“A crack.” Rod kept his face expressionless.
Toby nodded. “ ‘Twas a crack thou couldst have marched thy Flying Legion through, milord; but in that vast wall of rock ’twas nonetheless a crack.”
“So they sailed into a river-pass.” Rod frowned, trying to make sense of it. “What happened then?”
“Naught to speak of. When they slipped into the cliff-face, I dropped down to the cliff-top, where I lay and watched. Anon, I saw them slip out on a footpath, without their shields or helmets, and naught of weapons save the knives at their belts. They trudged across the plain, back to the village. I did not follow, for I feared sighting by an early-riser.”
Rod nodded. “Wise. After all, we found out everything we really needed to know.” He frowned. “Maybe more.”
“What then?” Brom demanded.
Toby spread his hands. “Naught. The work was done… and I commenced to feel as weary as though I’d not had a night of sleep.”
“Not surprising, with the psychic blast you pulled yesterday,” Rod reminded him. “And teleporting takes some energy out of a man too, I’ll bet.”
“I think that it doth,” Toby agreed, “though I’d not noticed it aforetime.”
“Well, you’re not as young as you used to be. What are you now, nineteen?”
“Twenty,” Toby answered, irritated.
“That’s right, it’s a huge difference. But that does mean your body’s stopped growing, and you no longer have that frantic, adolescent energy-surplus. Besides, what’s the furthest you’ve ever teleported before?”
“On thine affairs, some ten or twenty miles.”
“Well, this time, you jumped… oh, let’s see now…” Rod stared off into space. “All night in a sailing ship… let’s assume the wind was behind it… say, ten miles an hour. Maybe ten hours, factored by Finagle’s Variable Constant…” He looked back at Toby. “You jumped a hundred miles or more. Twice. No wonder you’re tired.”
Toby answered with a snore.
“Take him up,” Brom instructed the men-at-arms, “and bear him gently to his bed. He hath done great service for our land this morn.”
One of the soldiers bent to gather up Toby’s legs, but the other stopped him with a hand on his shoulder. “Nay. Only lift the chair.” The first soldier looked up, nodded approvingly, and picked up the chair legs as his companion lifted the back. Rod instantly memorized the second one’s face, marking him as one who might have potential.
The door closed behind them, and Brom turned on Rod. “What makest thou of this, Lord Warlock?”
“Confusion,” Rod answered promptly. “For openers, I want him to draw a map when he wakes up. Beyond that?” He shrugged. “We do have a tidy little mystery, don’t we?”
“Aye,” Brom agreed. “Why would they come so silently back to their lair?”
“Mayhap ‘twas not all returned from this sally,” Tuan offered, “and they feared the censure of the slain ones’ kin.”
“Possible, I suppose.” Rod frowned. “But it doesn’t seem very likely. I mean, I suppose there really are some hard-hearted cultures who take that attitude—you know, ‘Return with your shield, or on it,’ and all that. But their mission wasn’t exactly a total flop, you know. Their ship did come back stuffed. They took everything that wasn’t nailed down before they burned the stuff that was.”
“E’en so, they did have dead,” said Brom, “and if they’d gained recruits by promising great bounty with little danger, they would now have reason to fear the wrath of the kin of the slain ones.”
“Ah, I see you know the ways of recruiting-sergeants,” Rod said brightly. “But they’d have to face that anger anyway as soon as the rest of the villagers found out they were back. I mean, sooner or later, somebody was bound to notice they were there. So why sneak in?”
Catharine looked up slowly, her face lighting. “They stole back like thieves in the night, did they not?”
Rod frowned and nodded. “Yeah. How does that…” Then his eyes widened. “Of course! Your Majesty has it!”
“What?” Brom looked from one to the other, frowning.
“Aye, she hath!” Gwen jumped up. “The whole of this expedition was done in secret!”
“Aye!” Tuan’s eyes fired. “Indeed, that hath the ring of truth!”
“Hypothesis does not account for all available data,” Fess said flatly behind Rod’s ear.
“But it’s got the right feel,” Rod objected. “Now, just how they managed to hide the little fact that they were gone for thirty-six hours, I don’t know; but I could think of a few ways, myself.”
Gwen looked up, alarmed.
“That means, Your Majesty,” Rod said, hastily turning to the King, “that we’re not being attacked by a hostile nation.”
“Nay, only thieves who come in ships.” Tuan frowned. “Is there not a word for such as they?”
“Yeah; they call ‘em ‘pirates.’ ” Rod wasn’t surprised that the people of Gramarye had forgotten the term; their culture was restricted to one huge island and had been isolated for centuries.
Tuan frowned thoughtfully, gazing off into space. “How doth one fight a seaborne bandit?”
“By knowing something about the sea.” Rod turned to Brom. “Is there anybody in Gramarye who does?”
Brom frowned. “We have some fisherfolk in villages along the coast.”
“Then, get ‘em,” Rod called back over his shoulder as he headed for the door. “Get me a fisherman who knows something about the winds and the coastlines.”
“An thou wishest it, we shall. But where dost thou go, Lord Warlock?”
“To find out what’s current,” Rod called back.
“But there’s got to be a current here somewhere!”
“They are not visible on standard reflected-light photographs, Rod,” Fess explained, “and when we arrived on Gramarye we had no reason to take infrared stills.”
Rod’s starship was buried under ten feet of clay in a meadow a few hours ride from Runnymede. He had persuaded the elves to dig a tunnel to it so he could visit it whenever he wanted.
Now, for instance. He was enjoying the rare luxury of Terran Scotch while he pored over a set of still pictures on the chart-table screen. “I don’t see anything, Fess.”
“Isn’t that what you expected, Rod?”
Fess’s robot brain, a globe the size of a basketball, hung in a niche in the curving wall. Rod had temporarily taken it out of the steel horse body and plugged it in to act as the ship’s automatic control section. Not that he was going anywhere; he just needed Fess to operate the ship’s auxiliary equipment, such as the graphic survey file. And, of course, the autobar.
“Well, yes, now that you mention it.” Rod scowled at the aerial picture of the Gramarye coastline, the mainland coastline opposite, and the open sea in between. Fess had taken the pictures during their orbital approach to the planet two years earlier. Now they were stored as rearrangements within the electrical charges of giant molecules within the crystal lattice of the on-board computer memory. “I hadn’t expected to find anything except plants and animals—but I hadn’t said so. Better watch out, Metal Mind—you’re getting close to intuitive hunches.”
“Merely integrating large numbers of nonverbal signs, Rod,” the robot assured him.
“I should be so good at integrating.” Rod stabbed a finger at a bump on the mainland coastline. “Expand that one for me, will you?”
The glowing plate in the tabletop stayed the same size, of course, but the picture within its borders grew, expanding out of sight at the edges, so that the bump became larger and larger, filling the whole screen.
Rod drew an imaginary line with his finger. “Quite a demarcation here—this arc that goes across the bump. Divides the vegetation rather neatly, don’t you think?”
“I do not think, Rod; I simply process data.”
“One of these days, you’ll have to explain the difference to me. What’s this stuff in the upper left? Looks like the tops of a lot of ferns.”