A distant, muffled roar filled the air. Slowly the heaving of the troubled earth died away. A ringing in their ears also ceased. They raised their heads and looked at one another. Hiero was the first to grin, his white teeth flashing in a countenance so dirty it looked like pure mud. Then Aldo laughed, a deep-throated, ringing sound. Hard on his heels a bird began to sing nearby, tentatively at first, then bursting into its full series of rippling cadences.
Luchare kissed Hiero. When she pulled her lips away, she murmured drowsily, for she was almost asleep from sheer exhaustion, “What was that?”
“That,” Brother Aldo answered as he helped them both up, “was the button marked ‘self-destruct’ on the central control board. Right, my boy?”
“Yes. I gave it four hours. What a race of men! After five thousand years their death still works! At least the Unclean got nothing from them. Nothing but destruction. The House too. And yet—if it hadn’t held them, I couldn’t have done it.”
They looked north in silence. Where there once had been a wide, level plain, a vast, shallow bowl had now appeared, its sides and rim of raw tumbled earth and chunks of riven rock. The low trees and scrubby bushes had vanished, lost in the rubble caused by the great explosion.
“We’d better move,” the priest said. “Klootz and the men are apt to be way up north by now, and we need to push on as soon as possible.”
“Your road should be easier henceforward,” Aldo said, the sun highlighting the gray in his once snowy mane and beard.
“I hope so,” Hiero said wearily. “But I still haven’t found a computer. And this army of theirs wasn’t a real percentage of what the Unclean could put into the field if they wanted to.
“Besides,” he added, “S’duna’s not dead. I would have known somehow if he’d been down there. He wasn’t. We have an appointment to keep somewhere, he and I.”
“You may not have found a computer,” the old man said, “but look what Luchare is carrying. She found a stack of these things on an apparently abandoned desk. Possibly someone’s study area. I could read the title. Try it yourself.”
Half-numb from what he had been through, Hiero scanned the title of the small, flat book which Luchare had handed him with one finger. “Principles of a Basic Computer,” he read in halting English, the lost language. Inside were plastic page after plastic page of diagrams and close-printed text. He could say nothing and felt choked. Here was how a computer could be built, perhaps by anyone! The other two smiled at the look on his dirty, sweat-streaked face.
“Look,” Aldo said, using his finger in turn, “it says, ‘Volume I.’ Luchare found a stack of them. And she has the other two, Volumes II and III, as well. She called me over and I read off the titles. But I think she knew, somehow, even without me!”
Wordless, Hiero pulled Luchare’s arm around his waist, and the three humans and the bear began to retrace their steps, moving north like cripples over the barren and shattered landscape. Gorm tried to have the last word, or rather, thought.
No one ought to move so fast, he grumbled. From now on, let’s try to move at a calmer speed.
The world moves at a certain speed, Aldo answered, after a bit. We all must learn to move with it.
GLOSSARY
Abbeys, the: Theocratic structure of the Kandan Confederacy, comprising the Metz republic in the west and the Otwah League in the east. Each Abbey has a military-political infrastructure, and the Abbey Council functions much as the House of Lords in eighteenth-century England, with all science and religion also as its prerogatives.
Batwah: Trade Lingua franca; an artificial language used throughout the areas bordering the Inland Sea, and well beyond in some places.
Buffer: Giant bovines, probably mutated bison, which migrate in vast herds through the western Kandan regions on an annual basis.
Chespek: Small kingdom on the Lantik Sea, often allied to D’alwah and equally often at war with its immediate neighbor.
Children of the Night Wind: An intelligent, bipedal species of mutated, man-sized feline; runners of unbelievable speed. Bred by the Unclean for warfare, they managed to escape their masters and establish themselves in a far country. Proud and volatile, they are in no sense Leemutes.
Circles: Administrative areas, named by color, of the Unclean and its Masters of the Dark Brotherhood. Hiero passed through three, the Red, Blue, and Yellow, as he went south and east. Until his journey, their existence was unknown.
D’alwah: Largest and most developed of the east coast states on the Lantik Sea. A kingdom, organized as a benevolent despotism, but where commoners have few rights. A debased branch of the Universal Church exists.
Dam People: Aquatic rodents of human intelligence and more than human bulk, who live on artificial lakes in the Metz Republic, under terms of mutual toleration; probably mutated beaver.
Dark Brotherhood: Their own name for the Masters of the Unclean. The fact that they use the word “dark” indicates that they sought universal conquest and, more important, gloried in it and realized that they were, in fact, basically evil. Modern Satanism, in its real sense, is a parallel. (See Circles; Unclean.)
Davids: Similar to the Mu’amans in that they follow a quite different monotheism from that taught by the church and one which they claim to be far older. Found in D’alwah, Chespek, and perhaps elsewhere, they occupy positions in all levels of society. (See Mu’amans.)
Death, The: The atomic and biologic blight which destroyed the major population centers and most of humanity some thousand years in the past. Still a name of dread and ultimate menace in Hiero’s day. “All evil came with The Death” is a proverb.
Deserts of The Death: Patches of ancient atomic blight where there is little or no water and scant or no vegetation. Yet life exists in these horrible places, though most of it is inimical and strange, bred from hard radiation and a ferocious struggle to survive. Some of the Deserts are hundreds of square miles in size and, in Hiero’s day, are avoided like The Death itself. They are rare in Kanda, but many exist in the South. Blue, radioactive glows mark the worst of them at night.
Eleveners: The Brotherhood of the Eleventh Commandment. (“Thou shalt not destroy the Earth nor the life thereon.”) A group of social scientists who banded together after The Death to preserve human culture, love for all life, and knowledge thereof. This group permeates all human societal life and, though opposing violence, battles the Unclean, often in hidden ways.
Forty Symbols: The tiny wooden signs that a trained priest-exorcist carries on his person. By putting himself (or herself; there are priestesses of great power) in a trance state, the priest can forelock, or to some extent see the future, using the symbols.
Frontier Guards: The army or embodied forces of the Metz Republic. The Otwah League has a similar group. There are sixteen legions, self-contained units, in the Metz Republic. They are under, not the Republic’s orders, but those of the Abbey Council, which, in turn, reports to the Lower House (Assembly) on its decisions, which are always approved. Priests usually lead and direct the Frontier Guards.
Glith: A recent form of Leemute, possibly bred from a reptile by the Unclean. A humanoid, scaled and very strong physically, utterly the slave of the Dark Masters.