M’urgi said, “Yesterday, I would have considered that to be good news! Before I saw that armada overhead…”
“Your plan must proceed,” Gardener said to me. “I am told you did well as a tactician. I have faith in your plan.”
“M’urgi, Naumi,” said Mr. Weathereye. “You haven’t met the Gardener. She is the one who has kept Wilvia safe, and she is a friend of Earthians and Gentherans. She has been in this business from the beginning.”
“Then you know about the seven roads,” I said.
“I do,” she replied. “Which we’ll soon be walking.”
“Provided all goes well.” M’urgi grimaced.
“Well or ill, still we must walk,” said the Gardener. “It took us over a thousand years to find a sevenfold road that would exist for a little while in the now, the here! It took two hundred years to arrange the emergence of the walkers and another lifetime to prepare them. We have only hours to accomplish what it has taken over a millennium to arrange. Even if this world ends, we must walk.”
The horns moaned again, more loudly. “Where did they get those horns?” I cried. “They sound like the end of the world.”
“They’re from old umoxen,” M’urgi said. “The tribes find the bones and horns on the prairies, where an umox has died. The older the animal was when it died, the longer the horn and the more mournful the sounds are. Look! They’re dropping cargo.”
The ships were sowing seeds into the sky, dark specks that drifted downward. At the center of the encampment, something hummed briefly, faded to a drone, then to a hissing sound, like waves on a shore. Out on the prairie, tribesmen danced, waving their spears and insulting the Quaatar at the top of their lungs.
Thousands of the specks were drifting toward them, becoming visible as circles of pale tissue supported by radiating arms, the whole almost transparent, floating downward like tiny parachutes. Looking straight up, we could see the ghyrm dwindling into the distance. As the falling creatures passed an invisible line, the tissue darkened, the arms curled. When they were close enough to be seen in detail, the arms were shriveled, the disks of pale tissue were darkening. The last few dozen feet, the things crumpled and fell, littering the ground around us, unmistakably dead.
Out on the prairie, the tribesmen went on shouting, and I cursed my own stupidity!
“Tell some of them to pretend to die,” I shouted. “I didn’t think of it until just now. The Quaatar will stop dropping the ghyrm unless they can see some of us dying!”
M’urgi ran down the hill, spoke urgently to one of her messengers, who sped off. I, watching from the hill behind her, saw the message relayed to others who fled away in their turn, a spiderweb of messengers, radiating off into the chaos of the camps. A few men near the hill began to stagger, clutching first their throats, then their bellies, falling and writhing with arched backs and histrionic faces. A few more, not too many, then others, while some of the first played dead.
The ships turned in a wide swoop that brought them lower, and lower still. The sun faded behind the rain of ghyrm. I looked down to find I cast no shadow. Well, if I could not see the sun, likely the creatures in those ships couldn’t see what was happening on the ground! I tried to estimate how many ghyrm were being dropped. Millions. Millions. “How many could they have had?” I cried to Mr. Weathereye. “Each of those, a human life?”
“Shipload after shipload of Earthian children, year after year,” said the Gardener from behind me. “Plus we understand they’ve learned to clone them. We can’t stay to see the end of this, however. It’s time for you and the others to go. Round them up quickly. We go to Cantardene, then to Chottem, swiftly through a gate on Hell, and so to Tercis, where the others are waiting. It will take us less than an hour.”
“Who?” I asked. “Who’s going?”
“Everyone who came with you from Thairy, plus M’urgi,” said Weathereye. “It’s time. What we do, we must do now, while the road is open and the enemy fully occupied here.”
We were fetched variously: M’urgi, reluctantly, from her station amid the battle, where she had been whispering orders to tribesmen; Mar-agern from her post outside the tent, weapon at the ready; Margaret from her seat by the fire in the tent where Bamber Joy, Falija, and Gloriana lay asleep. I found Ferni in the thick of the shouting, and dragged him away as he protested. Meantime Mr. Weathereye found Ella May and gave her certain instructions.
“No time for you to pack anything,” the Gardener told M’urgi, who was reaching for her kit. “Bring weapons only.” We joined the others, who were moving quietly through the clearing. One by one, we squeezed between the two big trees and lined up outside the shining gate, all of us keyed up, nervous, frightened, each of us trying desperately not to show it.
“The first stop is Cantardene,” said the Gardener. “We may find no one at the Cantardene gate. Their ruling class is in those ships above. In case they’ve left a guard, Naumi, Ferni, and M’urgi should go first, armed and ready, the rest to follow.”
We came out in the mausoleum on Cantardene, empty of any living thing. I heard voices from outside and went to look out over the slanting bulk of the huge door that rested on one corner and one hinge. Outside in the plaza, a few soldiers knelt at a gambling game beside the stone of sacrifice.
The Gardener came up beside me, pointed to the tall stone, and said, “That is empty, too. Whirling Cloud of Darkness-Eater of the Dead is elsewhere. Now the next gate.
