and furious faces. Chaumel was hammering his chair arm.
«Catch me if you can!» she cried, and took off toward planetary north.
Another fifty meters, and Plennafrey transported them from Klemays valley to an isolated peak. Brannel, a huddled bundle of knees and elbows at her feet, was silent. Keff thought the Noble Primitive was terrified until Brannel turned glowing eyes to them.
«Oh, Magess, I want to do this!» he exclaimed. «It would be the greatest moment of my life if I could make myself fly. I could never even imagine this out of a dream. I beg you to teach me this first.»
Keff grinned at the worker males enthusiasm. «I hope you'll feel as energetic when you find out how much work it is to do magic,» he said.
«Oh, it feels so good to be free again!» said the voice in his ear. Carialle, knowing in advance where they were going, reconnected instantly with Keff's implants. «I have to keep slowing down so I don't lose my audience. They're such quitters! I've almost lost Potria twice.»
«Any unwanted watchers out there, Cari?» Keff asked, pointing his finger so the ocular implants could see.
«No spy-eyes here yet,» Carialle's voice said after a moment.
Plenna shot in over the balcony, which was a twin to the one at Chaumel's stronghold, and hovered a few centimeters above the gray tiles.
«I mustn't land, or the ley lines will indicate it,» she said.
Brannel hopped off and dashed inside.
«Good luck!» Keff called after him. Plenna lifted the chair up and looped over the landing pad's edge to wait beneath the overhang.
Brannel felt the floor humming through his feet and forced himself to ignore it. The discomfort was a small price to pay for associating with mages and having them treat him as a friend, if not an equal. Even a true Ozran magess had been kind to him, and the promise Mage Keff had made him—! The knowledge put a spring in his step all along the corridor walled with painted tiles. At the green-edged door, he turned and put his hand on the latch.
«Ho, there!» Brannel turned. A tall far-face with five fingers strode toward him. He had a strange, flat-nosed face, and his eyes turned up at the corners, but he was handsome, nearly as handsome as a mage. «You're a stranger. What do you think you're doing?»
«I have been sent by the magess,» Brannel said, leaning toward the house servant with all the aggression of a fighter who has survived tough living conditions. The servant backed up a pace.
«Who? Which magess?» the servant demanded. He eyed Brannel's prominent jaw with disdain. «You're not one of us.»
«Indeed I am not,» Brannel said, drawing himself upward. «I am Magess Plennafrey's pupil.»
That statement, and the casual use of the magess's name, shocked the house male rigid. His tilted eyes widened into circles.
Brannel, ignoring him, pushed through the door. The room was lined with hanging cloth pictures. He went to the fourth one from the door and felt behind it at knee level. Gently, he extracted from the hidden pocket a thick bundle. He forced himself to walk, not run, out the door, past the startled house male, down the hallway, and out onto the open balcony.
The chariot appeared suddenly at the edge of the low wall overlooking the precipice, startling him. Keff cheered as Brannel held up the packet and waved him onto the chairs end.
«Good man, Brannel! Where are you, Cari?» Mage Keff asked the air. «We're on our way back to the plain. Yes, I've got them! Cari, I can almost read these!»
The chair swept skyward once more. Now that his task was done and reward at hand, Brannel indulged himself in enjoying the view. One day, he would fly over the mountains like this on his own chariot. Wouldn't Alteis stare?
«Are those what they look like?» Carialle asked, from her position over the south pole.
«Yes! They're technical manuals from a starship,» Keff said, gloating. «One of our starships. The language is human Standard, but old. Very old. Nine to twelve hundred years is my guess from the syntax. Please run a check through your memory in that time frame for,» he held a trembling finger underneath the notation to make sure he was reading it correctly, «the CW-53 TMS Bigelow. See when it flew, and when it disappeared, because there certainly was never a record of its landing here.»
Keff turned page after page of the fragile, yellowing documents, showing each leaf to the implants for Carialle to scan.
«This is precious and not very sturdy,» he said. «If anything happens to it before I get there, at least we'll have a complete recording.» The covers and pages had been extruded as a smooth-toothed and flexible but now crackling plastic. In a tribute to technology a thousand years old, the laser print lettering was perfectly black and legible. He wondered, glancing through it, what the original owners would have said if they could see to what purpose their record-keeping was being put.
«Are these documents good?» Plennafrey asked, over the rush of the wind.
«Better than good!» Keff said, leaning over to show her the ship's layout and classification printed on the inside front cover of the first folder. «These prove that you are the descendant of a starship crew from the Central Worlds who landed here a thousand years ago. You're a human, just like me.»
«That makes everything wonderful!» Plennafrey said, clasping his wrist. «Then there will be no difficulty with us staying together. We might be able to have children.»
Keff goggled. Without being insulting there was nothing he could do at the moment but kiss her shining face, which he did energetically.
«One thing at a time, Plenna,» Keff said, going hastily back to his perusal of the folders. «Ah, there's a reference to the Core of Ozran. If I follow this correctly, yes . . . its a device, passed on to them, not constructed by, the Old Ones, pictured overleaf.» Keff turned the page to the solido. «Eyuch! Ug-ly!»
The Old Ones were indeed upright creatures of bilateral symmetry who could use the chairs reposing in Chaumel's art collection, but that was where their similarity to humanoids ended. Multi-jointed legs with backward-pointing knees depended from flat, shallow bodies a meter wide. They had five small eyes set in a row across their flat faces, which were dark green. Lank black tendrils on their cylindrical heads were either hair or antennae, Keff wasn't sure which from the description below.
«Erg,» Keff said, making a face. «So now we know what the Old Ones looked like.»
«Oh, yes,» Brannel said, casually standing up on the back to look, as if he flew a hundred kilometers above the ground every day. «My father's father told us about the Old Ones. They lived in the mountains with the overlords many years past.»
«How long ago?» Keff asked.
Brannel struggled for specifics, then shrugged. «The wooze-food makes our memories bad,» he explained, his tone apologetic but his jaw set with frustration.
«Keff, something has to be done about deliberately retarding half the population,» Carialle said seriously. «With the diet they're being forced to subsist on, Brannel's people could actually lose their capacity for rational thought in a few more generations.»
«Aha!» Keff crowed triumphantly. «Tapes!» He plucked a sealed spool out of the back cover of one of the folders. «Compressed data, I hope, and maybe footage of our scaly friends. Can you read one of these, Carialle?»
«I can adapt one of my players to fit it, but I have no idea what format its in,» she said. «It could take time.»
Keff wasn't listening. He was engrossed in the second folders contents.
«Fascinating!» he said. «Look at this, Cari. The whole system of remote power manipulation comes from a worldwide weather-control system! So that's what the ley lines are for. They're electromagnetic sensors, reading the temperature and humidity all across Ozran. They were designed to channel energy to help produce rain or mist
