Sterling Lanier - Hiero's Journey

He told the others this, and they went cautiously on. Three more great curves, and the light was quite strong enough to make the guttering lamp unnecessary.

The faint calling and piping of birds came to their ears now, and even the human noses could catch the sweet scent of the air which poured down the shaft.

“Let me go first.” Hiero took the lead again and soon saw the great, opened doors ahead. He absently noted the shattered hinges and, when he stepped outside, the cleverness of the device amazed him. For the two huge doors were made of something on the outside which imitated weathered, gray rock and yet which must have been far more impervious than any granite. The Unclean had been indeed cunning to penetrate their secret and so quickly follow on his traces.

All this raced through his mind as he drank in the cool air of the tropic dawn, but he urged the others on as before.

“Hurry,” he said, “hurry! We can’t delay yet! We may not be safe for hours!” He gave Luchare, who was stumbling, his arm again. He was oblivious to the packet to which she clung with her other hand, for her telescoped spear was now tucked through her belt.

The four set off to the south over the boulder-strewn waste onto which the huge tunnel had opened. Limping and staggering, they went on, no one questioning Hiero’s iron determination or right to drive them thus. Aldo now frankly leaned on his heavy staff, something no one had seen him do before.

Still they staggered on, their breath coming in painful gasps, their muscles twitching and burning. The ground was semi-desert, tall weeds and thorn bush growing up through patches of rock and scree. The cool air of dawn gave way to the burning heat of morning and (very slowly now) they hobbled forward. Time seemed to pass with terrible slowness.

Then it happened. Hiero, who had been listening both with his mind and his other senses, felt it first.

“Down!” he shouted and, falling, pulled Luchare close to him. Aldo, too, fell prone, while the bear simply collapsed.

First came a gentle tremor of the earth, so slight it might have deceived them into thinking it was a muscle spasm of their own overused bodies.

Then the earth began to shake and heave, rising and falling in a great wave, as if the tiny atoms of flesh which clung to it were being tossed in some inconceivable blanket. For the first time, Gorm let out a howl of sheer terror.

A distant, muffled roar filled the air. Slowly the heaving of the troubled earth died away. A ringing in their ears also ceased. They raised their heads and looked at one another. Hiero was the first to grin, his white teeth flashing in a countenance so dirty it looked like pure mud. Then Aldo laughed, a deep-throated, ringing sound. Hard on his heels a bird began to sing nearby, tentatively at first, then bursting into its full series of rippling cadences.

Luchare kissed Hiero. When she pulled her lips away, she murmured drowsily, for she was almost asleep from sheer exhaustion, “What was that?”

“That,” Brother Aldo answered as he helped them both up, “was the button marked ‘self-destruct’ on the central control board. Right, my boy?”

“Yes. I gave it four hours. What a race of men! After five thousand years their death still works! At least the Unclean got nothing from them. Nothing but destruction. The House too. And yet—if it hadn’t held them, I couldn’t have done it.”

They looked north in silence. Where there once had been a wide, level plain, a vast, shallow bowl had now appeared, its sides and rim of raw tumbled earth and chunks of riven rock. The low trees and scrubby bushes had vanished, lost in the rubble caused by the great explosion.

“We’d better move,” the priest said. “Klootz and the men are apt to be way up north by now, and we need to push on as soon as possible.”

“Your road should be easier henceforward,” Aldo said, the sun highlighting the gray in his once snowy mane and beard.

“I hope so,” Hiero said wearily. “But I still haven’t found a computer. And this army of theirs wasn’t a real percentage of what the Unclean could put into the field if they wanted to.

“Besides,” he added, “S’duna’s not dead. I would have known somehow if he’d been down there. He wasn’t. We have an appointment to keep somewhere, he and I.”

“You may not have found a computer,” the old man said, “but look what Luchare is carrying. She found a stack of these things on an apparently abandoned desk. Possibly someone’s study area. I could read the title. Try it yourself.”

Half-numb from what he had been through, Hiero scanned the title of the small, flat book which Luchare had handed him with one finger. “ Principles of a Basic Computer,” he read in halting English, the lost language. Inside were plastic page after plastic page of diagrams and close-printed text. He could say nothing and felt choked. Here was how a computer could be built, perhaps by anyone! The other two smiled at the look on his dirty, sweat-streaked face.

“Look,” Aldo said, using his finger in turn, “it says, ‘ Volume I.’ Luchare found a stack of them. And she has the other two, Volumes II and III, as well. She called me over and I read off the titles. But I think she knew, somehow, even without me!”

Wordless, Hiero pulled Luchare’s arm around his waist, and the three humans and the bear began to retrace their steps, moving north like cripples over the barren and shattered landscape. Gorm tried to have the last word, or rather, thought.

No one ought to move so fast, he grumbled. From now on, let’s try to move at a calmer speed.

The world moves at a certain speed, Aldo answered, after a bit. We all must learn to move with it.

Abbeys, the:Theocratic structure of the Kandan Confederacy, comprising the Metz republic in the west and the Otwah League in the east. Each Abbey has a military-political infrastructure, and the Abbey Council functions much as the House of Lords in eighteenth-century England, with all science and religion also as its prerogatives.

Batwah:Trade Lingua franca; an artificial language used throughout the areas bordering the Inland Sea, and well beyond in some places.

Buffer:Giant bovines, probably mutated bison, which migrate in vast herds through the western Kandan regions on an annual basis.

Chespek:Small kingdom on the Lantik Sea, often allied to D’alwah and equally often at war with its immediate neighbor.

Children of the Night Wind:An intelligent, bipedal species of mutated, man-sized feline; runners of unbelievable speed. Bred by the Unclean for warfare, they managed to escape their masters and establish themselves in a far country. Proud and volatile, they are in no sense Leemutes.

Circles:Administrative areas, named by color, of the Unclean and its Masters of the Dark Brotherhood. Hiero passed through three, the Red, Blue, and Yellow, as he went south and east. Until his journey, their existence was unknown.

D’alwah:Largest and most developed of the east coast states on the Lantik Sea. A kingdom, organized as a benevolent despotism, but where commoners have few rights. A debased branch of the Universal Church exists.

Dam People:Aquatic rodents of human intelligence and more than human bulk, who live on artificial lakes in the Metz Republic, under terms of mutual toleration; probably mutated beaver.

Dark Brotherhood:Their own name for the Masters of the Unclean. The fact that they use the word “dark” indicates that they sought universal conquest and, more important, gloried in it and realized that they were, in fact, basically evil. Modern Satanism, in its real sense, is a parallel. (See Circles; Unclean.)