Soon Zeke's gaze was focusing and his voice mouthing toward sound.
'16d--lynk,' Zeke rasped.
'I know,' Carl reassured him. 'I saw it. I'll go back in and destroy it.'
Zeke clasped a black-fingernaded hand on his arm, .his bruise-quilted face gasping to speak. Before be could, the air shocked to an icy brilliance. The warehouse was filled with an enormous light. The radiance seeped through the cracks of the walls and streamed in great beams out of the windows and the back door. Then darkness.
The armor filled Carl with understanding: The
zotl lynk had inadvertently provided the necessary inertia to lynk the pig manure with the Werld-two weeks early. The armor also inspirited the news that unless he got himself into the warehouse within the next few minutes, while the lynk echoes were still strong, he would be unable to lynk at all. He would be permanently stranded on earthtwo.
He peered down at Zeke, whose tormented face was relaxing toward the semblance of a smile. 'Go-' he husked. -He wanted to tell Carl so much-about the. marvels of pain the zotl had revealed-about the supernatural calm inside the emptiness of the spirit where only pain can go-but his mouth barely worked. 'Youcan't do-anything for me.' His lips hooked toward a smile. 'Go-'
Carl used the lance to radio for help. He made Zeke as comfortable as he could, laying him in paineasing currents from. the lance. If only he could take Zeke with him-but his friend's inertia belonged to earthtwo, not the Werld. Carl's insides were jumping with the eagerness to go, but he still had to force himself to turn away from his friend. At the back door, he looked around and waved. Zeke's finger twitched. Carl walked into the warehouse.
A moment later, the door and windows flashed with a majestic fulgor. The darkness that settled back was salty with tiny lights for a long time afterward.
Carl appeared for a few seconds in Rataros. The black flames were frozen, still as megaliths, and in this pitch dark, the animal in him was close. He felt fear like a wetness inside him, cold and electrical. He was alone with that fear within the vacuum of himself. The armor had been taken away again.
Suddenly, horizons of red clouds appeared. Great strides of clouds! He tumbled into a gulf of skyles and cloudlanes, falling from lynk to lynk on his lightsecond-long journey to the eld skyle. The lance was still in his hand, and he clutched the weapon close to his body. He noticed then that he was garbed in a leather finsuit and strider sandals.
He was numb with the horror of losing Zeke, yet by the time the sky had brightened to the beaten bluegold luster of the Welkyn and the eld skyle's giant moss-veined walls were turning below him, awe had softened his feelings. The black waters of the eld skyle's lake gleamed deeply as opal. He slid over a fallpath to the wall of the lake. Thornwings were everywhere, cruising low over the water and dropping in dark bales. As he climbed down the wall, he saw the mound of pig manure on the'beach below him. Thornwings were gathering the dung and dispersing it on the waters.- Among the slopes of dung were scattered articles from the .warehouse: a chair, a houseplant, pots and pans, and Zeke's black-and-white-speckled notebook. He picked up the notebook and looked out over the lake, waiting for the eld skyle to speak.
Nothing happened. He waded into the lake and even immersed himself in the thick water. Still nothing. On shore, while he waited, he flipped through Zeke's journal. He read: 'Emptiness. Carl is gone. I'm alone. Really. alone. The connection with the armor has vanished. For the first time in over two years, I am just myself again. No inspelling. No surges. Strangely enough, that doesn't bother me at all. In fact, I'm glad. I guess I've finally learned: A man must love his own to stay a man.'
The gravel clacked behind Carl, and he jumped about with a shout. He saw a brown tangle of vines and vetch with a green scar glowing behind a fist-sized
birdhead. The thornwing's stately walk stopped a pace away;, and its tendriled arms lifted and opened.
''You've come for me, my old friend,' Carl acknowledged.
'Okay-we'll go.' He looked out over the eld skyle's lake one more time. The other thornwings were still splashing bales of manure into the lake. Somewhere in its depths Sheelagh's strangeness was being digested. And others, too. Someday he might meet them. If he hadn't killed the eld skyle by overloading. it. A pang of guilt cramped through him.
'Don't worry about me,' he heard the eld skyle's voice, far, far within himself. He startled. When he strained to hear, it was gone. Then: 'The spores you released were limited. Only eighty thousand or so people will catch light before the number of spores is exhausted. Their strangeness feeds me well. It pulls me away from you.'
The eld skyle thinned o$: Feebly, the voice returned, inside the ringing of his earbones: 'But listen. Though the Rimstalkers have taken back their armor, they've left you the lance.'
'Great,' Carl grumped. 'A sword and no shield.'
'More than a sword,' the shadow-thin voice said. 'It is a bomb. When you pull o$' the hilt, it will trigger a starfire geyser that will cut off any approach--a wall of impenetrable energy.
Use it to save your Evoe. The thornwing knows where to take you. That is all I can do for you-all that is left in me of you.
Goodbye, Carl Schirmer. And glad fortune to you.'
Silence hissed.
Carl smiled sadly and proudly. He saluted the eld skyle with his lance and stepped backward into the bristly embrace of the thornwing.
The thornwing carried him through several natural lynks, rolling down a fallpath in the intense, bluegold light of the Welkyn. The pure white and languorous clouds poured through the skyles on their endless spiral climb toward the shear winds of the Eld. Their gray velvet interiors blanked his thoughts, and he burned in the sliding silence with the power of his return. Zeke's notebook tucked into the back of his finsuit and the wounds from his zotl fight were the emblems of his striving. And Evoe was at the end of this journey. The lance in his firm grip was cold. Its alien works clicked and purred. In the open spaces, Carl took shots at rock spires and treetips, remembering the use of the lance. It was difficult without the armor to help him select the lance function and to aim. Then they dove through the Cloudriver for a long time, and there was nothing to see. The emptiness jammed him toward sleep.
