Then the word “blue” seemed to jump out and seize Ara. Of course! That was what Lillabeth’s dream had described. Blue fire would be most unusual, but not here in the Domain of the North. The archer Athlan had spoken of “swamp-fire,” and the overly clever Trogite Keselo had mentioned something he called “methane,” or “coal-gas.” He’d told his friends about a coal mine down in the Trogite Empire that had been on fire for seventy years and would probably continue to burn for several centuries. The notion of a blue fire that would burn forever cleared away Ara’s doubts and confusion. All she had to do now was to locate a deposit of what Keselo had called “coal.”
She released her awareness and sent it probing through the ridge-line that stood on both sides of the gorge. She encountered several extensive layers of coal, but they weren’t exactly where she wanted them.
She probed deeper and came to the one she wanted. It ran along the ridge and lay just below the floor of the upper end of the gorge. Better still, there were large pockets of that coal-gas Keselo had described. “Now we’re getting somewhere,” Ara murmured. She’d have to crack a few rocks to release the coal-gas, but that wouldn’t be much of a problem.
Then she stopped, and her awareness seemed to freeze inside the coal-bed. The prevailing wind in Crystal Gorge went up toward Dahlaine’s part of the Land of Dhrall, and sending perpetual fire in that direction could be disastrous. Fire was nice enough, Ara conceded, but only if it went in the right direction.
“I think I’ll have to work on this a bit,” she murmured to herself, rising back up through the hard stone and gleaming quartz.
She sent her memory back into the distant past, long before the Land of Dhrall had been separated from the rest of the world. At that time, this region had been covered by a dense forest of primeval trees that, in a certain sense, had been the grandparents of what Keselo had called “coal.” The region had been marshy, so the tree roots had not been firmly attached to the ground beneath them, and even a minor windstorm had uprooted them. She realized that those short-lived trees had been the ultimate source of what Keselo had called coal, and of the gas that was the source of the blue fire. That explained what had seemed to Ara to be a contradiction. Down at their core, swamps and mountains were not really unrelated.
The more Ara considered her scheme, the more she came to realize that success or failure would depend almost entirely on the direction of the wind—and its strength. There was a certain kind of windstorm that might just work out fine. The natives here in northern Dhrall called them “whirlwinds,” and Keselo had referred to them as “cyclones.” They were enormously powerful, and that made Ara quite dubious. A bit of experimentation seemed to be in order here.
She sent her awareness on up to the northernmost region of the Matakan Nation and started to play with the wind. It wasn’t easy, of course. Whirlwinds seemed to have minds of their own. After several tries, however, Ara came up with a way to steer the silly things. She would have to warn the outlanders, of course, but she knew exactly whom she should turn to when the time came.
Ara considered her options then. It seemed to her that the fire driven by the whirlwind should be enormous. First it would purge Crystal Gorge, that went without saying. There were all those secondary passes to the south of the gorge as well, though, and Ara wanted to clean those also. If she did this right, she could obliterate an entire hatch of the servants of the Vlagh in no more than half an hour. “That might persuade her to go play somewhere else,” Ara murmured.
There still seemed to be something missing, though. “I think that maybe I’ll need a second fire—somewhere near the southern mouth of the gorge. The Vlagh can be very stubborn sometimes, so I’d better make it clear that she’s not going to be able to come this way ever again.”
She sighed and began to probe the southern end of the gorge. It was getting just a bit easier, she was forced to admit. Coal had a distinct odor, and Ara had noticed that she could actually taste what Keselo had called “coal-gas.”
There was definitely a deposit of coal near the southern end of the gorge, and as Ara homed in on it, she suddenly burst out laughing. She was positive that it hadn’t been intentional, but Gunda’s fort lay right above the deposit. The fort itself was relatively impenetrable, but the fort bathed perpetually in blue fire would take “impenetrable” out to the far end.
“First things first, though,” she reminded herself, and she went in search of Longbow.
Night was descending on the Trogite breastworks to the north of the gorge, and when Ara touched Longbow’s mind, she found that he was already asleep.
“Don’t get excited, dear one,” she told him. “It’s only me.”
“Again?” Longbow’s thought replied. “Do you want us to run away some more?”
“Not really,” Ara replied. “Warn our friends that a windstorm’s coming, so they’d better take cover. Caves might be the best. The wind won’t be just a gentle breeze. You’d also better pull all of our friends off the rim of the gorge. The wind might be a bit hard to control, so the gorge rims—both east and west—could be dangerous. There’s also going to be fire down in the gorge, and it might spill over now and then.”
“You don’t sound too sure of yourself this time.”
“I’ve never done this before,” Ara admitted. “It should work the way we want it to, but let’s not take any chances. Go back to sleep, Longbow. I’ll take care of everything. I hope so, anyway.”
Then she drifted away. She still had one more important decision to make. Right at first it had seemed that Yaltar, who was really Vash the younger god, might be the most suitable Dreamer to unleash this upcoming disaster, but if it was going to be the whirlwind that would drive the blue fire down through Crystal Gorge to the Wasteland, weather would be far more important. Enalla, known now as Lillabeth, had already contributed much to this third war, but Enalla lacked a certain amount of subtlety, and she was a long way away. Since the whirlwind would be their main weapon this time, the Dreamer would almost have to be a girl, and that left Balacenia, of course. The more Ara thought about it, the more convinced she became that Balacenia—known to the humans as Eleria—would be the perfect Dreamer to permanently block all passes from the Wasteland to the Domain of Dahlaine of the North.
Ara reached out to Mount Shrak, where Zelana was minding the children, and gently touched Balacenia’s sleeping mind. “Sleep on, dear child,” Ara said, “but join your mind with mine that we may once again confront the servants of that called ‘the Vlagh.’”
“Well, it’s about time,” Balacenia replied. “Did you forget that I was here?”
“I never forget you, dear one,” Ara replied. “Yours is the finest mind of all the children—and of the old ones as well. Do you think that you could unleash a whirlwind?”
“I see no problem with that,” Balacenia said.
“Perhaps not in bringing it to life, dear one, but we need to send it down along a specific path.”
“I was fairly sure that’s what we would need. I might have to sit on it a bit to keep it from roaming up out of Crystal Gorge, but it will do what I want it to. What have you come up with to produce this ‘fire unlike any fire we have ever seen’ Enalla’s Dream mentioned?”
“It’s going to be blue, child.”
“‘Swamp-fire,’ you mean?”
“It goes just a bit further than swamps, dear,” Ara said. “The gas that comes out of rotting trees in swamps also lies under the ground in beds of coal. There’s a vast pocket of that inflammable gas in a coal-bed that lies under Crystal Gorge. We’ll want to shatter the rock plate that’s holding the gas in the coal-bed. That’s where the whirlwind comes in. Not only will it push the gas south toward the Wasteland, but whirlwinds create a great deal of lightning, so it’ll ignite that gas, and there’ll be a huge wave of blue fire rushing down toward the Wasteland.”
“You’re going to create another inland sea, I take it,” Balacenia said shrewdly. “The one in Veltan’s Domain
was water. The one up here will be fire. Their colors will match, though. Veltan will love that. He adores the color blue.”
“You’re not supposed to make these jumps ahead without letting me know, Balacenia,” Ara scolded her.
“A habit of mine, I suppose,” Balacenia confessed. “I’m very sorry, Mother. Can you ever forgive me?”
2
The weather had turned cold, and Sorgan Hook-Beak was very grateful for the bison-hide robe Chief Two-Hands had given him to ward off the chill. He squinted up at the bright blue sky just after sunrise. “At least it isn’t snowing yet,” he muttered. He’d been here in the Land of Dhrall for almost a year now, and he still remembered the deep snow that had been piled up on the village of Lattash when he’d arrived there with his fleet.
At least he’d been more or less in charge of things during that first war, but as more and more outlanders arrived here in the Land of Dhrall, he felt that he wasn’t really all that significant anymore.
That didn’t sit too well with him, for some reason.
He decided that he should probably go have a few words with his friend Narasan. There was yet another peculiarity about this part of the world. If someone had told him a few years ago that he would ever be friends with a Trogite, he was sure that he’d have laughed in the fool’s face. Narasan had been a little stuffy right at first, but as the two of them had come to know each other better, that stuffiness had faded away, and they now got along very well together.
“You’re up early, Sorgan,” the dark-haired Trogite noted as Sorgan joined him on the west side of the breastworks.
“Not really,” Sorgan disagreed. “The sun comes up later, that’s all. I’m having a bit of trouble with some of the things the bug-people did when they attacked your first breastwork. I was almost positive that the mud-pit would stop them dead in their tracks, but it didn’t seem to slow them down very much. Of course, the idea of their using their friends as building material to get across that pit never would have occurred to me.”
“That’s probably because we don’t think the way bugs do, Sorgan,” Narasan replied. “It startled me probably even more than it startled you. I’d say that there’s no such word as ‘friend’ in the language of the bugs. What they did sickened me right down to the core, but it was extremely practical. They needed to pile up something to build a road across that mud-pit, and since there wasn’t anything else nearby, they used their fellow bugs instead.”
“You’re probably right,” Sorgan conceded. “Do you think there’s any way at all for us to get back down to that fort we built near the bottom of the gorge?”
“I wouldn’t get my hopes up, Sorgan. Now that the bug-people have run us off once, they know exactly how to do it again.”
“Maybe the horse-soldiers could rush into those caves and put out the fires. That fort would have stopped the bugs right there if it hadn’t been for that cursed smoke.”
“I wouldn’t make any large wagers on that, my friend.”
“Your people have found a way to get the bug-people’s immediate attention, though. Those fire-missiles your men threw at them yesterday worked very well. When you set fire to anybody—or anything—he seems to forget all about whatever he’s supposed to be doing.”
“It worked out even better than we’d expected. The only problem is the fact that the bugs have fires of their own now. If we throw fire at them too often, they’ll probably steal our idea and start throwing fire at us.”
Sorgan squinted off toward the south. “I’m not really very useful here right now, Narasan,” he said. “Your people—and the horse-soldiers, of course—seem to have things under control. I think I might just drift on down along the rim of the gorge and see just how many of the bug-people are coming this way. That’s one of the things we really need to know.”
“You’re going to take up scouting as a hobby, Sorgan?” Narasan asked with a faint smile.
“I need something to do, Narasan,” Sorgan declared. “I feel so useless just sitting here watching my friends fight this war.”
“It’s not really such a bad idea, Sorgan,” Narasan replied thoughtfully. “You’ve got a steady mind, and younger scouts tend to get excited, and they exaggerate things. Older soldiers are much more dependable. Why don’t you take Padan along? He’s got a good mind, and you two seem to get along quite well.”
“Iff’n that’s the way you want ’er, we’ll do ’er that way,” Sorgan said, grinning at his friend.
“Clown,” Narasan accused.
And then they both laughed.
It seemed to Sorgan that it might not be a bad idea to take another friend or two along on the expedition down the rim of the gorge. The bug-people were very unpredictable sometimes, and there was no real reason to limit their party to just two men. Longbow would have been his first choice, of course, but Longbow seemed to be everybody’s first choice, so Sorgan went in search of relatives instead.
Skell seemed to be in a bad humor, however. The abandonment of the fort at the bottom of the gorge had really irritated Sorgan’s cousin.
“We spend weeks and weeks building that fort, and then the bug-people drive us out in less than a day. We aren’t getting paid enough for this silly war, cousin. If things don’t start getting better, I think I’ll just pack up and go on back home.”
“We took the gold, Skell,” Sorgan reminded his cousin. “We’re pretty much obliged to stay here now.”
“Just exactly what do you expect to see down in that gorge, cousin?” Torl asked.
“I’m not sure,” Sorgan admitted. “That’s why I think it might be a good idea to go have a look. The bug-people are full of surprises, and getting surprised during a war is the best way I know of to end up dead.”
“He makes a lot of sense, big brother,” Torl said to Skell. “Why don’t you stay here and try to get over your grouchies. I’ll go along with cousin Sorgan and see if I can keep him out of trouble.”
“Thanks a lot, Torl,” Sorgan said in a flat, unfriendly tone.
“Family responsibility, cousin,” Torl said, shrugging. “Who else will be coming along? If that warrior woman will be one of the party, I might just change my mind, though. She gives me a lot of creepies, for some reason—probably because she never learned how to laugh.”
“Do you get along with Padan at all?” Sorgan asked.
“Very well,” Torl said. “Padan can be almost as funny as I am.”
“We’re not going down there to laugh, Torl.”
“I’ll try to keep it under control. Let’s go find Padan and get started.”
Padan was waiting for them near the third breastwork up the hill—the one where Narasan’s men had doused the charging bug-men with fire. “Narasan told me to join up with you on your scouting expedition down the rim of the gorge, Captain Hook-Beak,” he said. “What are we supposed to be looking for?”
“If I knew that, we wouldn’t have to go,” Sorgan replied. “Those fires your men splashed all over the bug-men worked out very well.”
“I sort of liked it myself,” Padan replied. “I just wish that somebody could come up with a way to throw fire at our enemies without using those cumbersome catty-pults.”
“Catty-pults?”
“There was a sergeant back when we were only boys in the fort in Kaldacin,” Padan explained. “For some reason, he just couldn’t pronounce ‘catapult.’ Every time he said it, it came out ‘catty-pult.’ I’ve got a sort of a hunch that the first time he ever heard the word, ‘catty’ was right there at the beginning.”
Torl laughed. “I did that to a fisherman one time. I deliberately mispronounced the names of certain kinds of fish, and after that he’d talk for hours about ‘habilets’ and ‘clodfish.’ It drove the other fishermen crazy, but he just couldn’t help himself. Just exactly what do you think we should be looking for down in the gorge, cousin?”
“Numbers, for the most part,” Sorgan replied, “but I think that what we really need to know is whether or no
t the bug-people have picked up bows and arrows, and whether they know how to use them or not. We definitely don’t want to come up against bug-men who can shoot arrows at us.”
“Let’s get started, then,” Padan suggested. “If there are any bug-archers charging up the gorge, we’d better come up with some way to kill them off before they get up here. Things are likely to fall apart on us if the bug-people start showering us with arrows.”
They climbed up the steep slope to the west side of the Trogite breastworks and then went on down to the little brook that crossed the mouth of Crystal Gorge. Sorgan tried his very best not to think about how long it must have taken for a stream that small to eat its way down through solid rock to form its current bed. Sorgan knew exactly what the word “hundred” meant, but when numbers wandered off toward “thousand”—or even “million”—and the people who used those terms were talking about years, Sorgan’s mind shied back in horror.
The sun was all the way up now and the shadows back under the stunted mountain trees had that bluish cast to them that always seemed to come out in the early morning up in the mountains. Sorgan rather grudgingly admitted that mountain country could be very beautiful—not as beautiful as the sea, of course, but not really all that bad.
They followed the little brook on upstream until they reached the steep slope that led up to the rim of Crystal Gorge. “You missed a lot of fun up here, cousin,” Torl said. “You should have come along when we helped Keselo fill the mouth of the gorge with chunks of that pink quartz. If I understood what he told us right, there are a lot of cracks and fissures in that quartz. A good healthy sneeze is all it takes to break the quartz loose, and it tumbles on down to the bottom of the gorge. I had a good solid iron pry-bar, and I broke loose about a half acre of quartz in one afternoon.”
“That’s Keselo for you,” Padan declared. “He can come up with the most exotic things I’ve ever seen or heard of every time he blinks his eyes.”