Crystal Gorge

“How long did that water keep on running down that slope?” Ariga asked.

“If I understood it correctly, it’ll keep on running like that for several hundred years at least. The last time I looked, there was a huge lake at the bottom of the slope, but that lake’s still growing. Give it a few more years, and it’ll be an ocean. The bug-people won’t be able to attack the southern part of Dhrall again.”

“I think you just lost me, Gunda,” Ariga said. “First you called our enemies ‘snake-men,’ but just now you called them ‘bug-people.’ Just exactly what are we going to have to deal with when we reach the Land of Dhrall? Are they bugs, or are they snakes? Or are they some odd mix of both breeds?”

“They’re all kinds of things, Ariga. We even came up against a variety of them that appeared to be bats—and you don’t ever want to encounter a venomous bat that does its hunting in the dark.” Gunda laughed suddenly. “There’s a clever little fellow called Rabbit on one of those Maag ships, and he came up with the idea of holding the bat-things back with fish-nets. I’ve heard that the nets snared thousands of the bug-bats, and they didn’t come around after that.” Gunda frowned slightly. “I’m a soldier, Ariga. I can follow orders, and I know how to use my weapons, but there are a lot of things going on in the Land of Dhrall that I don’t understand. I’ve heard that ‘the Vlagh’ is the leader—or maybe the mother—of the snake-bug-bat things that live out in the Wasteland. It lays eggs—like a chicken—but when the eggs hatch, the new little chicks aren’t anything at all like their older brothers and sisters. I guess that this Vlagh thing tampers even more than Dahlaine or his brother and sisters do. We kept coming up against things that seemed to be impossible—but we keep on winning, and I can’t for the life of me understand how we did that. If the dice suddenly go sour on us, though, I think we’ll be in a whole lot of trouble.”

“You’re just full of good news, aren’t you, Gunda?” Ariga said just a bit sourly.

Ariga found it to be very crowded on the big Trogite ships that had been hired to take them to the Land of Dhrall. He’d had to help Ekial lead the newly hired horsemen from several other clans down to the coast, so he was among the last of the Malavi to go onto one of the ships. When Ekial’s other friend—the one with all the pretty gold blocks—told them that he was going to put fifty thousand horses on a single one of those ships, Ariga laughed right in his face. “That’s ridiculous, Veltan,” he said. “You’ll need twice as many ships to carry the horses as it took to load up the men.”

“That might be true, Ariga,” Veltan replied, “if the horses stayed as big as they are now. Are you at all familiar with the word ‘tampering’?”

“Gunda mentioned it to me. He said that you and your family can play games with reality, and he referred to that as ‘tampering,’ and he said you do it all the time.”

“Interesting definition, there,” Veltan said. “Anyway, I’ll tamper with size this time. Your horses will be quite large before they go onto that Trogite ship, but as soon as they go on inside, they’ll be a lot smaller, and they won’t need nearly as much food.”

“How much smaller?” Ariga demanded.

Veltan squinted at the huge Trogite ship. “Oh,” he said then, “probably about the same size as mice are. There’s more than enough room on that big ship for fifty thousand mice, wouldn’t you say? And there’ll also be plenty of room for their feed as well.”

“Why did you hire so many ships, then?”

“To carry fifty thousand men, of course.”

“If you can shrink horses, can’t you shrink people as well?”

Veltan blinked and then he suddenly flushed with embarrassment. “I never even thought of that,” he admitted. “Now that you mention it, though, I probably could.” He put one hand on Ariga’s shoulder. “I’d take it as a kindness if you didn’t tell this to any of your friends, Ariga. For some reason, my mind seems to have blanked out. It’s probably one of the signs of old age.”

“You aren’t really all that old, are you?”

“I’m quite a bit older than I look, Ariga. I think it’s just about time for me to take a long nap—a very, very long nap. It appears that my mind’s already gone to sleep.”

2

They sailed from the north coast of Malavi at first light the next morning, and the blond-haired Veltan had suggested that Ariga might as well join them on Gunda’s fishing-yawl, which he referred to as the Albatross. Ariga had a few suspicions about that. Veltan had been quite embarrassed by Ariga’s suggestion that he could have saved time and money if he’d gone ahead and shrunk down the Malavi in the same way that he’d shrunk their horses. Evidently, Veltan didn’t really want Ariga telling stories to the other Malavi.

The weather was nice that day, so they’d covered a fair distance by the time evening was approaching. “Those big tubs you hired back in Castano don’t really move very fast, do they, Veltan?” Ekial said when the herd of Trogite ships lowered their sails and dropped the heavy bronze weights they called “anchors” into the water.

“I wouldn’t blink if I were you, Ekial,” bald Gunda suggested. “Our friend Veltan here is a master of cheating, so we’re probably a lot farther north than it might seem.”

“‘Cheating’ is such an ugly word, Gunda,” Veltan said rather plaintively. “We much prefer ‘tampering.’ I’m not really cheating anybody. All that I’m really doing is modifying time just a little bit—and distance as well, of course. The coast of sister Zelana’s Domain is pretty enough, I suppose, but we’re not really here to look at the scenery. My big brother needs us on up to the north, and I think we’d better do our best to make him happy. He tends to get grouchy when things don’t go the way he wants them to.”

“Did he ever manage to get his older sister calmed down?” Ekial asked.

“We hope so. Aracia’s having some problems, and Dahlaine sent Commander Narasan on over to her Domain to make her feel just a bit more secure. We don’t know for sure just where the creatures of the Wasteland will strike next, so we more or less have to cover the East and the North at the same time. Narasan will have the help of the warrior women from the Isle of Akalla, and we’re going north to help Sorgan Hook-Beak.”