I slid down into the pit and walked carefully up to one of the medium-sized seradatho, which was starting to put some kind of joining stone between some of the b.u.t.tresses. I examined the resulting stone carefully, then climbed back up. "Sir, that looks just like standard cavern limestone! I swear, if I took that back to a lab I wouldn"t be able to tell the difference!"
"And nor should you. We are part of the Earth, Clint. How many times must I say this before you truly understand? Nothing that we do may be apart from her. Except in our own dwellings, it must not even be recognizable as our work, but be fully in harmony with Nowe, as much a part of her as we are."
I shook my head, still trying to comprehend it. "But it looks like standard flowstone-deposited over thousands and thousands of years. How the h.e.l.l can you possibly replicate that?"
"I could attempt to explain it," Rokhaset said, after some consideration, "but in truth, without taking much time indeed to instruct you, all that I could tell you would boil down to saying "it"s magic," a most unsatisfactory explanation. Suffice to say that this is the way it must be for us."
"So some of those natural-seeming caverns we see around the world are really your doing?"
"Undoubtedly. Sometimes your people intrude upon us by exploring what you think are natural caves and are, instead, our dwelling places. Only in the great cities and central places of the Earth do we build places such as the throne room and its nearby environs."
I rubbed my temples. Running into the Nomes themselves, well, I"d always known they were there. So it was more like just meeting some aliens. This, though, was magic-a kind of magic that affected stuff I really did know a lot about, and direct enough to hit me in the gut. The threat of the Lisharithada"s great quake was real enough, but too huge to grasp, really. Seeing stone that, by rights, ought to have taken a million years to form be spat out in seconds by some crawling centipede-thing, that was different.
I remembered, suddenly, the rushing water I"d heard when the great doors to the Throne Room opened. "You don"t even use machines like we do. You just channel water and maybe use levers or something to move those doors and other things."
"Correct. In nature, sometimes water does move great boulders, so we can construct a device that takes advantage of that."
"Well, Clint, now we know why we"ve never seen any traces of these things before in caves around the world."
I nodded to Jodi. "Ayup. We did see traces, more"n likely. Problem is that there was no way to tell the traces from the original stone. Y"all even make stalact.i.tes and stalagmites and all the tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs, right, and make sure the water"s there to keep it alive?"
Rokhaset seemed pleased that I"d picked up on the last part. "Exactly right, Clint. I see you have finally penetrated the significance of your original ancestor"s find."
"In a cave, water flowing represents life to you just like to us. So you keep your diamonds and other stones in those pools so they stay a part of Nowe"s essence, right?"
"Very good. Yes, precisely so."
I noticed Rokhaset was staying carefully in the deepest shadows under the tree, and remembered his prior comments. "Hey, you said your eyes might suffer in the sun. I could get you something that probably will help."
"Indeed?"
"Yeah. I"ve done some work with multispectral optics, off and on, and you mentioned your eyes get messed up slowly. I"ll bet the crystals are being affected by the ultraviolet rays, which you"ll never run into underground." I handed him a pair of UV-blocker sungla.s.ses.
He put them on and glanced around with his odd sight. "Extraordinary. There is minor interference from these gla.s.ses in how well I turan, but I can tell that the faint pain from the light here is considerably lessened."
"I wasn"t sure if the plastic would interfere with your own senses, but the fact that it blocked UV made it worth a try. UV"s generally the culprit in most damage sunlight does."
"I believe you are correct in this case. Thank you." Rokhaset glanced into the pit. "I do not suppose you have a few dozen pairs of these?"
I chuckled ruefully. "Nope, and can"t get any until we get to town."
"Then let us arrange that as swiftly as possible."
The next few hours pa.s.sed quickly. Rokhaset drove his people and their seradatho twice as hard, pausing only to listen when we clarified how the terrain would have to run in order to permit the cars to pa.s.s. Before our eyes, the landscape healed; it was the only way to describe that incredible sight. Stone and soil literally growing up out of the bowels of the Earth, a foundation of limestone covered by soil, and trees and brush somehow moving in over the scar through careful manipulation of the soil and roots.
Finally, the hillside was solid again. "Now, Clinton Slade, it is time for you to fulfill your part of this bargain."
"I"m on it. C"mon, Jodi, we"ve got a withdrawal to do up to the bank, and darn little time to do it in. We"ve gotta get to town in less than an hour or the bank will close!"
We dashed to the truck and got in. "Strap in tight, Jodi-y"all"s in for a h.e.l.l of a ride!"
Fountaining gravel, we pulled out of the gateway and thundered downhill, plowing over the newly-laid earth and leaving its first set of tire tracks. The new road around the first gash slowed me down some, being as it had to make a sharp curve, but I opened her up again and had all four wheels off the ground at the first drop on the straightaway. We jolted against the harnesses and even with the heavy shocks she nearly bottomed out. "Oy, Clint, slow down! We can"t make any withdrawals if we"re dead!"
"Ain"t no slowin" down, sweetheart. If"n you remember when we drove through last time, takes all of an hour and ten minutes to get to town. And we can"t take that long nohow."
"Your accent"s getting worse, Clint."
"Yeah, I know. It"s "cause o" th"truck," I said stoutly. "A pickup jest naturally brings out th" inner hillbilly in a man."
Pavement, albeit pretty c.r.a.ppy, was now under the wheels and I opened her up as much as I dared. There"s places where you can make over 70, and others where even a nutcase wouldn"t go past 30 on those roads, unless he was stone drunk. I drove like a stone-drunk nutcase and Jodi just hung on to the doorframe and said nasty words in Yiddish.
We came screaming down the main street with me riding the brake to get down below the limit as we pa.s.sed the town line; I think Sheriff McCloskey almost lit off his lights before he saw it was me. I skidded us into a spot in the parking lot and jumped out for the doors, just as I heard the soft but final click of the bank door being locked for the day.
"Son of a-" I couldn"t quite stop in time to keep from whomping the doors. Arlene Ebsen, the manager, gave me a stern look, but turned around. "Clinton Jefferson Slade, I"ve known you since you were in diapers, and I know your mamma raised you better"n that!"
"Sorry, Miss Arlene, really sorry, but I"ve just gotta get into the deposit vault. Please!"
She pursed her lips. "Clint, you know we like the Slades as our customers, but I can"t just go openin" and closin" at someone else"s convenience."
"Please, Miss Arlene, I"m beggin" you. I"m right here on my knees, I mean it." And I was. We just couldn"t miss it by this much, we just couldn"t!
She rolled her eyes. "Well, Lord, if it"s that all-fired important . . . just this once. But don"t try this again!"
The sound of the door unlocking was like the whole weight of my truck lifting off my back. "Hurry up, y"hear?" Arlene said. "That there vault"s on a time lock. Locks itself down in half an hour after closing, less"n someone"s in it, but if someone is in it, it screams fit to wake the dead."
"Don"t you worry!" I said, racing ahead of her, key already out. "Be gone so fast you"ll think I wasn"t even here."
Jodi waited back by the doors. After Arlene took my key, matched it with hers and opened the safety deposit box, she marched out of the vault heading for the phone. She was probably going to call Father to make sure there wasn"t some reason I might be trying to make off with the family treasures in secret. It didn"t take me long to get out the diamonds, since they weren"t loose but stashed in three little bags. I slammed the box shut again, locked it hastily, and hurried out of the vault towards the outside door. Pa.s.sing Arlene, who was just hanging up with a slightly bemused expression, I said: "Thanks a million, Miss Arlene!"
I took a bit more time on the drive back. It"d be awfully stupid to get us both killed now that we actually had the diamonds Rokhaset needed and weren"t racing against a specific deadline. But it wasn"t easy, because my foot kept wanting to hammer the gas, and from her expression I think Jodi felt the same way. We were going to be in good time overall, but still, it felt like every second counted. It was getting dark by the time we made it back to the homestead. I parked the truck and jogged to the front door.
I then faced what might have been the oddest sight I"d ever seen in my life: Rokhaset was sitting at Mamma"s big table, everyone else eating her cooking and him with slices of some kind of stone on his plate, as though he was no stranger a dinner guest than some new neighbor. Strange, yeah, but I felt a huge swell of pride in my family. Okay, so we Slades had been barbarians to these people, but d.a.m.ned if you could call us barbarians now. I wouldn"t bet that one in a thousand families could have a Nome at the table and treat it-him-like proper company.
Rokhaset stood as we entered. "The H"adamant-do you have it?"
"Right here. Hope it"s still alive, like you call it."
As I put the bags in his hand, he nodded. "I can hear it. Weakened slightly by time away from the heart of Nowe, but still there." He fumbled with the bags a bit, examining what was inside; he didn"t need to open them. I wasn"t an expert in Nome body language, but it seemed to me he slumped a bit.
"My thanks to you for a valiant effort, Clinton Slade," he said finally. "But it is as I feared. There is not enough here-not nearly enough-to provide us with a force to overcome what the Lisharithada will have to defend them. We shall do our best, of course; it is our calling and destiny. But we shall never triumph."
I stared at Rokhaset. "No. We can"t let it end like that."
"Of course we can"t, Clint dear. And we won"t," Mamma said tartly. "Mr. Rokhaset, we"ve come invisibly into your homes and taken your diamonds; it"s about time we made it up to you. How do you think a few Slades might change the odds, down there in your little war?"
The High Spirit turned around to face her. "You would fight for us?"
"Well, it"s for my family too, isn"t it? And it"s our fault, as Jodi showed us. Now, I only married into the Slades, but what I was taught was that a Slade admits when he"s wrong and fixes it until it"s right."