“Margy?” I thought he said.
“Mar-agern,” she corrected him.
“But you…she…Naumi! Except for the hair, she looks exactly like M’urgi! They could be twins! What’s going on?”
Naumi held up his hand, hushing him. “Ears are quivering over there at the guard post. Let’s find somewhere less public. May I suggest the dorm common room? Plenty of room for the…ah…people who have joined us. The reunion doesn’t start for two more days, so there’ll be no one there but us.”
Chatting over his shoulder about the weather, the beauty of the sunset, how wonderful it was to see everyone, Naumi led our group past the guards at the gate. We went down a central road and turned right to enter one of the large buildings facing the side street. Inside, Naumi took us straight back through the building to a large room opening onto a central courtyard.
“All right,” Naumi said. “Somebody tell me what’s going on.”
We looked at one another. Gloriana took a deep breath, and said, “This all started when Falija’s parents left her with me…” She went on to describe briefly how that had happened. Falija, dutiful as ever, picked up the story from that point: her fostering on Tercis, her acquisition of the mother-mind, the threat on Tercis, our travels to Fajnard, where we had picked up Mar-agern, and our trip to Thairy. She said we had learned that the way-gates go one way in pairs, one coming in, one going out, and had verified that in the cave we had come in through.
“You came through that thing up on the cliff,” Naumi said. “So that pool of light is a way-gate! I found it the first year I was here, but I’d never heard of way-gates, and it seemed a bit dangerous to try on my own. I’d almost forgotten about it!” He turned to Margaret. “But you called me by name. Both of you.”
I said, “When I…that is, when we were a child, I, we invented imaginary people, roles to play, fantasies to act out. Now me was a warrior. I said to myself, ‘I will be a queen,’ and ‘will be a’ turned into ‘Wilvia,’ and there really is a Queen Wilvia, but we don’t know where she is. Margy was our shaman…”
“That’s M’urgi,” cried Ferni. “The woman I’m in love with, the reason I came to Thairy! She’s a shaman! She’s been captured by tribesmen. They won’t hurt her, at least not for a while, but…”
“Shhh,” Naumi said. “Just a moment.” He turned to me, I suppose because I was the eldest of the group. “I’ve found it isn’t smart to believe or disbelieve too early in any situation, but one thing we need to know immediately: Are any of you in immediate danger? Are you being pursued? Is there an emergency of some kind?”
I turned to the others, who looked quite blank. Even Falija shook her head, no, not right now.
Naumi turned back to Ferni, took him by the upper arm, and sat him down. “Now. Everyone sit. Flek, will you and Poul get us something to drink? How about our visitors? Are you hungry? Well then, just something to drink while Ferni tells us whatever he has to tell us, because that does sound like an emergency.”
Ferni, openly staring at me-Margaret and other-me-Mar-agern, began his story with the arrival of another Margaret on B’yurngrad. “Her name was Margaret,” he said. “She was twenty-two. She was from Earth.”
“So were we,” Mar-agern and I said simultaneously.
Ferni went on with M’urgi’s name change and education by the shaman. “I wasn’t with her again, not for years,” he said. He told of his search for her, of their ghyrm-hunting in the northlands. “I love her,” he declared almost defiantly. “We love each other, and they took her! The tribes are being eaten by ghyrm, and they want her to kill them all, which she can’t do by herself!”
“The Siblinghood won’t help?” Naumi asked.
“I can’t reach anyone above midmanagerial-not-allowed-to-decide-anything-unless-it’s-in-the-book!” cried Ferni, pounding the table with one clenched fist. “Which makes me think there must be some great crisis going on somewhere. Someone may be available when I get back, two days from now, but I knew our old talk road was assembled here, and I thought we might come up with some answers.”
“Talk road?” asked Falija.
Caspor laughed. “We used to call it that. When we had a problem, we’d talk about it, sometimes forever, and eventually we could almost always figure it out. Ghyrm infestations of tribesmen on another planet are a little outside our expertise, I’m afraid.”
“Possibly not,” said Flek. “The company has been working on a weapon.”
“May I ask, what company?” I asked.
“My grandfather was Gorlan Flekkson Bray, originally from the city of Bray on Chottem. He didn’t like some of the family ways, as I understand it, so he moved here, to Thairy, to start a company he later called Flexxon Armor. In Bray, he’d traded with the Omniont races for technological information. Here on Thairy, he recruited some very bright young people who developed their own refinements, and he began by manufacturing high-quality armor for the colonies…”
“Are the colonies under attack?” I demanded.
Flek shook her head. “Not yet. Everyone knows what the Mercans are like, though, and we’re right in the middle of Mercan space! So, while we publicly supply armaments for the colony police and the frontier scouts, we’re also developing and stockpiling very-high-tech arms and armament to help the colonies resist invasion. Gorlanstown, up the coast a way, is the only city large enough to furnish our work force. We have twenty different buildings there, under twenty different names, so that almost no one knows the full extent of what we do.”
“Are you sure you should be telling
