Bryan slowly nodded. “I’d already sensed a lack of hierarchy among these people. I wouldn’t be surprised to find them still at the clan level of socialization. Fascinating, and almost unprecedented, given the high-culture trappings.”
“They’re barbarians,” Aiken stated flatly. “That’s one of the things I like about ’em! And they’re not too proud to let us human latents join right in…”
“With silver torcs.”
Aiken gave a short laugh. “Yeah. These silver collars have all the mind-expanding functions of the gold, plus control circuits. The gray torcs and the small collars of the monkeys have nothing but controls, plus a bunch of pleasure-pain circuits and a telepathic communication thing that varies a lot in its range.”
Bryan peered over the edge of the balcony. “Can you get any mental clues as to what’s going on around here? Quite a few alarums and excursions down there. I’m getting very curious about the Firvulag by now.”
“Funny thing about those severed heads the Hunt brought in.” Aiken frowned. “They weren’t quite dead, some of them! And after a while they started to, how can I say it?, flicker. The Hunters took them away, so we never really got a good look at them. But there was something subliminal about the whole scene.”
Sukey and Raimo chose that moment to come out in search of dinner. Aiken asked them, “You guys hear anything? With your minds? I’ve tried, but this damn lock Creyn put on me screens out all but whispers.”
Sukey closed her eyes and put her fingers in her ears. Raimo just stood there with his mouth open, finally saying, “Hell, all I hear is my stomach rumbling. Lemme at that food.”
After a few minutes had passed with Aiken and Bryan watching her patiently, Sukey opened her eyes. “I get… eagerness. From a lot of mental sources that seem to be different. Broadcasting on another wavelength from humans. Even different from Tanu. I can tune them in, but it’s hard. Do you understand what I mean?”
“We understand, kiddo,” Aiken said.
Sukey glanced from him to Bryan anxiously. “What do you suppose it could be?”
“Nothing to bother us, I’m sure,” Bryan said.
Sukey murmured something about wanting to sit with Stein and took a plate of fruit and cold meat inside. Bryan was satisfied with a roughly made sandwich and a mug of some cider-like beverage. He stood looking over twilit Darask. In the east, the monstrous rampart of the Maritime Alps still reflected glaring sunset-pink on the highest snowfields. Extraordinary, Bryan thought. The mountains looked to be as high as the spine of the Himalaya or even the Hlithskjalf Massif on Asgard. A cool wind was coming down from the heights, spreading across the everglade flats where the Rhône finally relaxed and spread wide after its precipitate plunge from the region around unborn Lyon.
The day’s journey had been something like descending a series of vast canyoned steps. They would sail peacefully for thirty or forty kilometers, then encounter savage rapids that would chute them to the next lower level at jetboat velocity. Despite Skipper Highjohn’s reassurances, Bryan felt that he had survived the ordeal of a lifetime. The last stretch of rapids, occurring, as he had suspected, in the gorge area about fifty kloms above the future Pont d’Avignon, had been formidable beyond belief. The prolongation of terror had blunted his senses to the point of stupor. Aiken Drum had begged Creyn not to put him to sleep for that last rough ride, being eager for some taste of the thrills that Bryan had described. When the boat had tumbled end over end down the face of the final great cataract and fetched up in the placid Lac Provencal, Aiken’s face had turned to gray-green and his bright eyes were sunken in shock.
“A fewkin’ flea ride,” he had moaned, “In a fewkin’ food blender!”
By the time they reached Darask on the Lower Rhône, they had journeyed nearly 270 kilometers in less than ten hours. The shallowing river twined and split and braided itself into scores of channels divided by rippling grasslands and mudflats inhabited by flocks of long-legged birds and cream-and-black checkered crocodiles. Here and here islands rose from the marshy plain. Darask crowned one of them looking for all the world like a tropical Mont-Saint-Michel towering above a sea of grass. Their boat had used its auxiliary engine to move out of the mainstream of the Rhône into a secondary channel leading to the fortified town. Darask had a small quay secured behind a limestone wall more than twelve meters high that butted against unscalable cliffs.
And now, in the town beneath the high-rising palace, ramas were lighting the small night-lamps, clambering up spindly ladders to tend those on brackets along the house roofs, working pulleys to raise long strings of lanterns up the face of the inner fortifications. Human soldiers touched off larger torches on the bastions of the town’s perimeter. As Bryan and the others surveyed the scene, the peculiar Tanu-style illumination sprang into operation, outlining the spired palace in dots of red and amber that symbolized the heraldic colors of its psychokinetic lord, Cranovel.
Aiken inspected the Tanu lamps along their own balcony. They were of sturdy faceted glass resting in small niches in the stone, without wires or any other metallic attachments. They were cold.
“Bioluminescence,” the little man in gold decided, shaking one. “You want to bet there are microorganisms in here? What did Creyn say, that the lights were energized by surplus meta emanations? That figures. You get some of the lower echelon torc wearers to generate a suitable waveform while they’re playing checkers or drinking beer or reading in the bathtub or performing some other semi-automatic…”
Bryan was paying scant attention to Aiken’s speculations. Out in the surrounding marshland, the ignes fatui were lighting their own lamps, wispy blobs of methane blue, firefly glimmerings that winked on and off in scattered synchrony, wandering pale flames gliding around the island’s misty backwaters like lost elfin boats.
“I suppose those are glowing insects or marsh-gas flames out there,” Sukey said, coming up behind Bryan to stare into the darkening landscape.
Raimo said, “Now I hear something. But not with any meta-faculty. You guys catching it?”
They listened. Sukey pursed her lips in exasperation. “Frogs!”
An almost inaudible trill was building up on the breeze, swelling and finally fracturing into a complex treble chord of tinkles and peeps. An invisible batrachian maestro lowered his baton and more voices chimed in, gulps and grunts, rattling snares, pops and clicks, tunking notes as of hollow canes. Additional frog voices contributed their simulations of slowly dripping water, plucked strings, human glottal trill, buzzing drill bits, amplified guitar notes; and underriding it all was the homely jug-o’-rum of the common bullfrog, that durable Earth creature that would, in only six million years, accompany mankind on its colonization of the far-flung stars.
The four people on the balcony looked at one another and burst into laughter.
“We’ve got a front-row seat,” Aiken said, “in case there’s any Firvulag invasion. And this blue pitcher is full of something that’s cool and definitely alcoholic. Shall we pull up chairs and fortify ourselves just in case the monsters arrive on schedule?”
“All in favor?” Bryan demanded.
“Aye!”
They held out their mugs and the little man in gold filled them, one by one.