“So he too will come here, our foe will, or at least near to here. In fact, I have news. He is coming. I just came from the instrument room. Two of the new Vocoders registered by the Blue Circle are moving this way across the sea. We have established that the Blue Brothers gave out four! Three to shipmen in this area, men we know well, led by Bald Roke. And one, mark you, to a Glith! The Glith was along to keep Roke under control if necessary.”
“And now?” The first harsh voice was eager.
“Two of the instruments are gone, destroyed, at a guess. Two are turned off, but, of course, still registering on our screens. I would hazard the four original owners, the Glith included, are now dead and that the enemy, unwitting, has pocketed the two remaining instruments, perhaps for study. A guess, but I think rather a good one.” There was a pause.
“Now, I believe, we can start to summon some of our own forces. The Yellow Brothers at least will not fail the cause!”
There was silence again as the two dark shapes, their hoods drawn in the moonlight, stared out over the old town. The stone parapet on which they leaned had long ago encircled the belfry of an ancient church, but the tall tower now housed only nightmare evil.
Far off in the east, a faint light gave promise of coming dawn. The figures turned and vanished from the tower.
“We will have to trust to our wits, at least as much as any Unclean chart, Hiero.” Brother Aldo’s long, dark forefinger pointed to a line on the map spread out before them. “For one thing,” he went on, “we can’t read all of it.”
The bear drowsed in a corner of the little cabin’s heaving deck, the flickering lantern light making him look larger than he was. At the round table, its base clamped to the deck, sat the Metz, Brother Aldo, Luchare, and Captain Gimp, all trying to interpret the secrets of the strange map.
“We Eleveners have learned to read some of their symbols, over the years, that is,” Brother Aldo went on. “But things such as these maps have seldom fallen into our hands in my lifetime, which is not a short one. This must be a precious chance.
“See here!” His finger traced a thin, crooked line from the Inland Sea which inclined roughly southeast by east. “This is a trail I have not used in many seasons. It lies to the north of the track over which you were brought, princess. That particular one is the major route between the Lantik coast and this sea of fresh water on which we now ride. It goes to Neeyana, here. “His finger indicated a circle.
“Now, as you felt in your bones, child, Neeyana is wholly given over to evil. This mark I know well, an enemy mark, unchanged for hundreds of years. It means ‘ours’ and, see here, it overlies the whole city. Still, trade, some of it quite innocent, passes through. The Unclean suffer it, taxing it not too heavily, but gathering a good deal of information and also using the traders as a cover for their own agents and schemes.
“Well, so do we! And I would wager we generally know more of their plans than they do of ours.
“But I wonder.” Again his gnarled finger traced the narrower line of the northern trail. “This goes through the forest, and Hiero, my friend, you have never seen our southern trees! Look here, now, look, a patch of another circle. Blue it is. Without trying to figure out the enemy color chart, I can tell you what that means. A desert, and deadly one, for it was caused by the radiation of The Death. These blighted deserts and similar strange, radioactive spots are generally shrinking, but they still exist, and a few even spread, so long was the life of the deadly cobalt bombs, and the stranger life they engendered. Hence the blue. For on our own maps these places are colored blue also, ‘cobalt’ being an ancient pre-Death word for that color.
“So, Hiero, the large Dead City you seek seems to lie near to that waste, or on its northern edge. In the distance are other Lost Cities, but much further on to the east. Still, I would feel better if I could see the map the Abbey rulers gave you. If you will trust me.”
There was a brief silence. The lantern creaked at the end of its short chain. No one spoke.
“Surely you trust the good Brother, Master Hiero?” Captain Gimp burst out. He banged his fist on the table. “Why, he’s saved all our lives a dozen times over in the past, and yours twice I knows of!”
Hiero laughed, his swarthy, hawk face clearing on the instant. “Sorry, Brother Aldo. You’re quite right, Gimp. I apologize. But Abbot Demero laid it upon me to keep this secret. My mission, I mean, or at least its ultimate goal. I find it hard to trust anyone at all. The Unclean have so damned many disguises!
“Still, if I can’t tell my real friends by now, I’d better give up! And I mean you too, Captain! Here’s the map, then. What do you think, Brother?”
“Ah!” For a minute or so, the curly white beard almost touched the surface of the Abbey map as the old man pored over it. Then he straightened and looked at the others, dark eyes glowing, the whites like new ivory.
“I thought so. This is a very old map, Hiero, or rather a new copy of an old map. There are things on here I did not know still to exist and others which I know for a fact not to exist at all, at least for many centuries.”
“In other words,” the priest said, “a quite unreliable guide?”
“Yes and no. Alone, with no other aids, definitely yes. But with me and with the Unclean’s own set of maps, perhaps not. For, as I said, there are things on here, on your map, which are now covered by ancient forest and evil waste and yet which could perhaps now be found again.”
They pondered this for a while as the even rhythm of the Foam Girl never changed, rocking up and down, up and down, as she rode the long swells running to the south. Above their heads, the lantern smoked and swayed in tune with the shifting motion. It was two days after their battle with the pirates.
A discussion of routes continued. Hiero had still not mentioned what he ultimately sought and he had no intention of doing so. The fewer people who knew, the better, even if utterly trustworthy. He could always kill himself if trapped, in which case the enemy would still be left uncertain as to his true goal. He knew more strongly, as each league rolled under Foam Girl’s keel, that the Unclean would lay a nation in ashes to gain one of the ancient computers. With such a device, they would be literally invulnerable.
He saw that Brother Aldo was looking at him expectantly and brought his attention back with a start.
“Sorry, I missed that last remark.”
“Well, Gimp knows of no harbor, at least none inhabited, on that coast where the northern trail comes down. He says it’s untouched forest right down to the edge of the sea. But we’d better try and find that trailhead all the same. Even overgrown, I feel it is our best chance, and it heads straight to that desert. And one thing about the great woods is that there we will be on my ground. The Unclean do haunt the forests at times, but even with their beast and Leemute allies, they do not know them, not as we do. And, Hiero, you are a woods ranger too, even if only of the smaller woods of the Taig, which we southerners know to be stunted and shriveled.” His laughing eyes made the others smile at the jest.
“All right,” Hiero said, folding the maps and stowing them away. “How far from Neeyana is that trail end, do you think?”
“If that map, or rather all them maps, are right, not much more’n fifty miles up the coast,” Gimp said. His small eyes stared beadily at them. “There’s sometimes a few savages in the woods around there, mostly a wee kind of red dwarf man with poisoned arrows, that like to shoot at ships when we come in for wood or fruit. I’ll do my best to get you in to where that line there ends, but how you’ll find it in them trees is beyond me. And the animals! Whew!”