instructions, opened the small hinged grate in the front and sparked a flame. The fire came instantly to the interior and Ronin, closing the grate, was too grateful for the warmth to inquire about the fuel source.
He put Borros on a bunk, listened to him talk for a short time, then went on deck.
He took the mast from its storage rack along the port sheer-strake and set it in its place just astern of midships. He set the yard, low down on the mast. Then he went over the side and hacked at the metal chocks holding the runners in place. When they were freed, he went aboard and unfurled the high sweeping lateen sail.
Coming down the low slopes, the wind had been off the sea, into their faces. At some point it had turned and, picking up velocity, was now whipping almost due south. Ronin, setting the last of the rigging, thought, Now there is nothing more to do. Borros a.s.sures me that we need not stand lookout this night, that there is clear sailing. Does he really know, I wonder?
At that moment there came a powerful lurch and, as the sail caught the wind, the vessel, now standing clear on its runway of ice, was launched upon the ice sea.
Ronin, fatigued and unprepared, fell to the deck. Moving cautiously to the stern, he hauled hard on the wheel and lashed it tight as Borros had instructed him. They flew along the ice due south, the stiff wind billowing the sail, pushing them. He stared ahead for a moment, but the moon had disappeared behind racing clouds and new mist was settling in. Nothing more to do. With a final glance at the fastness of the rigging, he went below.
Sleep.
Tomorrow night."
A small squat lamp hanging from a beam in the cabin"s low ceiling had been lit It swung with the ship"s motion, shadows fleeing across the bulkheads."What?" he said thickly.
Through round crystal portals set in either bulkhead he saw that it was still dark out. It was warm and comfortable here and he closed his eyes, sighing.
"We slept through the night," said Borros from his berth across the cabin, "and all of the next day." He smiled wearily. "I got up once and it was near sunset, that is how I know. I went on deck and found that the wind had changed slightly. We were running more to the west than I wanted, as close as I could tell-the sun sets only roughly in the west-so I reset the wheel." He stood up carefully. He looked thin and gaunt "Hungry?" Ronin opened his eyes.
They ate voraciously from the stores on ship; concentrates with unsatisfying flavors, but they filled the belly. Abruptly he remembered the frostbite of his face but, lifting a hand, he could feel no burn or discomfort.
"The ancients antic.i.p.ated that possibility also," said the Magic Man. "You will find a packet of the unguent in one of the pockets of your suit. When I woke yesterday, I fixed us both up at the same time." He smiled almost apologetically. "I did not see the need to wake you." He lay back on his bunk, as if the talk had weakened him.
"Are you all right?" Ronin asked.
The Magic Man lifted a slender hand. "Only-it will take me somewhat more time than you to recover." His lips turned up again in a watery smile. "The disadvantages of age, you understand."
Ronin turned away. I have a surprise for you," he said.
"Ah, good. But first you must tell me of your journey to the City of Ten Thousand Paths." Ronin looked back at him in time to see the sorrow and regret in his eyes. He shook his head ruefully. "I am so sorry, Ronin. I sent you on a madman"s quest, an impossible-"
"But-"
"They told me about G"fand-"
"Ah." His heart felt as cold as ice. "Did they?"
"Yes." He grimaced. "It was part of my treatment. Freidal had already subjected me to such prolonged physical torture"-unconsciously his thin fingers sought his forehead, where before Ronin had seen the terrifying marks of the Dehn spots-"in trying to pry out of me all that I knew of the Surface, that he felt it was time to change tactics. I knew all along that I had sent you down to the City of Ten Thousand Paths and he could have stopped you at any time-"
"He wanted to see what I would return with, since he could not break you."
But Borros was not listening; he was remembering. "He was so clever, Chill take him! He came in and told them to stop; gave me water and let me rest. Told me that I had been through it all and had not given in; that it was useless for him to try any more. He-he said that he admired me"-his voice turned to a tremulousfluting-"that as soon as I had recovered, I was free to go." He pa.s.sed a frail hand across his eyes as if the gesture would blot out the nightmare that played in his mind and which, compulsively now, spewed from his mouth.
" "Oh, by the way," he said, as if it were the last thing on his mind, "we have taken Ronin into custody. He has just returned to the Freehold after making an unauthorized exit. We have asked him quite politely where he went, after all it is a Security matter. The safety of the Freehold is at stake; if he can egress, others may gain entrance. So you understand that we must find out where he went and why. It is a matter of utmost importance." Freidal sighed. "But so far he has been most reluctant to accommodate us. He refuses, Borros, to do his duty to the Freehold.
You understand what must be done now." I did indeed; he meant to use the Dehn on you. "His disrespectful actions leave me no choice. Oh yes," he said then, I almost forgot. The young man who accompanied him-a scholar, I believe-G"fand-was killed. Unfortunate, but scholars are hardly essential to the stability of the Freehold.""
Borros shifted uncomfortably on his berth but found no surcease. His eyes were still turned inward. "Freidal was furious that I did not crumble then, as he had hoped, so he"-the Magic Man"s thin frame shuddered-lie had Stahlig brought in. He had his daggam drag Stahlig in front of me. Someone held my head so that I could not turn away; they hit me when I tried to shut my eyes." He lifted his head, the narrow skull shining like ancient bone, his eyes l.u.s.terless. "When Stahlig looked at me-I have never seen such terror written upon the face of a human being." He let go a suspiration then, and it all came out "Freidal said to him: What is it that you fear most, Stahlig? The loss of your feet? Would you care to crawl through the Freehold on your knees? Perhaps your eyes. Do you fear blindness? No? I could break your back then; leave you alive, alive and immobile." And seeing the look in Stahlig"s eyes, he continued: "That would be most fitting, would it not? Your friend Ronin left my man Marcsh with a broken back. But you know that; you treated Marcsh. You will be totally helpless; to be fed and wiped hike a baby." "
The wind, m.u.f.fled somewhat by the cabin"s bulkheads, moaned mournfully, momentarily drowning out the soft sc.r.a.ping sounds of the runners gliding swiftly over the ice, as if it too was witness to the horror that the Magic Man had conjured.
Borros put his head in his hands. "In the end," he whispered so softly that it was like a ghost"s breath, "Stahlig died of fright."
There was silence for a time save for the moaning and occasional creak of the fittings abovedecks. Ronin lay back on his berth and tried to think of nothing, but his brain was on fire and he got up and went silently up the short vertical companionway.
The small ship shot through the mists of night ever southward. Ronin, on deck, could see nought but the blurred shadows of the ribboning ice as it sped by beneath the vessel. It was a quarter wind which now propelled them and he busied himselflearning the fundamentals of tacking into it, working hard at the rigging to keep them on course.
He went aft and freed the wheel, steering manually for a time, letting the vibrations flow from his hands into his body borne away on an imaginary tide. The endless gentle soughing of the runners peeling a thin film of ice below stood by him like a spectral companion.
The wind strained the sail. Already the weather was changing, the air wetter, denser than before and, because of it, the cold seemed fiercer, creeping beneath the skin into flesh and bone. At length Ronin lashed the wheel to and, taking a last deep breath, went below.
Borros lay on his berth staring blankly upward.
"The surprise, Borros," Ronin said gently. "I have not told you what it is."
"Uhm."
"Do you remember why you sent me to the City of Ten Thousand Paths?"
"Of course, but-" He sat up so suddenly that he barely missed hitting his head on a beam. Color had returned to his yellow face. "You cannot mean-" At last there was a light kindling his eyes. "But Freidal had you and-"
"And the Salamander also; his men took me from Security." A wintry smile broke out on Ronin"s face.
The Magic Man"s mouth opened soundlessly.
"And?"
Ronin laughed then, for the first time in many cycles. "And? And? Freidal found nothing, though he was justifiably curious about this"-he lifted his strange gauntlet-"and the Salamander lacked the time to find anything-"
"Are you telling me that you actually found the scroll? Ronin, you have it?"
Borros came excitedly across to him.
Ronin withdrew his sword, grasped the hilt, and twisted it three times. It came away in his hand. From within its hollowed-out recesses Ronin gently pulled forth the scroll of dor-Sefrith. He handed it to the Magic Man, who delicately opened it and stared, breathing, "You have found it. Oh, Ronin-!"
He gave Borros several moments before he said, "Now you must tell me what it says and why it is so important."
Borros looked up at him, the flame from the swinging lamp reflecting in his eyes, turning them colorless.
"But you see, Ronin," he said in a tired voice, "I do not know."
There was a time-he could actually force himself to remember that far back inthe dim and cloudy past, though he rarely wished to-when Stahlig, the Medicine Man, was not a part of his life.
He had fallen down half a flight of stairs, choked with rubble and debris.
Exploring. As he had come to a landing, something had shot across his path, tiny nails clicking industriously, and he had lost his balance, tumbling down the Stairwell.
He might not have been hurt at all if it had been clear. But he had fetched up against a fallen girder, twisted and red, his leg slamming into its side where it lay slashed through a rent in the outer wall. Perhaps he pa.s.sed out from the pain.
Eventually, he got to the Medicine Man on the next Level, limping and crawling because no one was about to help him.
His left leg was broken but he was young and strong and Stahlig knew his business. It was a clean break and with the white end protruding through the torn flesh appeared worse than it in fact was. The bones knit perfectly but that became secondary to him. Stahlig talked to him while he went about setting the leg. That was what interested him, intrigued him, what, ultimately, caused him to return to Stahlig"s med rooms whenever he was able. The Medicine Man had no reason to treat Ronin in a special way, yet he did, recognizing somewhere within him a potential others would not.
The two became friends and the reason did not matter at all, at least to either of them. That did not mean that it did not go unnoticed in some quarters of the Freehold, noted, written down, filed away for future use.
We accepted each other, Ronin thought as the ship rocked beneath him. And now you have joined so many others who have known me and because of it have died.
Outside, the wind was rising, plucking at the rigging in mournful melody.
"You do not know?" echoed Ronin without emotion. "What have you done to me?"
Borros put the scroll back into its hiding place in the hilt of Ronin"s sword. He rubbed his eyes.
"Sit," he said, and put his hand on Ronin"s shoulder. "Sit and I will tell you all that I do know."
In ancient times, when the world spun faster upon its axis and the sun burned with energy in the sky, when mult.i.tudes of people roamed the surface of all the planet and, beneath their feet, the land turned from dirt and high gra.s.s plains as they walked, to fields of rowed food plants green and golden in the sunshine, to arid deserts smeared with low-growing flowers of many hues, to steep windswept steppes and mountain ranges blue with haze, when high-prowed ships from many nations plied the seas in search of trade with new lands, then Ronin, then we were known by another name. We were scientists and then our work was highly empirical,our theorems coming almost exclusively from the forebrain. Are you familiar with the word "empirical"? Ah, good. Methodology was our watchword, this strict Catholicism a firm and supportive base for our work.
But times changed radically and the world of the ancients was disappearing. In that interim period, the world was seized by a progression of natural cataclysms. The continents broke apart and fell away to be replaced by others, rising steamily from beneath the boiling seas. As you may well imagine, many people died but, perhaps more importantly, at the same time the laws that had heretofore governed the world of the ancients were overthrown and destroyed. Others came into being.
The inconceivable had occurred; by what means it is impossible to say, nor is it entirely germane to this account. Still, whatever formal records of that time ever existed are lost now-what remains are but fragments pertaining to the world as it was before.
Naturally, among the living were numerous scientists, yet so tied were they to the bedrock of their empiricism that, though it was clear to many others that the world had irrevocably changed so that the old methodology now worked only sporadically, the scientists refused to listen.
Certain members of these others, born to the new order of things, were able to make, because they had not been trained in the traditional ways of man, the great leap forward in thinking. These then became great mages, as they explored new methods, discovering alchemical, then sorcerous pathways, shining like beacons in the night. So they grew in power, at length banishing the scientists whom they scorned and ridiculed as they threw them down. Then they took upon themselves the mantle of overlords and in so doing lost sight of the original goals of their creation.
Irresponsibly, they began to vie with each other for territory and power.
The inevitable holocaust of their quarreling spread throughout the world. The destruction was ghastly; its extent blossoming to unthinkable heights. Many people went underground. The City of Ten Thousand Paths came into being in this way. It was an attempt to form a peaceful society composed of members of all the surviving nations.
But among the populace of the City of Ten Thousand Paths were both mages and scientists, and they were ever at war. It is said that of all the mages only dor-Sefrith of Ama-no-mori remained unmoved and uninvolved though both sides desperately sought his considerable power.
From the time of the holocaust onward, there was of course an attrition of knowledge and each succeeding generation learned less and, eventually, when even dor-Sefrith"s long neutrality ceased to maintain the uneasy peace, factions broke away, tunneling upward through the mineral-rich rock to form our eventual home, the Freehold, only residues of each side"s knowledge remained.
We became the Magic Men, not-scientists, not-mages, struggling with but sc.r.a.ps of the methodology of both, learning languages long dead, convoluted equations which we neither understood nor would likely work under our present laws. Andeven if we grasped the tatters of the ancient concepts, even if we were somehow able to piece together the scattered information to make a coherent whole, we lacked the resources-our Neers so ill trained that they could not even repair the essential machinery of the Freehold, let alone building for us the machines we would require-to accomplish anything.
Most of the Magic Men languished until enterprising Saardin began to see that we had a limited usefulness in the Freehold"s power struggle. Then, one by one, the Saardin sought us out for affiliation. It was the end for us. From n.o.ble beginnings, we had been reduced to the lowest level, devising projects for the Saardin to increase their power.
I turned my back on them and for many sign would not even step onto their Levels. I spent my time with the remnants of the scholars, on the twenty-seventh Level, studying as best I could the lore of the ancient world, so that I might regain for myself some semblance of my heritage.
But the more I read, the more convinced I became that we were a dying race, strangling in our own mingled blood, indolent, inbred, incestuous.
"G"fand felt the same way," Borros concluded.
"You knew G"fand?" Ronin asked.
"Oh, yes. He helped me quite a bit in deciphering many of the ancient codices.
There were revelations each cycle, but everything was in fragments and too often we were only tantalized by the pieces we had managed to decode, discovering afterwards that they were isolated pa.s.sages, their beginnings and endings lost."
"I remember," said Ronin, "that when we arrived in the City he would stop at every corner to read the glyphs carved into the buildings."
The Magic Man nodded. "Yes. I can imagine his excitement. Such a storehouse of knowledge." He reached into a cupboard under his berth and pulled out food concentrates. He offered some to Ronin, who shook his head, then sat and munched thoughtfully for a time.
"One day," he said-his voice had a thin far-off quality now-"we came across a rent ma.n.u.script. It was frightfully old and so desiccated that it took us more than three cycles to carefully clean it enough so that we could begin to read the glyphs and restore the missing characters. Then G"fand set about deciphering it and I lost interest as I was involved in a project of my own at the time. Several cycles later he came to me saying that he could make no headway at all; the glyphs were totally alien to him; they bore no resemblance to any language he had studied.
"I laughed. Well, what can I do?" I said. "You are a far better translator than I." "I do not know," he said, "but come take a look in any case."
"The glyphs which were so baffling to him jumped out at me with such vividness that I had to conceal my surprise, and for once I was grateful for my peculiar training. For this codex was written in one of the forgotten-and I had supposed useless-languages which I had learned as a child."The codex foretold of a drastic shift in the presumably immutable laws of our world. When the foundations of our science are thrown down, then will man tremble before the true power. Conceit is his undoing and he will not heed the coming of his doom until it crushes him. The Dolman, a sorcerous creature of terrifying power beyond man"s ken, will come against mankind. The shifting of the laws presages his invasion. Indeed it is his invitation. First his legions, then the Makkon, then The Dolman himself will come to claim the world. With that, annihilation.""
The wind outside had picked up in intensity, buffeting the ship as it sped across the ice sea. Yet the sound seemed remote to them, unreal, frozen in sticky time.
Neither one said anything for a while. Then Borros roused himself and, listening for a moment, made a motion upward.
"The sail."
If they had left it up any longer it would likely have been torn to shreds. As it was, they managed to reef it just in time. The wind, blowing frantically out of the northwest quarter, tore at their faces, forcing them to gasp for breath and turn their heads from its might. They were blind in the pit of night and only by guesswork did they surmise their direction.
Below, they blew into their cupped hands and shoved them near the fire, trying to warm their faces. Ronin prepared food for himself and before he had eaten his fill Borros was already asleep on his berth. He stretched out and stared at the swinging lamp, thinking long about The Dolman. He must have dozed, for when he next looked about the cabin the ports were illuminated by a thin milky glow.
"Dawn," breathed Borros, and sat up. "The sun rises. Soon we can unfurl the sail."
On deck they got their first real glimpse of the ice sea since setting sail. Ronin saw now why Borros had not been concerned about keeping watch at night. In all directions the ice flew away from them flat and seamless and dark. No high ridges, no steep protrusions marred its surface. And there was a limitless horizon which in all directions held no sight of land.
In the east, the gray clouds had taken on a pale saffron color as the sun began its quotidian trek across the heavens. The wind came in gusts and Borros was obliged to go aft to reset their course.
Ronin stared southward, watching the shredded clouds pile and tumble, blown across the sky by the high winds aloft Are there really people out there? he asked himself. Would they look like Bonneduce the Last? He shrugged and busied himself with the rigging, tightening knots which had loosened during the night.
The air became heavier still, leaden despite the strength of the wind, and there was a slight pressure in his ears. He took special care, moving along the rocking deck, remembering his slip the first night and, peering into the wind, he spied the purple and black thunderheads ma.s.sed just above the horizon on the northwest quadrant that heralded the coming storm.
A shout twisted his head aft, but he could see nothing amiss. He made his waytoward Borros, who was already pointing northward.
"What is it?" Ronin asked, coming up to him.
"A ship." Borros clutched at the wheel. "Following us."
Ronin peered aft but could still discern nothing on the expanse of the ice sea.
"Obscured now by the mist."