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  “Mind if I hang on to it? It has to be magic of some sort and might be useful.” He looked at Cindella.

  “Go ahead.”

  Having sheathed the dagger, Anonemuss then toyed with the ring. As soon as he placed it on his finger, he disappeared.

  “Wow!” exclaimed Milan.

  Simultaneously, Erik’s voice rang out with amazement. “No way!”

  “Are you still here?” asked Athena.

  “What?” Anonemuss asked, surprised.

  “You’ve gone invisible, mate,” answered Milan.

  “Really?” He reappeared. “I didn’t see any change. You try it.” Anonemuss threw the ring over to Milan, who caught it and put it on. He, too, vanished.

  “Nice.” Anonemuss smiled.

  “This would be so cool back home. Imagine what you could get up to.” Milan’s snigger was the only indication of his whereabouts, unless Ghost wanted to concentrate hard on the pressure changes in the air around her.

  “I think Anonemuss should take that, too,” observed Erik. “It makes sense for our scout to be invisible.”

  Milan reappeared and gave the ring back with a rueful smile.

  “Erik.” Ghost was looking at the sky. “How about we make camp here? It’s getting near sunset, and that whole encounter shows we can’t just blunder through the forest; it’s dangerous.”

  “Good idea. Should we make a fire, though?”

  “I say yes.” Ghost replied. “There is a danger that planes flying overhead will see it, if they are looking for us. But who knows what other monsters are in the forest. A fire might keep them away, and at least it will allow us to see them.”

  Not long after, they had quite a lively blaze going at the edge of the glade, as far away as they could get from the dead creature in the fountain. Ghost and Milan were chewing nutribars provided by Athena. With the exception of B.E.—who was standing guard—everyone sat near the fire, listening to the crackling sound of the burning branches.

  “Hey! Look at this.” Athena was staring intently at the screen of the tracking device. “Our man is moving fast and sort of coming this way.”

  Ghost went over to see. The green dot was indeed moving back toward them, although he would pass a little to the east. And it was moving at a surprising speed.

  “Looks like he is in an airplane?” she suggested.

  “Could be.” Athena nodded. “Let’s hope he doesn’t go too far.” They watched the green dot for a while as it moved to the southeast. Eventually it ceased moving, which indicated that the scout they were tracking was more than fifty miles away.

  “Oh well,” said Athena. “At least we weren’t trudging all night in the wrong direction. We will have to go that way tomorrow.” And she pointed across the fountain to the far side of the glade.

  Chapter 10

  BENEATH THE SIGN OF THE BLACK LION

  After the humans had left them for another break, it seemed to Ghost that the glade was surprisingly quiet. Perhaps it was just that Athena and Milan were tired. Beside her, sitting on a fallen log, Milan was picking at clumps of moss.

  “I love the change of scenery”—he glanced up at Ghost—“but I wish I could dial for a pizza.”

  “You’re lucky I thought to bring nutribars.” Athena was looking through her large kit bag. “I also brought a torch—very handy—and a micro-thin sleeping bag.”

  “Oh, I don’t suppose you brought two of those?” Milan asked enviously.

  “I did, because I knew you wouldn’t have.”

  “Awesome, thanks.” He caught the pouch she threw at him in one hand.

  Athena dug out another small package. “What about you, Ghost? Want one?”

  “Sure, thanks.” It was possible for Ghost to alter the environment around her to cope with great extremes of hot and cold, but that took effort and concentration. It was much easier to take off her boots and slide into a thin sack made of fabric coated with heat-retaining emulsion. Soon they were all lying side by side, looking upward to where the glade allowed them a view of a darkening sky already rich in stars.

  “Just out of curiosity, Milan”—Athena tucked her bangs back behind her ear to look at him—“what did you bring with you?”

  “Um, my Atanski, a couple of Higgs handhelds, and my music—an awesome compilation.” He gestured to the headphones and music player beside him.

  Athena shook her head wearily. “I thought as much. You should really know when to abandon your party-idiot guise and get real. This is a matter of life or death.”

  On the other side of Ghost, just out of view of Athena, Milan pulled a face and silently mimicked Athena’s lecture, causing Ghost to smile.

  “Well, I’m going to repack half my gear in another bag and tomorrow you’re going to carry it.”

  “Hey, Ghost,” said Milan, blatantly changing the subject, “do you think it’s safe to sleep here?”

  “You mean, because of the dead monster?” Ghost replied.

  “Sort of. Don’t you think that there might be other dangerous critters around?”

  “Perhaps. Not here, though.” Athena looked about the glade. “Other creatures will be afraid of the snake-woman in the pool and stay away.”

  “Maybe, but if you’re thinking we should probably keep watches, Milan, then I agree.” Ghost turned to him and Milan shook his head in mock despair.

  “Damn, where are those humans when they would come in handy?”

  For a while the three friends lay in companionable silence. At first Ghost had been dismayed when Athena and Milan had insisted on coming with her, but right now their presence made her feel happy.

  “This puts everything into perspective, doesn’t it?” mused Athena aloud.

  Milan got up on one elbow so he could look across Ghost to her. “How do you mean?”

  “Well, we were all working so hard to, you know, get shoe production right, or something like that, and then there’s this world, right next to ours.”

  “I wasn’t working that hard.”

  “But you know what I mean. It’s like this is far more important. We have to understand the fundamentals first; we have to figure out what is happening to us, what the universe we live in is really like. Everything else back home is pointless until we do.”

  Milan lay back down. “Well, it’s certainly more interesting, anyway.”

  “You know what Erik said about the soldiers at the portal not fitting in here? I see it that way, too,” Ghost, too, had been pursuing her own thoughts. “The modern ones, anyway; they still had the full gradations of color. They didn’t look right for here.”

  “True,” said Athena.

  “So that makes me think there are probably other worlds connected through portals like the one we came through. Those soldiers came from somewhere else.”

  “Wow. Then there could be lots of worlds out here,” observed Milan. “Freaky.”

  “Yeah,” Ghost continued. “And perhaps each time a human colony left Earth, they created a new world for their journey.”

  “So, how many colony fleets were there? Is that, like, information you can access as queen?” For once Milan seemed genuinely interested in a conversation about the nature of the universe they lived in, a subject that had, by contrast, absorbed Athena and Ghost ever since humans had first appeared in Saga.

  “There were five colonies,” Ghost answered. “So there might be five whole new worlds out here.”

  “You would think they would have used the same ones again, though,” said Athena, “or even all participated in the same one, if that was possible. So there might not be the same number of worlds as colonies. And I wonder how they decided what world they wanted to play in. Was it just a question of taste? Of whether they wanted to play in fantasy worlds like this one or high-tech ones like Saga?”

  “I wish I was back in Saga.”

  “Already?” Ghost looked at Milan affectionately.

  “Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad to be here and to be on hand to help; it�
��s just . . . who would choose to live in a world without good punk bands?” He grimaced. “And pizza, and airboards, and parties, and hot chicks like Athena, and aircar racing—ouch!”

  Athena had successfully thrown a stick at Milan’s head, but all the same, she was laughing at him. “Anyway, Milan, you don’t know what the women are like here. You might change your mind when you meet some elves or something.”

  “Hot elfin chicks. Awesome.” He closed his eyes in happy contemplation, while Athena just rolled her eyes at Ghost.

  Before they had settled back down, Cindella materialized right beside them and soon after her, the avatars of B.E., Anonemuss, and Gunnar.

  “Hi. You guys are intending to go to sleep already?”

  “I’m not tired,” replied Ghost, “but I can’t speak for Milan and Athena. In any case, it’s getting dark; we may as well get some rest.”

  Cindella peered at the trees around them. “I wonder how safe it is to stay here.”

  “Yeah, we were discussing that.” Milan opened his eyes and winked at Ghost. “We were hoping you might stand guard.”

  “Oh certainly. We might have to take turns, though, so we can also get some sleep.” Cindella looked about at the others. “So, eight hours, divided by the four of us: two hours each. Anyone want the first shift?”

  Gunnar raised his hand.

  “Second?”

  No one.

  “All right, I’ll do that. Third?”

  B.E. looked at Anonemuss, who shrugged, leaving the choice to him. “I guess I’ll take third then.”

  “And that leaves Anonemuss on fourth. Right. In that case I might log out again and chat with Inny and the others a bit before getting some sleep.”

  “Same here,” added B.E.

  “See you in the morning . . . if it will be morning your time.” Athena worked one arm out of her bag to wave farewell. Their avatars froze while returning her salute and less than a minute later were gone.

  “I’m clipping out, too,” Anonemuss declared, before turning to Gunnar. “But you stay alert.”

  Ignoring this hostile comment, Gunnar came and sat on the fallen log, facing into the forest. Soon afterward, Anonemuss also disappeared. For a while there was near silence in the glade, just a gentle whisper from the treetops swaying in a light breeze. Above them were bright shimmering stars in unfamiliar constellations.

  Somewhere far away a fox, or wild dog, gave a shrill bark. Closer, Ghost could hear rustling, perhaps a small animal in the bushes. It was strange, not being in a city. It was so much darker, for a start, and then there was the sense of dislocation. They had no idea where they were, and in every direction lay the unknown. Despite the fact that her sleeping bag was so light and thin, it was very effective in warming her up and surprisingly, given the fact that she was in such an unfamiliar environment, Ghost began to feel drowsy. As she fell asleep, a part of her soul was singing with pleasure. Whatever the dangers, this was the kind of adventure she had long wished for and it was a welcome relief from the tiresome decision making expected of her back in Saga.

  An extraordinary cacophony of sound woke her. It was as if every bird in the world was clamoring for attention. And the maddening thing about the sound wasn’t that it was loud—it wasn’t much louder than the sound of traffic in a busy street in Saga—what made the noise impossible to ignore was the fact that although it sounded like a murmuring crowd, there were hundreds of distinct voices cycling repeatedly within it, each one demanding attention. Chirp—chirp—chirp, cried a bird to her left every minute or so. Too-weet, too-weet, went the slightly more frequent whistle of a bird behind her. In every direction and for some considerable distance, individual birds were crying out their existence.

  “Blue bolts of lightning! What’s that racket?” Peering out of his sleeping bag, Milan’s face was one dark frown.

  “Birdsong.”

  “Where’s my gun?”

  Milan sat up properly, lifted his Atanski to his shoulder, and fired an orange bolt of energy at a tree. After the crash of falling branches had died away, there was silence, a silence that seemed to register the astonishment of the whole forest at this unexpected violence. With a grunt of approval, Milan put the gun down and stretched out once more in his sleeping bag.

  “It’s probably not too wise to draw attention to ourselves.” Anonemuss was the human on guard duty and he came walking over to them.

  “I don’t care,” muttered Milan, his face turned away from the brightening sky.

  There was something meaningful in Anonemuss’s tone, something more specific than a general statement of principle. It caused Ghost to shake off her drowsiness and look at him. The scout nodded toward the fountain. With a shock, Ghost saw that it had been restored to the same condition as when they had first encountered it. Gone was the dead monster, with its giant snake coils, while back in place was the elfin statue and the welcoming inscription.

  “Do you think it’s still there? Alive again?” she whispered.

  “Could be.”

  Closing her eyes, Ghost extended her senses into the air around her. The patterns of the world were hers to control; all the substructure of the environment was laid bare, and all seemed in order, at least in her immediate vicinity. One of the great advantages to being a RAL—in fact, the great advantage—was this power she had been given to alter the conditions of the world about her. It may have cut her off from the rest of society, made people fear her, and perhaps even brought a cold and ruthless streak to her character, but it also made her capable of extraordinary deeds. Stretching her awareness all the way to the fountain, Ghost found the fault lines created by the magic in effect there. She also found a glitteringly evil, malevolent presence staring out from behind the illusion of the statue, watching them with hunger.

  “It’s there all right. I’m going to drop the illusion. You shoot her.”

  “You can do that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Set.” And she heard a click as he readied the gun. To untwist the flowing cords of energy that hid the monster was not difficult; easier in fact than steering fast-moving bullets through the air, because the streams of light coming from the fountain wanted to resume their natural course. As soon as Ghost felt everything fall properly into place, a burst of fire rushed across the glade, issued by Anonemuss’s gun. The shot was accurate and even if it had not been, she could have guided it to the target. The wicked semi-sentience was gone, again.

  “Now what?” Milan sat up, disturbed this time by the rushing sound of the pulse of energy and the crash of its impact. Athena, too, was awake and staring at the fountain. There the headless torso of the monster once more presided over the final lashing convulsions of the serpentine body.

  “It came back?” she asked.

  “Seems so,” answered Anonemuss, lowering the gun with an air of satisfaction.

  Milan gave a stretch, perhaps from a genuine physical impulse, or perhaps to demonstrate his unconcern. He was, as Ghost knew well, not given to letting any other male steal the limelight.

  “What’s for breakfast?”

  “Nutribars.” Athena reached for her kit bag.

  “No,” groaned Milan.

  A man facing torture could not have put so much expression into one word and Ghost gave him a smile. “You prefer snake meat?”

  After looking across at the remains of the monster for a few moments, Milan gave a shrug.

  “Nutribars it is then.”

  About an hour later they were on the march again in pursuit of the enemy scout, with Anonemuss invisible and some distance ahead, Cindella at the front of the rest of the party, and Ghost guarding the rear. She walked with her airboard slung over her shoulder, saving its power for the time being. It seemed very unlikely that they would be able to recharge it, or—more seriously—their weapons.

  With the sun up in a cloudless sky, the spaces between trees allowed hundreds of beams of pale sunlight to fill the air around them, giving depth to the forest
. It would have been easy to lose their sense of direction, for hour after hour they saw no real change in the scenery. Sometimes they had to step across streams, careful to search for a secure footing as they stepped through the bracken that covered the banks. Perhaps someone more accustomed to the outdoors would have figured out which way to go from the fact that the water was generally flowing from left to right, but Ghost put her confidence in Athena’s reading of the tracking device.

  It was well into the afternoon before the pattern of their march was broken. Ghost was the last to join the group that was looking with some curiosity at an ivy-clad stone tower. It was some hundred meters away, in the center of a large clearing that could have been a natural break in the forest or purposefully hewn into existence. The tower was tall, reaching high above the treetops, and Ghost could just see an amber-colored pennant streaming from the top with a black lion design upon it. The tower was square, but around it was a circular moat, about five meters wide. A drawbridge, visible from where they stood, was currently lowered over the water. Flanking the closed wooden door, on the narrow strip of land between stone and water, stood two ominous-looking statues: both were gargoyles, about three meters tall, with a sword in each clawed hand.

  “Well?” Gunnar asked. Everyone, naturally enough, looked to Cindella, who took off her glove so as to use her magic Ring of True Seeing. The avatar edged slowly toward the tower. They waited, patient and silent, until she returned.

  “It’s totally packed with magic and traps: the door, the windows, the roof—everywhere. And also the whole glade; not just the tower itself.”

  “Do you think those guards come alive?” asked B.E.

  “No doubt about it.”

  Anonemuss, currently visible, turned to Ghost. “What about you, Ghost? What do you make of it?” Perhaps he had been impressed by her dismantling of the illusion this morning. It was the first time Anonemuss had looked for her input, and Ghost realized that she welcomed his question, with its respectful tone. For some reason she wanted the good opinion of this human, perhaps because his overt dislike for Gunnar demonstrated a commitment to the people of Saga.