar’s, the young couple with the baby for three more, two more in Guinban and Piotras, and two more, Terrenci and Turtuz, from Fornonck town. With a sense of gloom, he surveyed the nine bulging packs they’d managed to snatch in their flight from Fornonck. Each pack held several day’s rations, light cooking gear, a water bottle, a field knife, a power pack, two light thermal blankets, bandages, and medical needs.

“Our supplies won’t last long, folks,” he said. Nods. “We’ve found some water down here – it seems good – and the fungals seem nourishing. But we have a long way ahead, and a mother and her baby to care for.”

“So there’s no way back?” Inkurisar’s tone seemed defeated.

Turtuz spoke. “No. We’ve seen these things happen before. They will dig through the rockfall we made and keep after us.”

“He’s right,” Piotras. “Andro hunters are on my trail, and soldiers on his.” He indicated Guinban. “They want the bounties for us. Even if the force withdraws, these hunters won’t stop.”

“We can’t go on through the tunnel.” It was Inkurisar’s wife Nakiran who spoke. “With a newborn and her mother, we can’t go fast.” She gestured toward Alumaras. “His age will slow us too. Besides, what defenses do we have against an armed force, down in this place?”

Derizan began, “We have some weapons now, and some able people for defense.” Inside he asked Fiarsinhilh, “Do you have any insight for this, any help for us?”

The alien responded, “I can work on your body and brain to make you a killer, but I refuse to do that. It would turn me into one of the fallen of the City. And my efforts for Piotras have drained me.”

“Nakiran is telling us the reality,” put in Munizkara. “Going further north in this tunnel leaves us no escape routes, and slow progress with a newborn. We would be caught, no matter how far we could go.”

“But we found this shaft! Won’t there be other shafts? Or other tunnels that meet this one?” Mentrianos was standing over his wife and newborn. Desperation rose in his voice. “Or can’t we hide somewhere?” This was met with shaking heads.

Silence. A happy gurgle from Samantine. Then Daryuz spoke. “Could we all go up the shaft to that portal you found? Maybe it can take us to a safe place, and we could come back here after they give up the chase.”

Derizan finally spoke. “I agree with Nakiran and Daryuz. We can’t just walk on down the tunnel with threats pursuing us. We’re virtually defenseless, with only Turtuz to take point, and whoever is coming has military equipment and skills.”

He sighed. “We already know we can’t take the tunnel the other way. We also can’t go back to the hatch where pursuit is coming. I don’t like it, but Daryuz is suggesting what is maybe the least of many risks. I can tell you from the knowledge of my inner companion that we can travel to another part of Tarnus using the portal’s panel.”

Voices rose in protest. “How do you trust that… thing in you?” “Maybe going through that portal will put us in worse danger!” “That’s crazy!” The hubbub grew.

Derizan interrupted with two raised hands and a shout. “Stop! As Daryuz says, using the portal gives us a chance to throw the City forces off our trail. If we take that choice, we may well find places to wait in safety. We may find food and water. We don’t know any of this, but at least we stand some chance. Anything else, and we just die down here, and for nothing.”

A long silence, marked only by dripping of water from the tunnel ceiling.

Then Denzari said, “If we are going to move at all, it had better be now. And if we can find any way to make following us harder, that would be best. Let’s all get ourselves up to the portal chamber and see what we can do up there.”

One by one the rest of the party nodded agreement. Mentrianos was the last. Astina went to Tellina and drew her to her feet. “Will you be able to climb that shaft? Ajina and I and the other women can carry the baby for you if that’s all right.”

Tellina smiled wearily. “Yes. Here.” Samantine slept as her mother handed her to Astina. “She likes you already. I dreamed it.”

“All right,” Derizan said. “Turtuz, will you take rearguard?” And gathering and packing their goods, the fugitives began the ascent to the portal chamber. Coming last, Turtuz put his foot on the first rung, looking back up and down the tunnel. Coming from the direction of the access hatch a distant banging began.

GRIEF, JOY, AND HOPE

Scene 41

The air stank. The five miners worked frantically, coughing and retching, as they tried to break back through to the now-silent southern parts of Fornonck. The attack by the City forces had been driven back, thanks to heroism and surprise defensive tactics by the Gellins, and there was no sound from beyond the fallen slabs of stone they had dropped on the advancing troops. A hand and wrist protruded beneath one of the slabs, blackened and grayed by lost and pooling blood.

“Did we lose anybody?”

“We haven’t found Viantos or Galanaisa. They were just behind me when we dropped these and blew the plast.” A muffled sob.

“There’ll be a lot of bodies. The City people didn’t spread out – they were all bunched in the open chamber when we blew it.”

“This smell!” A gagging cough.

“Come on! We need to track back and find ours. Get their bodies out, give them good rest. And get the place cleaned up again, the rest of the corpses. If the rockmuncher is still working, we’ll make a deep chamber and bury them there.”

“Not our own!”

“No, no, we’ll put our own up under the trees with the others. The cemetery. The wolves will watch over them.” A local Gellin Sintherou saying for their dead.

With prybars, great effort, and shoveling away volumes of heaped gravel, stone, and soil, they found their way into the further corridor. It was heaped with bodies, some of them mangled, nearly all in tattered disguises over militia uniforms. They called others to help, and their labors ran on. There was no sound from the entrance ways – any surviving attackers were gone.

“Oh, no. Viantos.”

“Is he alive?”

“No.” A woman bent over the body. Her tears rained onto its cheek and beard.

“Go back and let us take him home.” And three of the others slowly drew Viantos’s body up and carried it off along the passage to the northern sector.

The woman turned to the corpses still being moved. Her eyes widened. She raced to where a hand, a left hand with silver rings on curled middle and ring fingers, lay across a City soldier’s arm, palm up, at the top of a pile of dead soldiers. “Galanaisa! No! Help me!” And two others came to her, and they lifted off bloodied corpses, and there, her back to the stone floor, lay Galanaisa, her clothes soaked in blood and ichor, not moving.

The workers reached tenderly to her to gather her up, and at the touch she spasmed, heaved a shuddering breath, and coughed up blood. The woman finding her turned and yelled, “Medical help! Found life!”

# # #

“You’re going to need some time,” the medic told her in her bed.

Galanaisa smiled, and then turned her face away, sighing, coughing. “Oh, Viantos.”

“You’re his branch now,” the medic told her in the Gellin way. “Thrive for him.”

She nodded and lay silent. Then she whispered, “Get me a couple of well-armed miners. As soon as I can get up and move, I want to see what happened to that family we took in.” Maybe they got away before this started. Maybe not.

JUMPING AWAY

Scene 42

One by one the families and their escorts emerged from the shaft and stood in the portal chamber. Its pedestal glowed with the white light of the symbol marking their current location. Derizan looked around at their wondering faces. He pointed at the symbol below the lighted one. “This one takes us to Sirathen. It’s the only one we’ve identified as pointing to any place on this planet.”

Selech shrugged. “Why go right now? Why not just wait up here until we know someone’s coming? We can… jump out any time before they get here, and they won’t know where we went – if they even understand this thing.”

“Slow down your thinking,” Derizan said. “We don’t know what the pedestal shows after we leave a portal room. It might show where we went, at least for a while. Maybe at least some kind of afterglow.”

Selech laughed. “Now you’re sounding like me! Push the button and pray!”

“I don’t like this. Not any of it.” Inkurisar. “I’ve risked my life a thousand times to get people to safety, people just like you. Now you want to throw yourselves into some hole in the world and hope for the best. Blindly!”

Munizkara broke in. “And you’re taking a newborn with you? How will that work out?” Nakiran nodded agreement with her sister.

Now Piotras shook his head. “We can’t stay! They don’t care about catching most of you – they’re after the two of us!” He held Guinban’s arm.

Astina said, “If they chase just you, they will report back about us, no matter what else happens. I think we should go, and now.” She turned to Derizan. “We could go, and report back after we see what’s there. You were in… Sirathen, the first time, right? Nothing bad happened right away?”

As Derizan nodded, Terrenci spoke. “I don’t want to go either, because I want to go back to Fornonck and try to help there. It may be dangerous, but I know my way, and whoever is left there needs me. Anybody in pursuit won’t be after us, and we can move and defend ourselves more easily without families.” She looked expectantly at Turtuz, who murmured a gruff agreement.

Finally Daryuz and Alumaras turned to Derizan. “We’re with you,” they both said.

Now Denzari began. “I see two groups forming here. My family wants to go try Sirathen. The two fugitives,” and here he indicated Guinban and Piotras, “want to go with us. The folks based in Fornonck and Inkurisar’s family want to find their way back. Is this right, so far?”

Nods. Munizkara looked distressed. He continued, “That leaves Mentrianos, Tellina, and the baby, Samantine. What do you two want to do?”

While Denzari spoke, Derizan asked into himself, to Fiarsinhilh, “Do you have any insights we can’t see ourselves?”

The alien’s voice in him was soft. “Helping Piotras heal exhausted me. I can’t help you right now. I will need time and nourishment.”

Mentrianos looked uncertainly at Tellina. “I think we’d be taking a big chance, going off into the unknown with our baby. Don’t you?”

Tellina faced him squarely, Samantine in her arms. “Are you afraid? I’m not.”

He sulked. “I’m not afraid! Just for our baby!”

“Don’t use her for your excuse! You heard what our chances are down in the tunnel!”

“I brought you through to get into this group! Now it looks like it’s breaking up, and its best defender,” he gestured toward Turtuz, “intends to stay.”

Tellina replied, “I’m going, and I’m taking Samantine. Do what you want to do.”

Derizan held up both hands. “Before we make any final choices to separate, let our four explorers – Selech, Ajina, Denzari, and me – make the Sirathen jump to see what’s there. We needn’t take more than a few minutes, and we’ll come right back. It means the rest of you will have to clear the chamber.”

“Don’t take too long,” Turtuz growled. “I heard them trying to break open the hatch back there.”

“All right, that’s fair, isn’t it?” It was Terrenci, looking around. Sighs and slight nods. One by one they climbed down the shaft to wait, leaving the four to scout ahead.

# # #

“You can come back up,” Derizan called, a few minutes later. As the group reassembled in the chamber from the shaft, he said, “The chamber is as we left it. We found an exit door and got it open long enough to see that we were in a dark forest of huge trees and bare ground. It was very quiet. The ground sloped away on one side, and up on the other. We didn’t stay to explore outside, but now we have a place to go and no immediate danger there. We closed and secured the exit door when we came back.”

“We couldn’t see daylight above those trees,” Selech said. “They’re incredibly tall, big like towers, even higher.”

“That sounds like the Great South Fall, where the trees below the scarp grow so high and thick.” It was Guinban. “I was on a militia training run when an officer told us about all that.”

“Shall we decide, and shall we act?” This Gellin phrasing from Terrenci got everyone’s attention.

“We are going,” Derizan said firmly. “All those who choose to stay, please go down the shaft and wait, or else continue on down. Go with our souls, and we will go with yours. Again we shall meet.” The Arcus phrases of farewell came to him with certainty.

And without looking back or saying a word, Mentrianos followed the others down the shaft.

The chamber held Denzari’s family, Guinban and Piotras, and Tellina with Samantine. Her eyes were red, and tears stained her wrap.

Wondering why the young man had abandoned his wife and baby so easily, Denzari touched the Sirathen symbol of the pedestal.