“Is there, as well, the one secreted away, the other watching everything, controlling what happens aboveground as well as below. Walker tells me this in his images, in my visions and dreams, but in my subconscious, as well. He doesn’t tell me everything, because he does not feel safe doing so. But he tells me what he can, what he must. He is in trouble, and he clings to me as he might a broken spar on a shipwrecked sea. He is adrift and lost, and I am his lifeline back.”
She waited for his response. He did not have one to give. He wasn’t sure if he believed it all or not. She might be confused, misled, or delusional from the events of yesterday afternoon. She seemed lucid and assured, but you couldn’t always tell another person’s state of mind from the way they looked and sounded.
“Is he asking you to come to him?” he said finally.
Suddenly she seemed confused, as if the question had presented a new dilemma for her. “No,” she replied after a moment. “He clings to me without revealing I am here. It is a reaching that asks nothing of me.” Tears filled her eyes and ran down her cheeks. “But I will go to him anyway. I will because I must. There is no one else, no one left but me. And you, if you will go with me.”
He would do no such thing, Ahren thought, certain that it was suicide to go back into the maze under any circumstances. He was filled with dread at the prospect and riddled with fear by his memories of that encounter. He couldn’t help himself. He was still fighting to come to terms with his failure to fight, his abandonment of his friends, and the shame he felt as a result of both. But even his growing desire to redeem himself was not enough to make him go back into that maze. The best he could do for Ryer Ord Star was to convince her she was making a mistake.
“How will you get into that tower?” he asked, looking for a way to reach her.
She shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“If you do get in, how will you find Walker? If he isn’t summoning you, isn’t calling to you, how will you track him?”
“I don’t know.”
“This whole city, ruins and all, is made of stone and metal. There are no tracks to follow. Look at the size of it. If it’s only half this big underground, it will take weeks, maybe even months, to search it all. How are you going to know where to look?”
She was crestfallen, but her lips tightened with resolve. “I don’t know any of this, Elven Prince. I only know I have to try. I have to go to him.”
He felt helpless in the face of her blind determination to go forward, to do what she had set her mind to do no matter the obstacles and complications. He felt as if he was crushing her hopes without persuading her to give them up, so that when all was said and done, she would go anyway, but he would have stripped her of her spirit.
He sat back on the rubble and peered out into the ruined city. It stretched away in the sunlight, vast and broken, its history lost deep in the past with the dead civilization that had occupied it. It was a relic of the Old World, of that time before the Great Wars when science ruled and all of the Races were one. He wondered if any of those who had lived then had foreseen this end to things. He wondered if they had tried to do anything to prevent it.
“Maybe we could find some of the others to help us,” he said finally, feeling doomed and trapped, but unable to bring himself to abandon her.
She shook her head. “No, Ahren. There is only you and me.”
It was the first time she had used his name, and he was surprised at the depth of feeling it aroused in him. It was as if she knew just how to say it—as if by saying it, she was linking them in the same way that she was linked to Walker.
It drew him to her and at the same time it made him afraid.
“I can’t go with you,” he said quickly, shaking his head for emphasis because he thought his voice was shaking.
She did not reply, simply sat there looking at him. He couldn’t bring himself to meet her gaze, but kept his eyes directed out at the city, at the miles of rubble and debris, at that mirror of the wasteland he was feeling inside.
“My brother knew what he was doing by sending me on this voyage,” he said to the empty landscape, at the same time trying to make the girl understand. “He knew I was weak, not strong enough to survive—”
“Your brother was wrong,” she interrupted quickly.
He turned and stared at her, surprised at the vehemence in her voice. “My brother—”
“Your brother was wrong,” she repeated. “About this voyage. About Walker. But especially about you.”
He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, feeling a shift in his thinking that was impossible to reconcile with common sense but equally impossible to ignore. Could he do what she was asking of him? Could he possibly find the resolve that seemed to come so easily to her? It was madness of the sort that he could not quite manage to dismiss. Something deep inside was responding to her need, and it made him disregard all other considerations.
Even so, what could he do that would make a difference? “I don’t think I can protect you, Ryer Ord Star,” he whispered.
Then a distant sound caught his attention, one so tiny and insignificant he almost missed hearing it. He froze momentarily, afraid of what it might be. The seer watched him, waiting. Finally he rose to peer from their hiding place into the ruins. She was beside him at once, pressing close.
The sound had come from the maze. Dozens of tiny metal creatures skittered and wheeled their way through its intricate system of walls, none of them more than perhaps two feet high. There were several different kinds, each clearly built to perform a specific task. Some hauled away the bodies of the dead Mwellrets, gripping them with pincers at the end of stubby arms and dragging them across the smooth metal floor, where they dropped them down chutes that opened briefly and then sealed again. Some used a torch mechanism attached to their bodies to repair the rents caused by the fire threads in the metal surface of the maze. Some swept and polished and otherwise cleaned away all traces of the one-sided battle, restoring the maze so that it looked as if nothing had ever happened there.
It took them less than an hour to complete their work, speeding about like mice in a cage, sunlight gleaming off their metal shells, the sounds of clicking and whirring and buzzing barely audible in the stillness surrounding them. When they were finished, they wheeled into lines and disappeared down rampways that opened to admit them in the same fashion as the chutes that had swallowed the Mwellrets. In seconds, they were gone.
Ahren looked at Ryer Ord Star. A surge of relief swept through him. He felt giddy. “Sweepers,” he said, gesturing toward the tiny machines, the word popping into his mind all at once, causing him to smile in spite of himself.
She did not smile back. Instead, she pointed to something just behind him. His heart lurched as he followed her gaze and found one of the newly named sweepers parked not three feet away.
The sweeper wasn’t doing anything. It was just sitting, a squat, cylindrical body on a set of multiple rollers. Its round head might have been the top half of a metal ball resting on a set of heavy springs. Thin, short probes stuck out from the head in various places and directions, and a pair of fat knobs stuck out of its body on opposite sides, each about the size of a fist.
Ahren had no idea how it had gotten so close without them hearing it. Nor did he care. What mattered was what it was doing there. It didn’t appear to have any weapons, but he was not about to discount the possibility.
Neither Ryer Ord Star nor he said anything for a moment. They stared at the sweeper and waited for it to do something. The sweeper, to the extent that it was capable of doing so, stared back.
Then all of a sudden a hatch on its head popped open and a beam of light shot out, freezing an image in the air about two feet away from them. The image wasn’t very big, but it was quite clear. It was of Walker.