* * *
The following morning found the travelers at the caravan staging ground, which was located at a column which lay beyond the outskirts of Mastmarch – one of the few that remained intact at that distance from the settlement. The structure was transected by black crystalline shafts throughout much of its length, and a troop of small, feathered bipeds uttered shrill cries as they chased each other from crystal to crystal.
Adimar regarded the arboreals. “Are these daroogs?”
Merinel consulted her shawl. “Iniikrii.” she corrected him. “Near-sentients; they can be taught to speak, to some extent.”
The caravan consisted of several dozen vehicles, of which the cargo lifter represented one of the smallest; the largest by far was a seven-sectioned crawler with spherical wheels and an armored carapace of faintly iridescent green. The caravan-master, a Strirk woman of middle years, stood atop the lead section of the crawler as she attempted to take stock of the participants.
“Merinel and Adimar of Tenbor!” she cried. “Humans of Tenbor, are you present?”
“We are here,” called Merinel, as Adimar extended his cable ten feet into the air.
“Great Stars, who or what is that? Oh, I see … I see … merely a device, as opposed to an anatomical protuberance. Approach the crawler, if you please.” The caravan-master focused the five black orbs of her right eye-cluster on the travelers, while the five on the left continued to swivel independently, tracking events of interest throughout the caravan. “Your patron Entity was good enough to forward your details to me; therefore we simply need to ensure that there has been no miscommunication or substitution. Please verify your final destination?”
“Jnuluk,” replied Merinel, the Szerar Domain (such as it was) having been deemed by the Tenbor Entity as too noteworthy a goal for public knowledge.
Before the caravan-master could continue, an iniikrii bounded atop the containers of the cargo lifter, raising itself to its full height and flaring the colorful crest of feathers that adorned its head. Upon closer examination, Merinel realized that there was little about the creature to suggest the avian other than its feathers. It had no beak, and the bare quills that served it as whiskers gave it an appearance of bristly indignation.
“Where!” demanded the iniikrii in a shriek. “Go where! Where, where!”
“Begone, pest!” cried the caravan-master. “They have already identified Jnuluk as their destination. If that is not meaningful to you – as I suppose must certainly be the case – you must resign yourself to unenlightenment. Oh, flames and wreckage, why do you not leave!” Adimar gently but firmly removed the iniikrii from the lifter with a coil of his cable, and the outraged creature squealed and scuttled its way across the cable’s length, leaping to safety with a baleful backwards glare.
“Thank you. Infuriating creatures – I can only hope that not too many of them choose to accompany the group, but if they do of course we are bound to care for them; they are far too clever to dismiss as beasts. Now then, have there been any changes to your cargo relative to the manifest which was sent to me?”
Presumably psychotic breaks are not what she has in mind, thought Merinel. “No.”
“And may I trouble you repeat the secret phrase which was established to validate your identity and cargo for this journey?”
“Do not squander your passion on anxiety or regret,” recited Merinel.
“Excellent advice, I am sure. There, I believe everything is in order. If this is your first journey through a wild area, you have chosen wisely: the landscape between here and the Ninth is predominantly savannah, and the fauna thereof will have no interest in meddling with a massed troupe of uncategorizable creatures, led by what appears to be an arthropod of leviathanic proportions. Indeed, the only obstacle to our speedy progress would appear to be our own organizational deficits … hey!” The caravan-master broke off as an iniikrii snatched away her tablet and bounded towards the pillar. “Now blast it all, that is really going too far!”
Smiling, Merinel directed the lifter back towards the periphery of the caravan. Shortly after the vehicle stopped moving, an iniikrii hopped aboard, clambering over the casks and containers. “Food here? Food here yes?” the creature inquired.
“No food here, little friend,” replied Merinel. “Best you begone before my companion loses patience with you.” Adimar’s cable slithered meaningfully.
The iniikrii flared its crest and gave an outraged trill. “Snake bad! Snake man bad! Snake man go now!”
“Out of the question,” said Merinel. “The snake man is my friend, and the snake man is not going anywhere, so if you wish to remain in our company you must treat him with respect.”
The iniikrii dropped to its haunches with a portentous frown. “Iniikrii stay. Watch bad snake man. Friend safe.”
“Another protector,” sighed Merinel. “At this rate I will need to issue uniforms.” She glanced at the length of shawl wrapped around her arm. “Any concerns?” she whispered.
Golden threads shifted to form the word “none.”
“You are unwise to tolerate the iniikrii,” opined a nearby Trylm, who was busy securing his own vehicle, a weatherbeaten half-track with a cargo bed full of large ovoid stones. The Trylm sat upon the ground in order to converse with the Humans at eye level. “They understand our ways only well enough to identify and pursue mischief. This feathered scalawag will surely help himself to whatever he can, edible or not.”
“These are serious accusations, little friend,” observed Merinel. “Your honor has been impugned, and you have been branded a scalawag. I hope your good behavior will disprove these sleights.” The iniikrii responded by presenting its buttocks to the Trylm and ruffling the tuft of feathers that served it as a tail.
The Trylm chuckled. “I doubt it understood more than three words of all this. No matter. My own possessions are far too heavy for an iniikrii to spirit away; I will keep an eye on your cargo whenever you cannot. My name is Bernial, a male.”
“Merinel, female. Pleased to meet you.”
“Adimar, male. Likewise.”
At this point the caravan-master’s voice emerged from the speakers of the respective vehicles. “Your attention, gentlebeings! We are now ready to depart. Any vehicle which is unable to maintain the caravan’s scheduled velocity should now be attached to the main crawler’s outriggers; if your vehicle falls behind, the tow-barge will pull you forward to a spare outrigger and you will be held accountable for all related expenditures. The caravan will only halt for the direst of emergencies! By nightfall we should be safely ensconced at the campgrounds of the Ninth Transverse Crevasse, where the local Crew detachment will be quick to revoke the travel privileges of any who have abused the benefits of caravan transportation. Off we go!”
The crawler and its dependents lumbered into motion, eventually achieving a modest pace that was well within the capabilities of the lifter and Bernial’s half-track. As promised, the unremarkable vegetation of the staging ground soon gave way to rippling vistas of bronze and umber grasses. The landscape was regularly interrupted by immense pentagonal plates of a ceramic substance that had somehow remained free of soil and growth, and a linear preponderance of these plates in a foreward direction represented a serviceable road for the caravan. In those areas where the chain of plates was broken, regular travel had prevented the grasses from achieving their full growth, and there was little to impede the caravan’s progress.
Merinel tried to summon up an appetite for the textual offerings available on her shawl, but to no avail. The autonomous node was restricted to a densely encrypted trickle of logic to and from the Tenbor Entity, the better to mask its presence from anyone in the caravan who might detect it, making communication with Byx impossible. Losing herself in the burnished horizon of grass seemed a superior alternative to feigning interest in any other missive.
The morning passed swiftly in this fashion. Occasi
onal herds of grazing animals bounded away from the caravan’s tumultuous passage, and if their predators were in the vicinity, they did not make themselves known. Adimar, Merinel noticed, had comported his cable into an intricate series of dense whorls which covered his entire torso, and appeared to be meditating.
The tranquil momentum of the journey was interrupted shortly before noon when Bernial’s halftrack jolted sharply to the left and began skidding sideways. Bernial soon brought it to a halt, but the rear gate of the cargo bed had swung open and several large stones had spilled onto the ground. The iniikrii, which had been dozing in the sun, leapt upright with a shriek.
Merinel stopped the lifter. “Are you all right?” she called out.
“Quite all right, thank you,” replied Bernial. “I seem to have discovered the only patch of uneven ground between Mastmarch and the Ninth.”
The caravan-master’s voice emerged from the half-track’s cabin. “Is everything under control? Do you require repairs, or a tow?”
“And be held responsible for all related expenditures? No, thank you,” replied Bernial as he exited his vehicle. “I need only a few minutes to retrieve my cargo, after which I will quickly catch up.”
“Very well,” responded the caravan-master.
Bernial grunted as he lifted the nearest stone. “It is at times like these that my particular stock in trade becomes a burden, if you will pardon the expression,” he said. “Friend Adimar, am I right in thinking that your ropelike accessory possesses a strength of its own? If so, could I implore you to aid me in reloading these blasted ovoliths?”
Adimar, who had been looking back along the landscape they had just traversed, nodded his assent and leapt to the ground. His cable extended itself from his right arm and snaked around two of the stones, twining about them several times and hoisting them into the air.
As Bernial placed his stone into the cargo bed, a strange noise reverberated through the air, and the cargo lifter lowered itself to ground with a gentle whine. Adimar’s cable went slack, and the two stones in its grip dropped to the ground; one of them nearly crushing his foot. Merinel quickly unwrapped a length of shawl; the threads moved in a sluggish, meaningless pattern. “Tenbor?” she whispered. “Tenbor?” She put her thumb to the pattern of scratches on the lifter’s pushbar; the display remained dark.
“Never fear,” said Bernial. “This reaction sometimes takes place when the ovoliths make sudden contact. Friend Adimar, are you injured?”
An unfamiliar voice rang out as Bernial approached Adimar. “Beware! In his right hand he carries a neural stunner!”
Adimar, still in the process of untangling himself from his listless cable, lashed out at Bernial’s hand with a powerful kick, sending an object flying through the air. At the same time, the iniikrii leapt onto the Trylm’s head with a shriek, pulling at his ears. Bernial, bellowing in rage, swung at the much smaller Human, but Adimar had detached a length of his cable and was using it to good effect despite its inanimate state – entangling the Trylm’s blows in its coils and flailing its ends at Bernial’s face.
Merinel, searching among the lifter’s contents for something that might serve as a means of defense, noticed that the shawl had regained enough of its function to flash “WEAR ME” along its length. With a muttered oath, she wrapped the garment over her hair, feeling its filaments reach out to her scalp to form a makeshift crown.
“Tenbor, we’re busy here.”
“I have already evaluated the situation and determined that Adimar and his ally are more than capable of overcoming Bernial.”
“His ally?”
“Please remain still while the shawl completes its reconfiguration.” More of the shawl’s metallic threads found their way to Merinel’s scalp, and soon her view of the melee was washed away by the Verch.
Tench and the Inner Child still stood upon the antenna spire, but Tench had resumed his apparent struggle with the node, ignoring the whimpering Child’s pleas for attention.
“Tench is on the verge of breaking stasis once again,” reported the quicksilver dove. “It is unclear how much progress he had made on his own in this regard, but the process was clearly hastened by the interruption in the node’s power supply.”
“The interruption – what was that?”
“An enervation device utilized by Bernial. Having momentarily separated you from the caravan, he triggered the device in order to disable any mechanical and logical defenses you may possess, trusting in his neural stunner and his superior size to counter any physical resistance. Had he succeeded, he would have absconded with the lifter. He was clearly able to determine that it contained sophisticated technology, although it is doubtful that he was aware of its exact nature. Luckily, he will not be able to overcome his opponents.”
“You keep referring to three combatants. Are you including the iniikrii?”
“Yes. However, their struggle need not concern you. Direct your attention to Tench. He is no longer distracted by the Inner Child persona. I need to evoke another of your subselves. My I do so?”
“Yes, of course.”
The sobbing Inner Child, in the act of wiping her nose on her sleeve, was replaced by the Provider. Gliding towards Tench, she wetted his brow with water from the ewer she bore. “Come away,” she murmured. “Rest.” Her voice was like a spring breeze at twilight.
Tench’s head drooped and his shoulders slackened. His stature diminished, and as he turned to face the Provider, Merinel saw that he himself had become a child. “I’m so tired,” he mumbled. “I’ll never be able to do it.”
Now it was the Provider who knelt, laying down her ewer to embrace the child. “All will be well,” she whispered. “I love you.”
The pair of them became immobile, and the Verch faded from Merinel’s senses. She wiped away the tears that she had not bothered to stave off with chanting.
As she pulled off the shawl, she noted that events in the physical world had settled down considerably. Bernial lay senseless upon the ground, while Adimar performed a series of diagnostic exercises with his reanimated cable. The caravan-master and two of her staff had arrived in the tow-barge and were conducting what appeared to be a measured and professional conversation with the iniikrii.
Adimar noticed Merinel’s return and halted his exercises. “Everything is under control,” he reported. “Nothing is amiss with our cargo, I hope?”
“Nothing,” replied Merinel. “It looks like I need to retract my opinions on the irrelevance of your proficiency with violence. How in the world were you able to dispatch a Trylm so quickly with a limp cable?”
Adimar raised an eyebrow, and Merinel whispered a chant against blushing. “An infelicitous turn of phrase, but let it pass. The martial regimen of the Iron Goats has always included training for the contingency of a depowerment event. In the present circumstance, however, most of the credit belongs to Vral-tinnik.”
“Who?”
The iniikrii, having finished his conversation with the caravan-master, bounded atop the cargo lifter. “Allow me to introduce myself properly,” he said, in a voice much deeper and steadier than his earlier chittering. “Inspector Vral-tinnik of the Caravaneer’s Mutual Advocacy Guild, at your service. I apologize for not having been more forthcoming regarding my identity before now; I am sure you understand that discretion was called for.”
“Of course,” replied Merinel, blinking. “I … I hope you will forgive me for being a little disoriented. Are you not actually an iniikrii?”
“I am in fact an Ul-niikrii – a member of an iniikrii population group genetically enhanced centuries ago by the Haldanradan, or so it is believed.”
“I see. And among your hidden traits is the ability to render a raging Trylm unconscious?”
Vral-tinnik gave a trilling chuckle. “Not directly. Secreted upon my person was a microstiletto.” The Ul-niikrii displayed a sliver of glass. “It is – or was – loaded with paraly
tic venom. Bernial succumbed to its effects within moments.”
“I am very grateful,” replied Merinel. “Were you assigned to follow us specifically?”
“No, my sphere of operations is the caravan itself, not any individual passenger, and Bernial was indicated to us as a person of suspicion by the Crew. I have since been informed that your cargo is valuable and discouraged from further inquiry. In turn, I ask that you remain discreet about my true nature. With each person who learns of the presence of Ul-niikrii aboard the Ship, my ability to blend in with my simpler cousins is compromised.”
“Your secret is safe with me,” assured Merinel.
Vral-tinnik turned to Adimar. “Friend Adimar, your assistance in apprehending Bernial is most appreciated. I hope you understand that my earlier habit of referring to you as ‘bad snake man’ was simply an attempt to stay in character.”
“You are forgiven, if you will permit me to observe that you seemed to throw yourself into the role most avidly.”
“Guilty as charged,” the Ul-niikrii replied with a smirk. With a formal bow and a flare of his crest, he returned to the tow-barge.
“If you are prepared to resume, you had best catch up to the main group,” called the caravan-master. “I have gone so far to reduce the velocity of the crawler by ten percent during this brouhaha, but such laxity cannot endure long!”
Merinel and Adimar, after ensuring that the lifter had fully regained its functionality, hastened to rejoin the crawler as it lumbered implacably through the waves of grass.