Kickaha said, “Cut the lengthy narrative. How did you get here?”
“God bless us all! I did not think we were short of time in this prison. To be brief, I climbed as high as I could, falling several times but only short distances, until, thoroughly exhausted, I found a ledge large enough for me to sleep on despite my fatigue.”
“I told you to get to the point.”
“When I awoke, I felt around the ledge and discovered that it projected from a cave. I heard running water inside. I was very thirsty and too high above the river to get a drink. So I went into the cave, very slowly, you may be sure, sliding my feet along the rock floor and making sure that I was not at the edge of an abyss. Presently, I came to a cataract within the cave itself. And then light blazed around me. I was on a high mountain in another world. In short, I had gone through a gate hidden in a cave in the chasm. Placed there by some Lord long ago after the battle on that planet between Los and his son, Red Orc.”
“That could have been many thousands of years ago,” Kickaha said. “Probably a Lord named Ololothon did it.”
“Yes. But I did not stay more than a few seconds on the projection of rock high on the mountain. I was gated to another place, then another, then another. That was the last stage. I arrived in this cell inside the circle you see drawn on the floor in that corner. I advise you not to enter that circle because somebody else might be gated through at any moment. If you were standing within it when that happened, an explosion might occur.”
For the first time, Kickaha noticed the orange circular line in the corner. He said, “I doubt that would happen. If this cell is equipped with sensors, and most gates are, the gate would not be activated as long as anyone was already in that circle.”
“But you don’t know that there are sensors in this cell.”
“What happened to your ring?”
“Oh, shortly after my arrival here, I became unconscious. I suppose it was gas released by the demon. That would account for my becoming unconscious immediately after I’d entered the cell. It would also account for both of us becoming senseless when you entered. That thing came into the cell afterward and removed our clothes and possessions. Anyway, when I woke up after arriving here, the ring was gone. He is now wearing it.”
Clifton pointed at the creature’s finger.
“I saw it,” Kickaha said. “Now-“
The scaly man spoke then with a deep resonant voice while the tendril flopped around in his mouth. His words were an incomprehensible gabble. When he stopped speaking, he cocked one ear toward Kickaha as if he expected a reply.
Kickaha replied in Thoan, “I don’t understand you.”
The scaly man nodded. But to him, a nod must mean a no. He turned away and shambled off down the corridor.
“Now,” Kickaha said, “you never finished your account of how you got into the Lords’ worlds.”
Clifton stopped, and his jaw dropped. Kickaha turned and saw that a cell across the hall from his had just been filled. The man in it was crumpling, his knees sagging. Then he lay on his side inside the circle where he had appeared. Kickaha recognized at once the long bronze-reddish hair and the angelically handsome face.
“Red Orc!”
Clifton gasped, and he cried, “The devil has caught the devil!”
An alarm must have been set off somewhere to notify the scaly man. Kickaha heard his heavy footsteps and then saw him coming down the corridor. Just before the creature got to Red Orc’s cell, Kickaha became unconscious again.
He woke befuddled, deaf, and against the wall opposite the barred door. His head felt as if it had swelled to twice its normal size. Smoke stung his nostrils and made his eyes smart, but it did not have the odor of gunpowder. He reached out on both sides of him. His right hand touched, then moved up and down, flesh and ribs. By his side was Clifton, still knocked out. He was blackened with smoke and smeared with blood and fragments of bloody flesh. When Kickaha looked down at his own body, he saw that he was also blackened and bloody. Still stunned, he flicked gobbets of flesh from his chest, stomach, and right leg. What had happened?
By then, the smoke had drifted out of the cell and down the corridor. The bars of the door were coated with blood; pieces of skin and muscle clung to the bars and lay on the floor. An eye was on the floor near Kickaha’s feet.
Slowly, he came out of his daze. He tried to get to his feet, but he was trembling so much that he could not do it. Also, his back hurt, and his legs were strengthless. He closed his eyes and sat against the wall for a while. When he opened his eyes, he had a clear idea of what had to have happened. Not Red Orc but a clone sent by Red Orc had been caught in the scaly man’s trap. But that meant that the Thoan had sent his clone after Kickaha, for what purpose he did not know.
No. Kickaha, his brain now starting to operate on all cylinders, realized what the purpose was. Red Orc had detectors that told him that he, Kickaha, had been taken away from the course set for him by the Thoan. Red Orc must have been surprised-and very alarmed-when Kickaha had once again vanished. But Red Orc had sent a clone along the same path after Kickaha. How quickly he must have acted! He had placed a bomb in the clone’s backpack, a bomb set to explode a few seconds after its carrier reached the point at which Kickaha had been snatched away. The clone, of course, had not known that Red Orc had put the bomb in the knapsack.
Though Red Orc could not have known what was occurring after Kickaha had vanished from the detectors, he had guessed that only an enemy would do it. He might have reasoned that Manathu Vorcyon had abducted Kickaha again. Whoever was responsible, he or she possessed a device Red Orc lacked. So that person must be destroyed even if Kickaha was also turned into a shower of fragments.
Despite his pain and violent shaking, Kickaha got up and limped to the door of his cell. The bars of the clone’s cell had been bent outward. The vagaries of the explosion had left a leg, severed at the upper part of the thigh, standing against the bars, a hand lying on the floor outside the bars, and what looked like a rib.
He pressed his shaking face against the bars and looked down the corridor. The scaly man was standing about twelve feet from the door of Kickaha’s cell, but he was moving his head vigorously up and down and to both sides. It was as if he was trying to move the scattered pieces of his brain back into their previous positions. Though he was clean of blood and gobbets, his bright gold-and-green scales were dulled by smoke.
Kickaha turned to look at Clifton. The man’s eyes were open, and his mouth was working. Kickaha still could not hear anything. He started to walk toward the Englishman but never made it. His senses faded.
When he awoke, he was lying on his back on a bed in a big room. Its ceiling and walls were huge screens displaying unfamiliar animals and many scaly men and women moving through exotic and brilliantly colored landscapes. All of his pains and the shaking were gone. As he sat up, he could hear the rustling of the sheets. He pushed away the covers to expose his legs. The smoke, blood, and flesh pieces had been washed off.
Near him, Eric Clifton lay on a similar bed under a glowing crazy quilt just like his own. Kickaha was noting that the room had no windows or doors when a section of the wall sank into the floor. The scaly man entered. For a moment, he turned his head. The profile was an unbroken arc from the back of his neck to just below his lower lip except for the small protrusion of the tip of his nose. The line described by his profile was like the somewhat flattened arc of a mortar shell. The insectile appearance was increased when he came straight on to Kickaha’s bed. But when he stopped in front of the bed and spoke, he seemed more human than insect. The tone of his voice and the look in his eyes seemed as if they were expressing concern.
“I don’t understand,” Kickaha said.
The scaly man lifted his hands and turned their palms upward. But if that gesture meant that he also did not know Kickaha’s speech, he certainly was not going to be frustrated.
During the next two months, Kickaha and Clifton spent at least four hours a
day teaching Thoan to him. Meanwhile, they lived in luxurious rooms a story above the hospital room and were served food, some of which was tasty and some of which repulsed them. They also exercised vigorously. And the scaly man had returned Clifton’s ring, now resized to fit the Englishman’s finger.
Their host’s name was Khruuz. His people had been called Khringdiz. He, the lone survivor, had never heard of Thokina, the name given his kind in Thoan legend. But Kickaha thought that the Lords had adapted Khringdiz to their own pronunciation.
They were deep underground below the “tomb”-itself very deep-to which Kickaha and Anana had gated. Khruuz did not know why they had been transported to his place of millennia-long rest. But when Kickaha told him that he had used the Horn of Shambarimen, a sonic skeleton key to all gates, Khruuz understood. He said that it was still an accident that they had gone through the gate there. What had happened was that the gate, like many closed-circuit gates, had a “revolving node.” Anywhere from ten to a hundred gates were continuously “whirled” in the node. The gatee might be passed through any one of them, his entrance being determined by which one he encountered when a gate became activated by an energized portion of the node. The Horn had been blown just as a “crack” or flaw opening to the tomb had come by in its rotation. The flaw was not a true gate, that is, it had not been made by a Lord, but existed in the fabric. But the Horn had made the difference.
“That means that Red Orc might know how to get into here,” Kickaha told Khruuz. “You used a series of gates to trap us and the Thoan’s clone. If he has detectors, and I think he does, he may get into here. Or he may send another clone, somebody anyway, with a bomb a thousand times more powerful than the one the clone carried. Of course, he can’t know just where the clone went or what happened after he got here.”
By then, Khruuz had heard everything that Kickaha knew about Red Orc. He had also been told as much of the history of the Thoan people as Kickaha knew. Khruuz spoke in his heavily accented and just barely understandable Thoan. His tongue-tendril now and then struck parts of his palate and formed sounds that were not in Thoan and probably only in his language.
“I have closed all the gates for the time being. That keeps anyone from coming in, but it also does not permit me to gather information from the outside.”
Khruuz had told Kickaha that parts of the outline of the legends about the Khringdiz were close to the truth. But the details were usually wrong. When the Thoan people had killed off all of the Khringdiz except for him, he had made this underground retreat. After being there for a while, he had stopped the molecular motion of his body and settled down for a very long “sleep.” The fuel to drive the machine for maintaining the chamber, to record the events on various parts of various universes, and to “awaken” him was nuclear power. When the fuel was almost gone, the machinery would bring him out of molecular stasis.
“By then,” Khruuz had said, “the probabilities that the situation would be considerably changed were high. The Lords might have died out. Their numbers were comparatively few at the time I went into stasis. And their descendants, if these existed after such a long time, might be different in culture and temperament. They could be much more tolerant and empathetic. Or some other sentient species, higher on an ethical level than the Lords, might have replaced the Thoan. In any event, whoever inhabited the universes might be willing to accept me, the last of the Khringdiz. If such was not the situation, I would have to deal with the evil as best I could.
“My fuel would have lasted for some time yet. But I had also set up the security system so that any intrusion into the chamber would awaken me. You entered, and I was brought out of stasis prematurely. But the process takes some time. It did not bring me out of stasis in time for me to speak to you. You got away because of the Horn. That, by the way, must contain machinery the design for which was stolen from my people. The Thoan did not have such technology.”
“What?” Kickaha had said. “The Horn was invented by the ancient Lord, Shambarimen!”
“This Shambarimen must have gotten the data from one of us, undoubtedly after he killed the Khringdiz who owned it. But instead of sharing it with his fellow Lords, he kept it secret. He incorporated it in the artifact that you called the Horn. That has to be what happened.”
“But there must have been other designs, or even the machinery itself!” Kickaha had said. “If the devices for opening gates or flaws were used by the Khringdiz, surely some would have fallen into Thoan hands!”
“No. They were few and well guarded. They gave us an advantage over the Thoan because we could enter their gates and flaws. But those of us who survived the initial onslaught were too few to use the openers effectively. At last, only I survived. However, those who did have the openers must have destroyed or hidden all the designs and the machines before they were hunted down and killed. You know the rest of the story.”
“So, Shambarimen lied about inventing the Horn,” Kickaha had said. “There goes another legend into the dust!”
Khruuz had shrugged his massive shoulders in a quite human gesture. He had said, “From what you tell me and from my experience since being awakened, it’s evident that the Lords are still here and that very few have changed.”
Kickaha had said, “You’d like to get revenge, wipe them out?”
The scaly man had hesitated, then had said, “I can’t deny that I would be happy if all my original enemies, the Lords who existed when we were being exterminated, were to be killed and I was the one who did it. But that is impossible. I must somehow make peace with them. If I cannot do that, then I am doomed.”
“Don’t feel hopeless,” Kickaha had said. “I am the enemy of almost all Lords because they tried to kill me first. They must be killed before there will be peace in all the universes. You and I would make wonderful allies. How about it?”
The scaly man had said, “I will do my best to help you. You have my word on that, and in the days when there were other Khringdiz, the word of Khruuz was enough.”
Kickaha had asked him if he knew how the Thoan came into being. Khruuz replied that his people would never have made beings so unlike themselves.
“Some questions have no answers,” Khruuz had said. “But our universe was not the only one. Somehow, the Thoan broke through the wall between our universes. Instead of treating us as if we were peaceful and nonviolent sentients, which we were, they behaved as if we were dangerous animals. We were treacherously attacked, and in the first blow, the Thoan wiped out more than three-quarters of us. We survivors were forced to become killers. The rest of the story you know.”
“And now?” Kickaha had said.
“When I opened a gate and connected it to a circuit, I had no way of knowing if the Thoan were still violent beings. So I decided to collect various specimens. You two were the first to be caught. I did not know that you were not Thoan but from a planet that did not even exist when I took refuge. The third was a Thoan. You know what happened then.”
“We can help you, and you can help us,” Kickaha had said. “Red Orc must be killed. In fact, all those Lords who would slay us must be killed. But first I have to get into Zazel’s World before Red Orc does.”
“He really intends to destroy all of the universes and then make his own?”
“He says he does. He’s capable of doing it.”
Khruuz rolled his eyes and spat, his tongue-tendril straight out from his mouth. At that moment, he looked serpentine. Kickaha told himself to quit comparing Khruuz to insects and reptiles. The Khringdiz was as human as any member of Homo sapiens and much more human than many of them. At least, he seemed to be so. He could be lying and so hiding his true feelings.
Man, I’ve tangled with too many Lords! he thought. I’m completely paranoiac. On the other hand, being so has saved my life more than once.
Khruuz had promised to study the data re gates, which his bank contained. He had set his machines to scan that section, to abstract significant data, and to print it out. That
took only two hours, but he had an enormous amount of data to read in the-to Kickaha-exotic alphabet of the Khringdiz.
“Most of this is what my people knew about gates,” the scaly man said. “But I assume that the Thoan made some advances in their use since I went into the long sleep. I was trying to get information on these when I had to close my gates. Unfortunately, Zazel must have made his Caverned World after that. However, we may yet find out something about his gate setup. Not until Red Orc is dealt with, though.”
“If we do that, we won’t have to worry about getting into Zazel’s World,” Kickaha said.
“Yes we will. Some other Lord might get the creation-destruction engine data. The data should be in safe hands or destroyed. Though it makes me shudder to think of doing that to scientific data, it is better than chancing that it might be stolen or taken by violence.”
Kickaha thought for a moment, then said, “At one time, every Lord must have had the engine. Otherwise, how could they have made their own private universes? What made them all disappear? Why don’t at least some of them now have the data for making the engines?”
“You’re asking the wrong person,” Khruuz said. “I was out of the stream of the living for thousands of years. There may be some Lords who have the engines or the designs for them, but they don’t know it. As for your first question, I think that every Lord who successfully invaded another’s universe destroyed his enemy’s creation-destruction engine. The successful invader would not want others who might invade during the owner’s absence to find one. And then another Lord would slay the previous invader. In time, very few engines would be left. But I really don’t know.”
Several weeks after this conversation, Khruuz summoned Kickaha and Clifton to a room they had never seen before. This was huge and had a domed ceiling. The ceiling and walls were black but strewn with tiny sparkling points and lines connecting them. They formed a very intricate web.