“I’ve seen them from space, but not close up,” Gallen said. Indeed, when Gallen had landed, it seemed that he had little choice of spots to set camp. The land that was not desert on Ruin seemed to be the impenetrable tangle, and so Gallen had landed in a clear desert, where native predators might not prove too bothersome.
“The tangles are filled with wildlife. Florafeems, like the ones you rode here, feed in the foliage at the top, and thousands of other species of animals live in the canopy, some of them hundreds of meters into the growth, where perpetual darkness reigns.
“The predators in the tangle are-unusually nasty, let us say. Evolution has given them certain advantages over the human form. Their nervous systems give them superior reflexes-which let them react about twice as fast as humans do, and their muscles process energy at a more rapid rate.”
Gallen smiled wryly. “So they are nasty enough to keep you from your artifact?”
“Other men have gone searching for it. I’ve sent killer droids into the tangle, trying to recover the object of my desires-I’ve even sent in a dozen of my own clones. No one has managed to retrieve it for me.”
“So, you are saying it’s dangerous?” Gallen asked.
“For normal men. Perhaps even for you. No Lord Protector has ever tried the deed. I would, of course, provide droid escorts, the finest military weaponry “
“Yet even then, you don’t expect me to succeed.”
“Why would you say that?” Felph asked.
Gallen nodded toward Felph’s children-to Arachne and Hera, Athena. “You don’t let them speak. You’re afraid they’ll ruin the deal, talk me out of it.”
Felph grinned. “Very perceptive. I should have known that a Lord Protector would be so perceptive. To put it candidly, I am unsure of your chances. If I thought the venture fruitless, I wouldn’t even entertain this notion.”
“You told me that I would find your offer interesting,” Gallen said. “I’m not exactly interested in dying.”
“Of course not,” Felph said.
“So what do you offer?” Gallen asked. “I assume the reward justifies the risks?”
“I would, of course, take precautions before sending you in. I’d clone you, download you memories, so that should you fail, you will have lost nothing. Beyond that …” Felph spread his hands wide, indicating his palace, “whatever you want.”
Orick gasped, and even Gallen sat back in surprise. Gallen could imagine a lot. As he gazed at the opulence around him, he realized that Felph really would make good on his offer.
“That’s right,” Felph said. “I am four thousand years old, and in my youth I inherited more money than I could ever spend. That has been invested and accruing interest for ages. I control the economies of fifty worlds. If you acquire the artifact I desire, I will give you,” he shrugged, “half.”
Gallen’s heart pounded. Maggie reached over, clutched his arm under the table. A warning? Did she want him to jump at the offer, or back away from it? He glanced at her, and her face was set, wary. She was telling him only to be careful, he suspected.
But he couldn’t be careful. Only days ago she’d begged him to flee the civilized worlds, get her away from the dronon. Government officials, sympathetic to Gallen’s plight, had loaned Gallen a ship.
“What would be worth so much?” Gallen asked.
“The Waters of Strength,” Felph said.
Gallen asked, “What makes them so valuable?”
Felph shrugged. “I’m not certain that they are. At the very least, they intrigue me. That intrigue has held me here on this planet for six hundred years. But if the legends are true, then it is said that in ancient times the Qualeewoohs brewed the Waters of Strength, and those who drank them made four great conquests.” He raised one hand and counted off on four fingers, “Self. Nature. Time. And Space.”
Gallen shook his head. “That seems a bit much to expect from a potion. What proof do you have that it exists?”
“There are many accounts of it in Qualeewooh histories. It was brewed some thirty millennia ago, at the dawn of the Age of Man,” Felph said. “As for evidence of its continued existence, there is ample evidence. What evidence would you have?”
Gallen shrugged. “A thirty-thousand-year-old Qualeewooh, telling me where to find it.”
Lord Felph raised a brow. “All right,” he said. “Fair enough. Follow me.”
He got up from the table, and Gallen followed him out the corridor, back into the great hall, and out another passageway. Maggie followed at Gallen’s back, along with the bears, Felph’s children, and Dooring.
The passageways led to a road that wound outside the palace itself, and Gallen saw that night was full upon them, but though the stars dusted a cloudless sky, Brightstar outshone them all, more like a brilliant moon than a star. Gallen could see quite well, and indeed felt the heat of the star. He followed Felph through a garden of dahlias in shades of white and black, then down into a great chamber, an ancient chamber carved by the Qualeewoohs.
Felph reached into his pocket, pulled out a glow globe, and held it aloft. “If you look up here, you can see writing on the walls, most of it in a tempera made from colored clays mixed with pulp from bark.” There was indeed writing on the ceiling, intricate designs of stylized Qualeewoohs painted in vivid reds, blues, yellows, and greens. There was a queer feeling to the place. Strange scenes on the ceiling depicted birdlike creatures in armored helms, who carried knives on their wing tips, battling beasts in the heavens. The hall was ten meters across, but less than two meters high. By the odd proportions, one sensed it had not been burrowed by human hands. The symbols were obviously stylized, yet there were intricacies in the work that astonished Gallen. It was like nothing ever painted by a human. On one wall was a set of symbols that gave off ominous overtones. They depicted yellowish fanged beasts, like upright jackals with large ears, apparently dancing in a green mist.
“What do these symbols mean?” Maggie asked.
“No one knows,” Felph said. “Each mating pair of Qualeewoohs writes in their own private language, which they teach their children, but the children themselves create their own version of that language at adolescence. The result is that after a few generations, even the Qualeewoohs can’t decipher the family writings. But Qualeewoohs tell me that the private languages tell mostly of common things nearby nesting sites, feeding grounds, and the attendant dangers at each. But there is much more personal information that the Qualeewoohs don’t share with us-mystic teachings and magical rites.”
“You mean that the Qualeewoohs are still alive?” Orick asked. “I thought that they were all killed or something. That’s why the planet is called Ruin.”
“Not killed,” Felph said. “They are rare, but not extinct. We’re in a period called `the bone years,’ when their members become quite few. It’s a planetwide drought. And of course, over the past few centuries, their numbers have dwindled lower than ever. Poachers, you know.”
“I still cannot believe people would kill them,” Gallen said, not bothering to conceal his outrage.
“Perhaps if you’d met a Qualeewooh, you’d understand,” Felph answered. “They are feral. Their ancestors reached great heights of civilization, but the descendants are poor representatives of their species.”
He brought the light to a corner, where a glass case had been built into one wall. “Here you can see some spirit masks-Qualeewooh masks made of lacquered leather, with some inlaid silver fangs, and writing painted on the masks. The Qualeewoohs make these when they reach adolescence, then have them permanently glued to their faces. The masks cannot be removed. When a Qualeewooh dies, its body is left behind as being nothing, something merely cast off. But the dead Qualeewooh’s mate will bring the mask back to one of its favorite aeries.” He raised the globe toward the wall. The birdlike masks were about three feet from nose to head, and just the width of a human face. Gallen got the distinct impression that the empty eye sockets on the gray-blue masks were gazing out at him. “You said you wanted to speak to a dead Qualeewooh. Open the case. Put on a mask. As I remember, the center one there is quite well-made.”