They waited on the streaming deck of a Roderigan submarine, looking through a misty darkness at the deeper smudge of land. Gunderd stood by Ruiz; the others gathered in an anxious clump a few steps away. The only illumination came from the glow of green ready-lights on the weapons of the Roderigan guards.
“Dorn,” said Gunderd. On the whole, the former sailor seemed more cheerful than he had since the sinking of the Loracca. Perhaps, Ruiz thought, Gunderd was just happy to be away from Roderigo’s dungeons.
“The devil you know is only preferable when you can tolerate it,” Ruiz muttered.
“Eh?” asked Gunderd.
“Nothing,” said Ruiz. “So, you’re a scholar. What do you know of Dorn?”
“Very little,” said Gunderd. “Ghost stories, mostly. I’ll tell a few when we’re sitting round the campfire. Do you suppose they’ll allow us a campfire?” He pulled his coveralls tight and shivered. “It’s cold.”
“We’ll have a campfire, then,” Ruiz promised.
Gunderd gave him a speculative glance. “I confess to astonishment. How did you come to have such influence with the hetmen? I mean, we’re alive, most of us. More or less.” He glanced at Einduix, strapped to a floater on the deck.
Ruiz shrugged. “They need me, for some reason. They want information from the virtual, and none of their own can get it. For some reason they think I can.”
“Ah,” said Gunderd, but he looked no less confused.
Gejas climbed over the rail. The tongue wore a black shipsuit and a helmet haloed with sensors. “Come,” he said. “The lander is ready.” He pointed at Ruiz. “You first.”
Ruiz laughed. “Me last.”
Gejas tensed and moved toward Ruiz, baring his teeth. A neural whip appeared in his hand.
Ruiz stepped back, seeking better footing on the water-slick deck, but he bumped into one of the dozen mirror-suited guards that waited with them. The guard shoved him with the butt of his graser. Ruiz kept his balance and turned to the guard, planning some satisfyingly destructive act.
A hatch in the conning tower hissed open, and The Yellowleaf stepped forth, clad in light armor of some dead-black composite. An impressive collection of weapons hung from harness points on her torso. She carried her helmet under one arm.
Gejas stopped and looked at his master. Ruiz could see nothing at all in her stony eyes, but apparently Gejas read some dire message there. He dropped his head and said in a voice shaking with fear, “The Yellowleaf states: You may go last, if you wish. The Yellowleaf states: We must board the lander quickly. Persons unfriendly to Roderigo patrol Dorn’s waters. They will attempt to prevent us from landing if they find us.”
Ruiz faced the hetman. “We have not yet negotiated my fee for this job.”
“The Yellowleaf states: We will do so before you enter the virtual.”
Ruiz hesitated. “All right,” he said finally. “Why not?”
He couldn’t avoid an uncomfortable thought: that in agreeing with the hetman in the slightest degree, he was taking another step along the path to oblivion. He still hoped to survive long enough to give Nisa a chance at life — however unreasonable that hope might be.
He glanced at her as the guards took them to the boarding ladder. She looked back at him with a smooth passionless expression, as though his were a passing face in a crowd of strangers. He was suddenly reminded of the look she had given him in Bidderum, on her way to her Expiation… and to her first death.
They landed on a beach of gray cobblestones just as a dim pearly light began to lighten the mist. The half-dozen guards went ashore first, their mirrorsuits detuned a little, so that they looked like wisps of fog. When they were deployed into a perimeter a hundred meters from the lander, The Yellowleaf stepped onto the beach.
She stood without movement for a long minute, then motioned.
“Out,” Gejas whispered urgently.
Ruiz sensed a genuine apprehension in the tongue, and so he decided to save his next defiant gesture for later. He nodded and went down the ramp behind the others. He took a remote pleasure in discovering that the Roderigans had enemies dangerous enough to make such precautions necessary.
With the thought came a lift of irrational optimism… but he put it away. “Not yet,” he muttered.
“What?” The tongue stood at his shoulder, peering into the mist, a small ruptor strapped to his left forearm.
“What are you so afraid of?” asked Ruiz.
“Probably nothing,” said Gejas, his eyes darting from side to side. “Anyway, nothing for you to worry about.”
Ruiz shrugged and stepped aside as the first of the landwalkers bumped down the ramp, carrying racks of gear on its low steel back. The next one carried Einduix’s litter, strapped to its underside.
Gunderd stood beside him. “He fears Castle Delt. Delt and Roderigo were the principals in Dorn’s destruction. Both claim the island, and both fear the other will discover how to exploit the virtual.”
“I see,” said Ruiz.
They followed the four landwalkers in a single file, flanked by the unseen guards. Ahead of the landwalkers, Gejas picked a path through tumbled stones and thorny scrub. The mist still lay heavily on the island, but the sun was soon bright enough to make the going fairly easy, though the waist-high scrub eventually soaked Ruiz and the others.
They climbed into an area where the stones were larger and showed the marks of tools — though the stones had long ago weathered into anonymity. Here and there, holes yawned; apparently the ruins had deep roots. Ruiz couldn’t tell a pillar from a paving stone, but the place had a melancholy sense of antiquity, as if sad ghosts watched from beneath every dark heap.
The land rose slowly and the mist grew thinner, until it floated in tattered streamers across the ruins, and Ruiz could see the sea, shining below them. The island’s central massif became visible: once-jagged peaks of black basalt, now worn into gentler contours. Everywhere were the remains of ancient structures, reduced to dimly seen patterns amid the stony wastes.
Ruiz walked almost blindly, trying to think nothing, feel nothing. To a large extent he succeeded. The others said nothing to distract him, although Dolmaero seemed to be having some difficulty maintaining the pace; he breathed in a loud rasp that gradually took on a desperate tone.
Once Ruiz looked up to see Nisa watching him. She looked away instantly, as if her gaze had fallen upon him by accident.
After three hours of steady hiking, they descended into a hollow and Gejas signaled a stop. The landwalkers formed a defensive square. Several of the guards reappeared.
“We wait here for a while,” said Gejas.
Dolmaero sat heavily on a flat rock, gasping for air, his face pale and blotchy. Ruiz seemed to wake suddenly; he saw that Dolmaero was in real difficulty. He knelt beside the Guildmaster and loosened the collar of Dolmaero’s overalls.
Gejas watched incuriously.
Ruiz remembered that several hours had passed since he had last baited the tongue. “Give me a medical limpet,” he said.
Gejas shook his head. “Medical supplies are reserved for essential personnel.”
Ruiz smiled, somehow delighted. “Oh? Give me the limpet. Or do your own dirty work.”
Gejas looked at his master. She nodded, a barely perceptible movement, and Gejas hung his head. Ruiz saw that Gejas had changed profoundly over the last few hours; he no longer seemed the perfectly-at-ease monster. In some way Ruiz had disrupted Gejas’s world. It seemed an insignificant revenge, compared to what Gejas had done to him, but the thought gave Ruiz a brief chilly pleasure.
The tongue consulted the miniature dataslate he wore at his wrist. “The limpet is in the second starboard pannier on the red-legged landwalker.” He turned away and started supervising the guards, who were erecting a canopy of chameleon gauze over the campsite.