“That is agreement. Now indicate disagreement.” He did not move his body, but he glanced to her left.
“Good.” She stood straight and made a grand gesture of pointing to herself. “Me Prima.”
Darius had to grab onto the bars for support. Prima! The would-be female Cyng of Hlahtar he had promised to look for! Just like this he had found her!
Actually it made sense. She would have been trapped the same way he had been, and probably many others. She must have proved useful to her captors, so they had kept her alive.
“Me Prima,” she repeated, touching herself again.
This time he responded more appropriately. “Me Darius,” he said, touching himself. Establishing names was elementary; he had done it with Colene. But he realized that it was important not to let the captors know that he was from the same Mode as she, and that he knew of her.
“Listen closely. The dragons govern this Mode. They have hunted most other species to extinction and are desperate for new creatures to prey upon, because this is their nature. They know about the Modes, but can not travel between them. They are hoping to capture a Mode traveler who can give them the secret. Failing that, they will do what they can to restock this Mode with prey. We must work together to escape. If we do not, they will breed you to me to produce prey they hope will be more of a challenge to hunt. Will you cooperate with me?”
Darius looked firmly to the right.
“They will not let you have your sword. They will let you have your food. Magic is not operative here. Do you have anything that might be used as a weapon that is not obvious as such?”
Darius had to think about that. Then he got a bright notion.
He glanced right.
She squatted and began drawing things out from his pack. “Identify the things in your language,” she told him. “I have to appear to be making progress. Let your eyes tell me what your weapon is.”
She held up a package of beans. “Beans,” he said.
“Beans,” she repeated, and set the package down. She brought out a loaf of bread.
“Bread.” He remembered how he had been confused by what had turned out to be white (not brown) sliced (not whole) bread in Colene’s Mode.
“Bread,” she repeated. So it went, item after item. Then, near the bottom, there was a tiny box with slivers of wood inside.
“Matches,” he said, looking to the right. This was the box he had gotten from Colene and brought back with him Matches were much like magic, but were actually science, and they fascinated him.
“Matches,” she repeated, this time truly unfamiliar with the term. “What are they?”
“Ung,” he said, holding out his hand. The watching dragon made a warning puff of steam.
She handed him one match.
Darius held it by the business end and poked into his mouth with the bare-wood end. He was using it to pick his teeth!
Both the woman and the dragon looked disgusted. Evidently they had anticipated something more significant.
He reached, signaling for another. The woman gave him one more match. He stuck this in the other side of his mouth.
“This is a weapon?” she asked as she rummaged in his pack for what remained.
He glanced again to the right. Then he put the matches in a pocket.
After the woman completed the pack inventory, Darius risked telling her. “Ung. Kublai. Ung ung.”
Now she was the one who reeled. Oh, yes, she knew that name! She had loved Kublai, twenty years ago.
She recovered. “When can you use your weapon?” she asked. “At any time?”
He looked to the right.
“Can it kill dragons?”
He looked left.
“Better in privacy?”
He looked right.
“I will come to you at night, to feed you. I can not open the cage; only a dragon can do that. But they will put me in with you if I ask, because they are aware that breeding is not instantaneous with strangers. Can you use your weapon then?”
He looked right.
She verified some words, holding up things they had identified from the pack. Then she departed. The dragon glanced at him, then settled back to sleep.
Darius lay on the straw and closed his own eyes. He had a lot to assimilate!
DUSK came, and then darkness. Prima came, carrying not only his pack with its food, but a bottle of water. She said something to the dragon, and the barred gate swung open. She stepped inside, and the gate closed. How it worked Darius couldn’t fathom, except that it was under the control of the dragon. If magic didn’t work here, there must be some other type of force. The dragons must have used it to establish dominance in their Mode, just as humans had used magic to achieve power in his own Mode.
“Now you must eat and drink,” she told him, making broad gestures of food-to-mouth so that the dragon could see that she was doing her job. “And after that, if I am to remain here with you, I must make obvious attempts to seduce you, so that the dragon will know that we are potentially breedable. I realize that this will be distasteful to you because I am too old and unattractive, but our lives are at stake, so I ask you to behave in a manner the dragon will find reasonable.”
“Ung,” he said, taking bread from her. He certainly was hungry!
“As I interpret it, all you need to do to escape this Mode is to step into the next, which is just beyond this cage. If I am in direct contact with you at that time, I should be able to accompany you. This is because it is my home Mode too; were it not, I would be unable to join you regardless of our contact. We shall have to maintain contact continuously thereafter, because I fear I will slip away when we lose it, and be lost in infinity.”
“Ung,” he said around his mouthful. He saw how this could get complicated, but if the alternative was to be trapped here, it was necessary.
“I believe that once I emerge at the anchor site, I will be secure,” she continued. “So I will ask you to conduct me there. I realize that this will delay whatever mission you are on, but perhaps I can provide you with information that will facilitate your mission, and in this manner make up for it. I think, for example, I can enable you to avoid similar capture in the future.”
He looked to her right, indicating his interest. It had become obvious that he had entered the Virtual Mode woefully unprepared.
“Now, how do you propose to use your weapon?” she inquired. “I confess to being baffled how those two toothpicks can hurt anything.”
“They make fire,” he murmured. “I will burn the straw, and burn through the wooden bars. It will also distract the dragons.”
“Fire!” she repeated, surprised. “But a pyro spell won’t work here.”
“This is not magic.” He spoke into his bread, so that the dragon could not see him or hear him. He hoped. “All I’m concerned about is how long it will take to burn through the bars. If the fire is too big, I’ll be burned too; if too small, the dragons will put it out too soon.”
“Correct. Here is a better way: start the fire and feign sleep. I will scream to be released. When the gate opens, you must launch yourself out, and sweep me with you across the boundary.”
Darius was impressed. That did seem to be a better way to do it. Risky, of course, but probably less so than his imperfect notion. “Then let’s do it,” he murmured. “Say when.”
“Finish eating. Eliminate. Settle down to sleep. I will join you, but you will not yet be responsive. I will tell you when to make the fire.”
He glanced significantly to her right. Then he proceeded to stuff himself, for if their escape was effective, it might be some time before they had another chance to eat. She ate some with him, evidently trying to spark his interest in her.
His experience with Colene assisted him with the next stage. He did have to defecate. Prima turned her back, and he did it on the pot. The dragon seemed to be snoozing, but he knew better than to trust that.