A time of silence went by, while I raised my eyes to see a Mehrayn and a Ceralt who avoided the gaze of the male who looked upon them both. Mehrayn seemed troubled and Ceralt vexed, and S’Heernoh merely sat and smiled pleasantly, patiently awaiting words which were likely never to come. I knew not what foolishness the male played at, yet had I questions which he surely would find it possible to answer.
“This forcing a return to life you spoke of—” said I, drawing S’Heernoh’s immediate attention. “It was your efforts which restored Chaldrin, was it not? Never had I seen any survive such a swording, no matter their size and strength. Was it not for you, my brother would long since have fed the children of the wild.”
“I knew how much he meant to you, and knew also that part of you would die if he did,” said S’Heernoh with a nod, the false smoothness again gone from his voice. “I grabbed his mind and forced it to stay with his body, repaired just enough of the damage so that he could continue living on his own, then released him. Doing something like that takes a lot out of you, or I would have noticed sooner that you were gone. ”
“Then you did for him what the one who called herself Mida surely did for me,” said I, nodding with the very edge of understanding. “When I had walked the lines for the Silla and lay dying, I, too, was given life again.”
“She wasn’t the one who did it,” said the male, his gaze upon me wary, his words painfully slow. “I told you that the twisted children of my people were given no more than half of the education given all the rest. The half they did have covered the use of equipment of all sorts—the use of wonder but it didn’t include the most important part, the full use of the mind. Learning mind control takes a long time and a lot of hard work, and I don’t believe the twisted ones would have been able to learn it even if someone had decided to teach it to them. They could operate the mechanical units that required mind control for usage, but anyone can learn that. No, neither one of them could have helped you.”
“For what reason, then, did I not find an ending?” I demanded, nearly indignant over the denial the male had spoken. “For what reason was I not slain or terribly crippled?”
“For the reason that I wasn’t about to let either of those things happen,” said the male, again somewhat shamefaced. “I was much too far away to heal you as quickly or as thoroughly as I would have liked, but I did the best I could with what I had. You weren’t actively seeking death, then, so I had no trouble pulling you back.”
“Even then you watched over her?” asked Mehrayn, fully as surprised as Ceralt and I. “Easily am I now able to see that your assistance during our journey together was no mere happenstance, yet am I unable to comprehend the reason for such doings. For what reason did you give her such aid?”
“One of my reasons was the same reason your two Feridani wanted her dead,” said S’Heernoh as he looked upon me. “Everyone who read the Snows saw the same thing, and two of those reading it were the ones who called themselves Mida and Sigurr. The Snow said that if Jalav didn’t make the trip to Sigurr’s Peak, everyone on this planet would be lost. What that meant was— But maybe it would be better if I started from the beginning.
“When the twisted ones escaped from the shelter, they didn’t simply run in the first direction they saw. We discovered that they had picked their destinations carefully, from the records we kept of your people’s newest colonies. We knew about the upheaval taking place in their Union, had used the opportunity to look in on some of the isolated colonies, and had found some of them, for the most part the more primitive ones, of great interest. For their own twisted reasons, the twisted ones chose the colonies we had been studying, but the strongest reason was probably the knowledge that we would hesitate before showing ourselves and our strength in those places, so they were a good deal safer than anywhere else.
“When the two we just dealt with first came here, they spent a good deal of time building wonders and studying the people of this planet. When they felt they were ready they disguised themselves as Sigurr and Mida, then began kidnapping people to be their slaves and followers. This kept them busy for an even longer time, but then one day one of their watching devices gave them warning of a pending disaster: the power crystals taken so long before from your ancestors’ comm were about to be found and brought together again.
“The twisted ones were absolutely furious,” said S’Heernoh with a shake of his head. “They had already begun spreading their evil with an eye toward enslaving everyone on the planet, and they didn’t want to be interrupted by the people from the Union. They watched in near helplessness as the Silla simply handed over their crystal, raged when the Hosta’s crystal was stolen—and then noticed something that calmed them a good deal. The war leader of the Hosta clan immediately mounted her warriors and rode after the ones who had stolen their clan’s crystal, and that gave the two watchers an idea. The Hosta followed their goddess Mida, so why couldn’t they use the Hosta to get the crystals away from those who would set them back in a comm? That was when the one calling herself Mida first began appearing to the war leader of the Hosta. ”
The male looked upon me with deep compassion, yet did I continue to feel very much the fool. In no manner could I have known of the deception—however, I believed I should have known.
“When the Hosta failed to retrieve the crystals, the twisted ones were furious all over again,” said S’Heernoh, clearly attempting to draw me from my thoughts by continuing his narrative. “They could have warned the clan about the men coming to capture and claim them, but they didn’t—and ended up paid back for their betrayal. The third crystal was found and placed with the others, and the people of the Union were contacted again after generations and generations of isolation.
“The twisted ones should have properly blamed themselves for the catastrophe, but it was easier to blame a war leader named Jalav. When she escaped over the wall of Ranistard, they made sure to subtly direct her with their long-distance speakers—right into the hands of her enemies, the Silla. As expected she was caught and badly wounded, but I made sure she didn’t die the way the twisted ones wanted her to. Again they raged, unable to understand why she survived, unable to detect the efforts of one who had had much more schooling in the use of the mind. They were badly confused, and the main reason for their confusion was what they had seen on the Snows.”
Again S’Heernoh shifted in place with a sigh, and looked about at Ceralt and Mehrayn as well as myself.
“I don’t know how well I’m going to do explaining this next part,” said he, looking some small bit vexed. “At this point you have to know just exactly what the Snows are, but I doubt if I can make it clear enough for you. When my people find a planet they want to keep track of, one of the first things they do is tap into a parallel sequence we discovered a very long time ago, and set up a computer watch there. This parallel sequence is a place of no doings of its own—much like the place we’re sitting in right now—so the computers aren’t distracted. Everything that happens is fed into the computers—computers are wonders that remember everything they’re told and can keep track of all that without confusing one bit with another—everything is fed into the computers by spying eyes and ears the computer sends out, and everything learned is displayed for anyone who wants to look at it. The computer uses a special code or language, and shows every possibility it can discover from the information it’s been given, as to what will happen next on that particular planet. My people are trained to read and interpret that special language, a language that was developed because of the needs of the computer, not because we didn’t want anyone else getting the information. As far as we knew, no one not of our people could reach the parallel sequence to get the information.”