For his part, Gallen took Maggie up an ancient stair, and on his back he carried firewood and some blankets. There, at the peak of the mountain, the memories newly downloaded in his head told him an ancient race with powerful vision had once built a tower to keep watch over the valleys below.
Indeed, he found the tower as legend said, though it was but a small, cylindrical shack carved from stone, stuck between a crevice in the rocks. Still, it contained two large beds carved into stone, and a dome-shaped fire chamber with a tiny chimney. Gallen built a good fire, and soon the room was surprisingly warm.
And there by the fire, wrapped in blankets, he made love to his wife and lay with her, holding her tenderly long after she fell asleep.
Once, just before she closed her eyes, she asked, “When the Inhuman finished downloading, and you came back to the stable at the inn, how long did it take you to decide to stay with us?”
“I decided when I saw how you feared me,” he whispered honestly. “Until then I was unsure who I would keep allegiance with. But I could not stand to see you fear me.”
“Oh,” Maggie whispered, and she fell asleep, never guessing what a truly difficult decision that had been for him to make. At times, the sea of voices, the memories, still threatened to overwhelm him. But always there seemed to be one bright comer in his mind where he could retreat, and in that place his memories were clear, and he could recall what the dronon had done on his home world and on other worlds, and in this way he could bear witness against it.
And somehow, that helped. One by one, the voices in his head were going silent, like candle flames snuffed out under his finger. Over the past few days, his thoughts had begun to clear.
And yet he was afraid that somehow he would slip back into that dark place in his mind. He feared it, and he needed Maggie to help him remain strong.
So Gallen lay and thought for a long time, recalling the dronon’s atrocities, planning for the days ahead. He still had the Harvester to contend with, and if he guessed right, it was an ancient killing machine. So he let his mantle read out the files on its weaponry and defense systems.
Afterward, in the cold night, he wrapped his black robes around him, and took his mantle, and went out under the stars. It was bitter cold, and he softly spoke to his robe, asking it to reflect all heat back to his body.
He climbed to the top of the small tower, and there he sat upon a simple stone dais. And if anyone had seen him there, wrapped in dark robes, gazing out over the land, they would have thought him only to be an image carved in stone, so little did he move, for he closed his eyes and let his mantle gaze for him.
The sky was clear of clouds below him, and for a long while he sat, letting his sensors pick up sights and feed the magnified images to his mind. Letting the mantle scan radio frequencies, so that he could listen to the Inhuman’s distant communications.
What he saw and heard disturbed him. Down in the Nigangi Pass, only forty kilometers to the west, three hive cities scoured the land, calling to one another, searching for him, and all along the valley floor he could see the scouts, flapping on swift wings as they fluttered from ruins, to cave, to crowded inn.
To the south, in the deserts of Moree, he spotted seventeen more of the hive cities, crawling like great spiders across the land, heading north to war through the desert. He could see the glowing lights of their plasma engines, red in the night, and could see tiny figures of men running about the upper war decks.
He’d never imagined that the dronon had left such fearsome arsenals.
Yet far more disturbing than either of these were the armies. The whole south of Babel must have been coming northward, for warriors swarmed across the desert. He could see great armed encampments of giants in blood red robes, sleeping in the open beside huge bonfires. And beyond that were tent cities of the blue-skinned Adare warriors, numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Vast armies of Tekkar marched through the night, running northward in their fluid gait, all swathed in black robes. And all of them were heading to the north and east, out to ports where they could cross the seas.
And their movements were stirring things up in the wilds. Twelve kilometers below, at the foot of the mountain, tribes of wild giant Derrits had gathered, apparently to defend themselves from the sudden encroachments of others. The giant Derrits were said to be solitary creatures, seldom traveling in more than small family groups. But Gallen spotted at least a hundred of the creatures in one great war band.
And down a curve of the mountain trail, a glowing figure walked. Gallen watched it, a scout with wings folded, scurrying up the road in small lunges, stopping every few meters to sniff. Indeed, as it studied the fresh wagon tracks, it seemed both hopeful and apprehensive. Gallen wondered why the creature had not spotted him-it was only six kilometers down the road until he recalled that he’d asked his robe to reflect all of his body heat inward. Obviously, it cut down his infrared signature to the point that the scout could not detect him.
But most disturbing of all to Gallen was the great city of Moree, eight hundred kilometers distant. At such a great span, his mantle could make out little. Water vapors in the air, oxygen itself, formed a barrier.
Yet the images his mantle accumulated showed him one thing-five huge silver domes spread out equidistantly around the city. Gallen had seen such domes before, when he was on Fale, and so he recognized them.
The Inhuman was building starships.
Gallen sighed, and slipped from the tower, heading down to kill the scout.
* * *
Chapter 25
“I don’t like it,” Ceravanne said the next morning, in the great hall.
“The Tower Road is our best chance,” Gallen urged, standing over the corpse of a dead scout. “The servants of the Inhuman have little knowledge of it. I remember it as a dark and dangerous track, a place of terror-one I would not willingly brave again. I was lost in the tunnels under the city of Indallian once, for many days-and so I think that the servants of the Inhuman will avoid the place. But you, Ceravanne, must have used the road. You were the queen of this land.”
“That was five hundred years ago,” Ceravanne said. “Even then, the road through the Hollow Hills was a maze. Few dared the tunnels without guides. And now, who knows what might live there? Derrits at the least would lurk in those caves, but many another folk are accustomed to the dark. What if the Tekkar have established an outpost? And even when the road lies aboveground, one must beware of wingmen. They’ve a strong taste for blood.”
“Yet the valleys of Moree are awash with the armies of the Inhuman,” Gallen said. “The word has gone out that a Lord Protector seeks Moree. Scouts by the hundreds are scouring the land for us, and by our poor chance, great armies are moving through the night. We cannot go over the open roads. Already, one scout has found our wagon tracks. We must get through to Moree.”
“And you think that it is better to face a hidden danger than a known one?”
“When the known danger is overwhelming, yes,” Gallen said.
“I don’t understand,” Orick said. “What are you two arguing about?” Gallen had done a bit of scouting last night, and had decided to use an old trail, the Tower Road, to get closer to Moree. The rest of the group was willing to follow him blindly, but Ceravanne had blown up at the news.
She said, “The Tower Road is an old road that united Ophat with the underground city of Indallian, which lies west of here, under the Hollow Hills. From there, the road leads farther west, through the Telgood Mountains to the very edge of Moree itself.”
“I don’t understand,” Orick said. “I thought we were already in Indallian. Is Indallian a city, or a country?”
“Both,” Ceravanne said. “Long ago, there were many city-states in this part of the world, so the name of the Capitol was often the same as that of a country. We are already within the ancient borders of the land of Indallian, now Gallen wants to go through the city, under the Hollow Hills. But as Fenorah warned, the city is a perilous place, and has been for centuries. None go there nowadays.”