two of them, others only big enough to pass Jask Zinn, channels into the heart of the bright, hard sea, which made the massive structure seem, abruptly, less like a sea than like a mammoth growth of coral…
“Bacteria jewels,” Jask said.
They stretched on either hand for several miles, glittering until they fell away beyond the curve of the horizon, a numbing extravaganza of explosive tint, related to the clump of bacteria jewels that served as a landmark between the enclave and the tainted village from which they had fled, but much larger than that tiny growth, inconceivably more extensive.
“How far—” Jask inquired, pointing stupidly, his slim hand trembling before him.
“A hundred miles,” Tedesco said.
“That much?”
The bruin seemed humbled by the display fully as much as Jask was. “Perhaps twice or three times that,” he said.
“So bright.”
“Even brighter by dark,” Tedesco said. “Likely, it is no older than the formation that stands outside my village — but has found some richness in the soil or the air, or in some other circumstance, which caused it to sprawl so.”
“The Ruiner caused it,” Jask said, adamant.
Tedesco said, “There is no such creature.” He turned away from the soaring wall of luminescence, looked both ways along the barren no-man's-land between the stunted woods and the Wildlands. “We seem to be alone.”
Jask said nothing. As Tedesco stood and beckoned him to follow, as they stepped out onto the dark, dead soil, he drew his knife, looked at the blade and wondered where best to drive it into himself. He did not want to linger. He wished a swift death.
His suicidal reverie was interrupted by a barked, military command in a voice he knew too well: the General. An instant later the sound of prewar weaponry ripped apart the stillness of the borderland as the Pure soldiers sought to get the espers properly in their sights.
“Quickly!” Tedesco shouted.
The earth boiled up, foamed like a mad creature, settled into slag at Jask's feet.
Unthinking, terrified, he leaped across the molten pool and ran after the lumbering man-bear.
The General issued another command.
A bolt of energy caught one of the reaching tips of the wavelike upper structure of the bacteria jewels, shattered that into a fine, bright dust, like glassy snow that settled over them.
“Here!” Tedesco called, turning, standing beside one of the larger channels between the arms of bright crystals.
Jask ran toward him.
Tedesco opened fire on the soldiers who had ventured out onto the baked surface of the unfertile land. One man screamed, danced backward, brought down, flaming, by a weapon he had never expected a tainted creature to possess. Another, decapitated by the bruin's second shot, stumbled forward, spouting blood, waving arms that were no longer intelligently directed; after a few erratic steps, the corpse collapsed into a gory bundle, gripping fingers frozen as if they wished to scratch a burrow in the soil.
A beam burst against the wall of jewels next to Jask, cored it, reaming out chips of glassy stuff.
A moment later Jask leapt into the opening and kept on running, the roar of the battle deafening as the crystals picked it up, amplified it, gave the illusion that an army bayed at his heels.
He ran for several minutes, following the winding course of this channel of the great labyrinth, until, at last, he stumbled, exhausted, and fell to his knees on the polished floor.
Tedesco was right behind him. “They won't follow,” the mutant gasped, leaning back against a sunburst of blues and greens, made larger than life by the colorful backdrop.
It was then that Jask realized he had entered the Chen Valley Blight, the Wildlands, where the Ruiner reigned supreme. In his panic he had forgotten all about suicide. He had even lost his knife.
11
The Watcher stirs restlessly, though its slumber is profound.
Temporarily withdrawn from thought of any kind, it feeds mindlessly on the web of forces that contains it, replenishes energies of the soul that have been wasted by years of waiting, centuries of anticipation…
In time, it will wake.
It must.
Perhaps its sleep will end naturally, at the time it has planned to arise from its bed.
Or perhaps it will be stirred to consciousness by a strengthening of sympathetic psionic resonances that have just now pricked it for the first time.
The Watcher is meant to watch and wait.
Even a Watcher, however, must sometimes rest.
It stirs, sighs, subsides, feeds and continues its long nap…
12
The whites of Tedesco's eyes were green, and the wrinkled black flesh of his face, shiny with sweat, gleamed at many points with salty emerald droplets. He led Jask into a large, jewel-walled, jewel-floored chamber that was fully forty meters in diameter, though the ceiling lay just a meter overhead. In the center of the room he shucked off his rucksack and let it fall. The whumpf of its impact on the glittering floor echoed in that place like the beat of distant wings.
Jask dropped his own gray sack of supplies and sat down. His thin legs were too weak to support him much longer; if Tedesco had wished to go on even another hundred yards, the Pure would have been forced to stay behind. He was trembling all over, uncontrollably, like a man with the ague, though his symptoms represented only fear and exhaustion.
Tedesco sat down, too, generating more winglike reverberations, which the two of them listened to for a time, until the silence was again complete and until they had recovered their breath.
“We'll spend the night here,” the bruin said. He indicated the sea-colored walls and said, “Deep in the formation, where it's all greens and blues like this, the lights are the least bothersome at night.”
“You've been here before?” Jask inquired, staring at the glassy walls around them. They had come through areas of yellow and orange, of red and violet and finally into these cool vaults.
“Not in this particular room,'' Tedesco explained. “But I've explored several other branches of the structure. I've been fascinated by it since I was just a child.”
Jask was intrigued by what was, to him, a twofold revelation: first, that anyone would find the Wildlands “fascinating” rather than terrifying; secondly, that Tedesco had ever been a child. He knew, of course, that the bruin had not sprung fully grown from his mother's loins. Still, to imagine Tedesco playing with toys and toddling around like a human child…
Tedesco sighed, as if he had been listening in on Jask's thoughts and had to agree that childhood now seemed an impossibility, and he said, “When my esp powers began to bloom, I realized that my life might depend on my familiarity with the Wildlands. And now it seems that I was quite correct.”
Jask looked at the two prewar rifles lying beside the mutant, cold and black and deadly, and he said, “How many of them did you kill?”
“A couple,” Tedesco said vaguely.
Jask looked down at his own hands folded in his lap, and he tried to sort out how he felt about these murders. If Tedesco had not returned the soldiers' fire, neither of them would have reached the entrance to the
