They thanked the warrior and let him go—which he did standing a bit taller than when he had arrived. The few survivors would have given much to forget that battle, though they knew they never would. It had been a failure. The only thing that redeemed it was that no fault lay with those who had fought there or died there.
“Now,” said Lok-i-xan. “You say we have the beginning of a plan.”
“We have more than that,” said the emissary. “Before we destroyed the place, we took a few things. We took another of the tubes that were used by the coffin device. And, we have a very interesting book.”
“A book?” cried Lok-i-xan.
The emissary laid the book on the table before them, turning the encased pages one by one.
“Pictures,” said Precious Wind. “By all that’s holy! You found pictures.”
“More than that,” whispered the emissary. “We found the creature’s name.”
Chapter 10
The Last Monster
The return voyage to Norland took less time than had the preparation for it. Once again, the wolves had been a problem, once again Precious Wind had insisted that they were needed. Blue had been more phlegmatic than previously, though no less susceptible to seasickness. There were a number of extra passengers, Tingawan warriors, for whom room and feeding must be provided. Lok-i-xan had lamented that there was no time to prepare one of the large Tingawan ships, several of which were at anchor near the continent. The big ships had carried up to a hundred passengers, but none of them had sailed for years and fitting one for a voyage would have taken more time than they had to fulfill the plan.
Precious Wind had been laconic about the plan devised in Tingawa. It was better, she said, that it not be discussed, even among themselves. As the time grew nearer, they would go step by step, the first step being to “locate” the monster.
“I thought your locator device along with all those devices was too old and fragile to be moved,” Abasio commented to Precious Wind.
“The emissary found books,” Precious Wind told him. “Books with pictures and diagrams. There were even spare parts packaged in such a way that time scarcely touched them. The language was archaic. We called in our linguists. It was difficult, but we’ve built a new one, and a power source to go with it.”
“A power source?”
“It really takes very little power. It can be cranked or pedaled as we did the far-talker. Two men can keep it running all day.”
“What powers the ul xaolat, the thing master?” asked Xulai. “The monster uses it to move around, doesn’t it?”
“It must be powered by something hidden, something left over from that former time. We don’t know where it is. It could be up there.” Precious Wind pointed to the sky. “They had things up there that took power from the sun and sent it to earth.”
Abasio said, “And we’re assuming the creature still has Alicia’s blood on it? That seems rather farfetched to me. It’s been quite a long time since she died.”
She said, “It’s one of the few things we’re certain of. Remember the description of that coffin-shaped device the creature slept or hibernated in? Our people are certain it did all the maintenance for the creature. The device clothed it, bathed it, and—”
“You call that maintenance?”
She frowned. “Just listen! Remember, I told you on our voyage to Tingawa that we—that is, Tingawan agents—long ago journeyed around the world, finding the hidden monsters from the time of the Big Kill: one here, one there, well hidden, deeply buried. In each of those places we found a case with a top made of something like glass and we found cartons of metal tubes. In each of those glass cases we found a monster. Through the side of each case into the hip of each monster one of the tubes had been inserted.
“The first time our people went to the Old Dark House, they examined every corner. The cellar had nothing in it that looked like the glass cases we had found everywhere else. We knew the creature had moved its maintainer before; we assumed it had done so again. There were cartons of the maintainer tubes there, and we thought it possible the creature would come back for them. Our people didn’t disturb the cellar, but they did take one tube from a full carton at the bottom of a pile. They resealed the carton, so nothing would appear to be missing.
“Our people went through the entire building. There were no clothes, no remnants of clothes, not anywhere in the building. There was no food storage, no hint that any food had ever been prepared there. There were ancient fireplaces but no sign they had been used for years, decades, perhaps centuries. In the Old Dark House itself, we found no sign that anyone had slept, eaten, washed, bathed, anything that living people do . . . except one. They found secret rooms full of books.
“This convinced us the creature used books and it used maintainer tubes, but it did not use anything else. Yet it lived. Yet it was clothed. People had seen it. Our people concluded that when the creature needed information, it turned to books. When it needed rest, clothing, nourishment, or what we might call ‘cleaning and fueling,’ it received all those things from the tubes that were stored there as part of maintenance.
“It was only when our people went there for the second time, when Alicia died, and found the case open did they realize that the interior of it was similar to the glass coffin-cocoon devices we had destroyed all over the world. This told us we might have made a terrible mistake the first time we were there: the creature may have been inside,
