Part 33 (1/2)

'Then I must go to the Hall, and find that world I visited so long ago. Once there, I will open as large a rift as I can between that world and the original rift site, near the City of the Plain.

'Have the Great Ones of the Empire begin building rifts from every major city and from any safe place away from the Dasati and tell the people to gather what they may, for the Empire must be ready, the nations must be ready, the people must be ready! We have little time left.'

'How much time do we have?' asked the Emperor.

'Less than a week, Majesty. If we linger, we die, and with us die other worlds, eventually. I have seen it. It is the truth.'

'Go,' said Sezu, who now truly looked like a crestfallen young man, a young man wearing the mantle of leaders.h.i.+p that had been thrust on him by an accident of birth. It was clear to everyone in the room that he would rather that burden be on other shoulders at this time, but he had made his decision and he was ready to act. 'Make it so,' he said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO - Warnings.

THE CHILL WIND BLEW.

Pug repeated an approach he had used many years before, of transporting himself via magic to a place on the vast tundra of the Thn. He hiked to the north for the better part of an hour, his black robe a stark contrast to the bare grey-and-white soil beneath his feet. He was in one of the few places on this world which knew cold and ice, and it felt strange.

A band of Thn males appeared an hour before sunset, riding towards him. They were centaur-like creatures, but rather than a marriage of man and horse, they looked more like Saaur warriors grafted to the torsos of warhorses. Each carried a round s.h.i.+eld and a sword and they hooted odd battle chants.

Pug was ready to attempt the same tactic he had used the only previous time he had come this far north: erecting a pa.s.sive barrier so that they could not harm him, or force him to defend himself with violence.

But this time they came close enough to see his black robe and veered off, speeding back the way they had come. Having no time to wait for them to send out an expendable emissary, Pug followed in a series of magic jumps, staying just far enough behind them not to provoke an attack.

In less than an hour a village came into view and Pug could see more than a score of ma.s.sive sod huts with ramps leading down towards doors, so he deduced that the houses must be half underground. Smoke rose through vent holes, and Thn children and females moved among the buildings.

An alarm was sounded and instantly the young scurried for the safety of the huts. The females took up positions in the doorways, obviously ready to defend their young if the males were defeated. Pug realized that all the Thn's encounters with humans in black robes had been punitive, save one, the last time he had spoken to them. As part of their nature, the Thn attempted to range south of the mountains in winter, and for a thousand years they had been repulsed by the Tsurani.

Pug was about to seek to convince them to leave lands that had been their home since the dawn of time.

He erected a s.h.i.+eld around himself, and approached slowly. A few used slings to hurl rocks at him and one shot at him with a bow, but when the missiles bounced harmlessly off the s.h.i.+eld, they stopped. A few feigned charges and drew up short of slamming into him, but they all hooted and challenged him.

Pug stopped just outside the village boundary and said in a loud, calm voice, 'I seek a parlay with the Lasura.' He used their own word for themselves, like so many others meaning 'the people'. Thn Thn was a Tsurani word. was a Tsurani word.

For almost ten minutes nothing happened while Pug stood motionless and the Thn warriors shouted what he took to be insults and challenges to single combat. He knew it was ritualized and expected of braves, but he and the Thn also knew that the average Tsurani Great One could rain fire down on this village and Pug was far from average.

Finally an older male approached and in heavily-accented Tsurani said, 'Speak, Black One, if you must.'

'I speak of a great danger, not only to the Lasura, or Tsurani, or the Cho-ja, but to this whole world. Listen and heed me, for I come to you as a friend, and offer you escape.'

Pug spoke as well as he could, for nearly an hour, and tried to keep the concepts focused and plausible, for he knew there would be serious doubt that this was anything but some Tsurani ploy to lure the Thn south to destruction. At the end he said, 'I must leave, and I have only this to say. Send fast runners to your other villages and tell them of what I have spoken.

'If you stay here you will perish in less than eight sunrises. But if you wish to live, go to the place on the plains where the seven fingers of rock rise up from the mountains to the south. There I will leave a magic doorway. Step through it and you will find yourself on a gra.s.sy plain, with lush trees and warm breezes.'

'Why would a Tsurani for the Lasura do this?' asked the old male. 'Enemies are we, and always have been.'

Pug avoided explaining he was not Tsurani born it was a needless complication but said, 'This land was your land before the Tsurani came, and I would make this much right: come to where the Tsurani flee, to the new world, and I will make a home for you. You will have the oath of the Emperor of the Tsurani, and this entire land I speak of will be yours alone. No Tsurani will trouble you, for it is across a vast sea and you will share it with no others. This is my bond as a Great One of the Empire, and so is the bond of the Tsurani Light of Heaven.

'Heed my words, for I must leave now,' he said, and then he willed himself back to the a.s.sembly.

Alone in the room set aside for Miranda and himself when they resided with the Tsurani, Pug closed his eyes for a moment, hoping that the Thn would listen. But he was almost certain they would not.

Miranda approached the hive entrance with an escort of Imperial Guards. Cho-ja hive workers scurried about the Acoma estates as they had for centuries. Miranda knew that there had been some kind of special relations.h.i.+p between the Emperor's great-grandmother, Mara of the Acoma, and the hive queen and later the Cho-ja magicians in far-off Chakaha, the crystal-spired Cho-ja city far beyond the eastern border of the Empire. She did not know exactly what that relations.h.i.+p had been, but she understood that since then the Cho-ja had enjoyed the status of an autonomous people within the borders of the Empire.

At the entrance Miranda realized she had never been this close to a Cho-ja before. They were insects, as far as she was concerned, giant ants from her point of view, yet their upper torso rose like that of a human's, with similar musculature in the chest, shoulders and arms. Their faces were like those of a mantis, with eyes that looked like faceted metal spheres, but in the place of mandibles, the Cho-ja had mouths that were very human-like. Their colour in the sun was an iridescent blue-green. 'May we address your queen?' asked Miranda.

The guard stood motionless for a long moment, then asked in the Tsurani tongue, 'Who is it who seeks audience with our queen?'

'I am Miranda, wife of Milamber of the a.s.sembly of Magicians. I seek an audience with your queen to bring word of grave peril to all Cho-ja.'

The guard twittered in a clicking language, then said, 'Word will be sent.' He turned and clicked loudly down the hall, and several pa.s.sing Cho-ja workers turned to look at Miranda. After a few minutes, another Cho-ja, wearing some sort of mantle around his shoulders, appeared at the entrance. He made a fair imitation of a human bow, and said, 'I am one who advises, and have been sent to guide you. Please follow me and be cautious, the footing here is not easy for your feet.'

Miranda was too concerned by her mission to be amused by the odd syntax and the kindness of the warning. She followed the Cho-ja advisor into the tunnels. Her first impression was of a moist odour: a hint of a spice and a nutty tang. She realized this was the scent of the Cho-ja, and that it was not an unpleasant scent.

The tunnels were lit by some sort of fluorescence emanating from a bulbous growth that hung from odd supports that appeared to be of neither wood nor stone. As she moved down a long tunnel, she saw Cho-ja diggers excavating a side tunnel and saw a small Cho-ja extruding something from his jaws, his cheeks blown out to impossible proportions as he spat a compound onto the wall, then patted it into form and realized that these tunnel supports must be made of some body secretion.

In a deeper chamber she saw strange little Cho-ja hanging from the ceiling. They had long translucent wings which they beat furiously for a while, then rested, staggering the beating of their wings so that at least one of them in a group was always moving. Miranda realized that with miles of tunnels this deep and with thousands of Cho-ja living in these vast hives, they had to keep the air moving or suffocation in the lower tunnels would be a risk.

It took a good hike downward, but at last Miranda came to the royal chamber. This was a vast excavation, easily five storeys high with a score of tunnels leading away on all sides. In the midst of this huge chamber lay the Cho-ja queen, resting upon a raised mound of earth.

She was immense, her segmented body at least thirty feet long from her head to the end of her second thorax. Her chitin looked like cured hide armour, polished black, and from the withered appearance of her legs Miranda realized she never moved from this location. Her body was draped with a beautifully woven tapestry of ancient Tsurani origin. On all sides workers cared for her enormous body, polis.h.i.+ng her chitin, fanning her with their wings, carrying food and water to her. Above and behind her, and mounted back upon her thorax, a stocky male perched, rocking back and forth as he mated with her. Small workers surrounded him, tending him, while other males waited patiently to one side to play their role in the constant, endless Cho-ja breeding.

A dozen Cho-ja males were arrayed before the queen, some wearing crested helms and others without visible ornament; all greeted Miranda with polite, silent bows. On either side of chamber, smaller versions of the queen lay upon their stomach and attendants bustled about each of them. Miranda knew these were egg-bearing lesser queens, whose non-fertile eggs were pa.s.sed to the queen, who swallowed them whole, fertilizing them inside her body and then laying them again.

Miranda bowed low before the a.s.sembled Cho-ja. 'Honours to your hive, my queen.'

'Honours to your house, Miranda of Midkemia.'

'I bear a most dire warning, Majesty,' she began. Calmly Miranda related all that Pug had told her of the coming of the Dreadlord and the plans to relocate the Tsurani to their new world. At the end, she said, 'This world is lush and abundant, and there is ample room for the Cho-ja. I understand that what one queen hears, all queens hear, and that my words are even now being heard by your kin in distant Chakaha. Your magicians are legendary and we would welcome their aid in preparing the rifts to this new world for time is short and there are so many to evacuate.'

The queen continued her normal duties, then finally she said, 'We, the Cho-ja, thank Miranda of Midkemia for her warning, and we thank all who are concerned for the well-being of the Cho-ja.' She fell quiet for a long moment, and Miranda wondered if there was some sort of silent communication underway between this queen and the others. Then the queen said, 'But we must decline your kindness.'

Miranda could scarcely credit what she had heard. 'What?' she blurted.

'We will stay and we will die.'

There was a total lack of emotion in that statement, making it all the more alien for its starkness. 'But why, Majesty? Of all those on Kelewan, you are the ones who are most able to facilitate your own evacuation. You have powerful users of magic and can fas.h.i.+on your own rifts through which to escape.'

'Mara of the Acoma came to fetch me when I was a hatchling,' began the old queen. 'She said I was pretty and that is why I came here. Since then she visited me many times, as did her son, and his son, and his son. I enjoy those visits, as do all the queens who share the experience with me, Miranda.

'But no human has ever truly understood our nature. We are of this world. We can not abide anywhere else. We were of this world when humans first came here, in the time before history, and we will die with this world. It is what must be. Would you uproot trees and move them? Would you fish the seas and put creatures of the deep in alien waters to save them? Would you move the very rocks of Kelewan to save them? You humans are visitors here, and have always been such, and it is right you should move on, but we are of this world.' She paused for a moment, then repeated, 'We are of this this world.' world.'

Miranda was speechless. There was such a profound finality in the queen's words, that she knew debate was pointless. Feeling defeated she said weakly, 'If you have a change of heart, we will do what we can.'

'Again, we thank you for your concerns.'

'I will be away, for I have much to see to.'