Black eyes snapping with anger, Hiero was now sitting upright, glaring at his friend and mentor, any pretense of being bored gone forever. “So that’s what you think of me, is it?” he grated. “A sort of chartered ne’er-do-well and good fellow. That’s not fair, Most Reverend Father, and you know it!”
Abbot Demero simply sat looking at him, his wise eyes sympathetic, but not yielding, and Hiero felt his anger ebb away. There was truth, a good deal of it, in the charges, and being an essentially honest man, he could not deny it.
“I apologize for anger and impudence, Father Abbot,” he said heavily. “I suppose I’m not really much of a priest, or a soldier either, for that matter. What can I do for the Council?”
“A good question, Hiero,” the Abbot said briskly, “but not really the one I wanted, because it comes last, or ought to, and I want more thoughts from you first. Look now, my friend, what are your conclusions about what I have told you? I mean strengths, weaknesses, reliability, for that matter, plausibility, and above all—solutions, remedies. Let’s hear your own ideas now.”
“Well,” Hiero said slowly, “one thing hit me from the very first, and it grew as the tragedies you related mounted. There has to be treason, at least one highly placed traitor somewhere in the Republic and probably more. I don’t like saying this, but I have to, to be honest. What about the Council itself?”
“Good,” the abbot said. “You’re still able to think. Yes, there’s treason, and it’s being carefully, very carefully, searched out as we sit here. As for my peers, and your superiors, on the Council, you have no business knowing what steps might be taken if we ever should suspect a traitor in such an unlikely place. Therefore I shall tell you nothing about any such possible theoretical procedures.”
Two smiles met across the table. The old abbot had refused information and (literally) told Hiero nothing. As well as everything, including the fact that the Abbey Council itself was nonimmune from suspicion.
“I can’t argue against a conspiracy,” Hiero resumed. “We are definitely getting a series of blows, savage ones, from someone. And what you tell me is the final word. It must be coordinated. Since we are meeting here at a sealed office and talking, at your insistence, you must be worried about some sort of betrayal even here. If our minds concentrate on a subject, even if we speak aloud, there are currents set up audible to an adept, especially one such as you describe. What are you doing to keep this from happening?” He folded his arms on his chest and stared at the abbot in turn.
“This,” the abbot said simply. While they had been talking, the younger man had not noticed a plain wooden box, perhaps eighteen inches high, at one end of the table. The abbot lifted its lid and exposed a curious mechanism, a small, flat pendulum of some polished, ivorylike material, suspended motionless from a delicate wooden crossbar. Close on either side of the pendulum, two oval discs hung from the slender supports.
“There is a core of a very curious substance, something out of the Lost Years, which I’ll tell you about someday, in that pendulum. If any thought, power, or what have you had come upon us, I think there is a ninety-eight percent chance that tiny weight would have rung against a side support piece. We’ve been testing it for two years, and it hasn’t failed yet. In fact, it or a duplicate is what trapped the two spies at Abbey Central. Needless to say, very few of us know about it.”
“I see,” Hiero said, eyeing the little signal device. “Very reassuring. Let’s hope it works, sir. Now, you wanted more thoughts, I believe. I only have one. There must be a plan, something to reverse this steady constriction you fear, and I’m to be part of it. It must need a younger man than yourself, and so some physical hazard is involved. Perhaps a journey, a probe into some guessed-at area held, or thought to be held, by the enemy? A reconnaissance of some sort? Beyond that, I’m in the dark.”
“Think a little harder,” Abbot Demero suggested.
“All right,” Hiero said. “A weapon, or weapons, exist somewhere. As a result, one extraordinarily gallant man may barely manage to penetrate the Unclean enemy lines, relying on cunning, stealth, and sheer heroism, where a whole army could not get through. Frankly,” he added, “I’m getting a bit tired of the mystery. Beyond the sarcasm I just gave you, I really have no suggestions and I hardly think a children’s romance of the lone paladin against overpowering odds is what you’re after. Come on, Father Abbot,” he said impatiently, “what on earth are you after anyway?”
The Abbot looked a little nonplussed before he spoke, which in turn gave Hiero a bit of a start.
“Damnation, Hiero, you must operate on a level we can’t tap! You see, that happens to be exactly what I want. You and a few other highly trained men are something of a secret weapon. We want you to go and try to raid some of the Lost Cities in the far South, in the hope, which I confess to be dim, that you will indeed give us some secret of the past before the Unclean overwhelm us.”
Despite himself, the younger priest was instantly fascinated. He had been as far east as Otwah and into many wild areas of the North, but the far South was a closed book to almost everyone. For every mutated plant or animal in the northern part of the Kandan continent, there were a dozen in the South. There were rumored to be monsters so awful that a herd of morse would be but a mouthful to one of them, and trees so huge that it would take a man half a day to walk around the bole of one. Most of these tales could no doubt be relegated to fancy, rumor, and trappers’ lies, but Hiero knew enough to know there was a grain of truth in many of them. He himself had been just far enough to see the southern end of the Taig and its countless pines and the beginning of the monster trees of the southern forest edge, which had few conifers, but many deciduous trees of far greater size. The lost empire of the once fabled United States had lain there, and every school child knew that The Death had hit it harder than anywhere else in the world, causing horrible changes to all life, such as had barely touched northern Kanda. Endless marshes, inland seas, and vast tracts of poisoned desert, the latter lit by the undying, blue, bale fires of the Dead Zones, were said to exist in the unknown area. And the Lost Cities themselves, the very places he was to go, they were the worst of all! Metz children were frightened into obedience with tales of the towering, vine-hung cliffs of the ancient, tottering buildings, even a glimpse of which was said to bring a horrid end. There were Lost Cities in the north country too, but most had long been either isolated or explored, that is, if known at all. And on them, in any case, the terrors of The Death had been laid lightly. Daring rovers and free rangers occasionally risked the anger of the Abbeys, political, not religious, and explored to the South, but few departed thus and fewer returned. All this flashed through Hiero’s brain on the instant, as he looked into Demero’s wise old eyes.