“I am Genghis O’Leary. We met at the Kalindan embassy in Zone,” he told her.
“Of course! I was trying to figure out how I could have known you!”
“My apologies for this. I’m even more tired than you are. I’ve been here less than forty minutes, and I’ve slept even less. Still, we Pyrons are more nocturnal types and I can manage. This other gentleman is Har Shamish, Security Officer for the consulate here and quite a capable agent. He will accompany us and smooth things through to the border, as well as acting as a bodyguard of sorts until we reach Quislon. After that, you and I are on our own.”
“You make it sound so threatening. Surely it’s not as bad as all that!”
Shamish said, “I’m afraid, madam, that if we spend any more time here, it will be even worse. There is no way I could fight my way out of this city, and with all those cameras, we certainly can’t
She thanked the consul and bid him farewell, and walked out with the two Pyrons.
The sight on the night vision cameras of the striking winged Amboran flanked by two blocky, sinister, cobralike Pyrons would have startled the most jaded watcher.
She was surprised to find that the odors in the air, the sounds of the great city, all the lights and action, seemed just as vibrant and active at night as in the daytime.
“Big cities never sleep,” O’Leary noted. “They just have different routines for different times.”
“I do not see as well at night as in the day, normally, but I can make do through here,” she told them.
“It’s the lighting. The walkway and building and commercial lighting is so concentrated that it lights up the air over us,” Shamish explained. “It won’t be the same once we get out of the urban area. On the other hand, if your vision is best in daylight, ours is best in darkness, and it takes very little light for us to see perfectly well. We should be a good team.”
Jaysu could barely see the great mountains beyond the city, but she knew they were there by the lack of any sense of life along them save some sleeping birds. As they rode on the moving walkways, she noted that they were paralleling the rock wall rather than heading toward it, and in fact they seemed to be moving slowly back toward the sea, although well away from the harbor where the big ships came in.
“Where are we going?” she asked them.
“First we take a boat,” Shamish told her. “That takes us out of Alkazar and their jurisdiction, not to mention some of their prying eyes. Once we’re aboard, I’ll explain the rest. You never know what’s monitored here.”
They eventually reached a low-lying, small boat basin. Most of the boats were fishing craft of various designs, none longer than twenty meters or so, but there were some private craft among them in a small marina. Now it was time to walk. “That’s the boat there,” O’Leary told her, although she could see little except bobbing shapes in the darkness. She followed closely, one of the Pyrons in front, one behind her, relieved that the Pyrons took slow, deliberate steps on their fragile looking legs, which allowed her to keep up even though her feet were killing her after so many days of hard floors, hard woods, and plastic.
As they got closer, she could make out shapes on one of the larger private boats. It was a sleek, streamlined, dark blue and gray yacht, an elaborate sailing vessel, and didn’t have smokestacks at all.
“We use a different power in high-tech waters,” Shamish told her. “In all other cases, we use sail, although there’s a way to stoke a small boiler for emergencies if we must. Just go aboard and find a spot out of the way.”
The Pyron on the boat seemed tense; she could sense them, coiled like springs, ready to strike at any enemy, but when they saw the Pyrons with her, they relaxed and got ready to cast off.
They used no sails for this, letting go fore and aft. Then, before she was even at an out-of-the-way point on the stern, there was a high-pitched whine of engines below. The running lights came on and they eased out of the slip, turned, and headed for the breakwater.
“As soon as we pass that flashing beacon there, we will be safely out of the district and, in fact, Alkazar,” Shamish said, using a thin tentacle emerging from under his hood to point.
“Where are we going, then?” she asked.
“Tonight we’ll head west along the coast, then go ’round the point and down just a few kilometers under sail. That’ll put us in nontech territory for a short while, but it will allow us to turn in and reenter Alkazar via the Corbino River. It parallels the range—the Solarios Mountains, as they’re called through there—and will get us upriver to the limits of navigation at Zadar Station, which is a good 140 kilometers up and in a tropical rainforest. Not too many Alkazarians there, which is excellent, and less snooping, although they still monitor the place with other gadgets and gizmos. We should get a local guide there who’ll take us as far as the point where it will be impossible to avoid the Solarios. Then it’s up and over. At each point we’ll be under intense scrutiny. We will have to be on our best behavior, and also have to depend on corrupt people staying corrupt. If so, we should be to the border and you should be done with this bloody hex in just a couple of days. Now, I suggest you leave the sailing to us and try and get some sleep. We’ll let you know if there’s any trouble.”
That was easier said than done, now that she’d been so rudely roused and marched down here, only to be told that the dangerous adventure was only beginning. Still, she found the sea motion almost welcome now, and while the accommodations below were basic and not designed for anything with wings or anyone who slept standing up, she could manage. With the familiar rolling motions of a gentle sea, but absent any of the noise and vibration she’d become accustomed to, she fell asleep without even realizing it.
She awoke quite late, or so it proved to be once she’d splashed cold water all over herself and made her way up to the deck.
She had thought that she’d slept hardly at all; she ached and creaked as if she hadn’t had a good sleep in days. But when she got topside, she saw that they had not only reached the nontech hex area but had gone through it and were on a river. The sun, too, was not just up, it was almost overhead, signifying that it was close to midday.
She found O’Leary on the afterdeck, unnervingly lying, serpentlike, looking out at the shore. The great head, which was integrated into the body, turned, and those huge orange and black eyes with narrow pupils stared at her.
“Hello,” she called. “Goodness! How long did I sleep?”
“Eleven hours,” O’Leary answered. “You must have been as tired as I was.”
“You slept almost as long?”
“No, I slept for about five, I just
“Where are we, exactly? This is quite unusual to look at.”
“We’re almost ninety percent there,” he told her. “If they hadn’t had to stop a few times for authorization checks, we’d actually be ready to disembark now. Damned officious little teddy bears!”
“What bears?”
“Teddy bears. That’s what they look like. Back where I came from, they used to give children toy stuffed bears that looked a lot like these critters, and they were called teddy bears for some reason. Don’t know why— they just always were. Some things are like that. Anyway, that’s the way I think of ’em. Teddy bears gone bad.”
She looked out at the riverbank. Although they’d said it was a huge river, it looked relatively narrow by Amboran standards, at least at this point. Perhaps it had been much wider downstream.
The banks on both sides were covered with jungle, and so thick that only more jungle was visible in between. The river itself was about sixty meters across at this point, substantial but not impressive. The heat and humidity, too, were very high, but not worse than much of Ambora.
“Have you been through here before?” she asked him.
“No. I’m going by briefings, maps, and whatnot. Shamish was here once before, so he tells me, but never has been inland Up the Wall, as even the locals call it.”
“The Wall?”
“The big mountains. They always strike everybody, even the natives, like some kind of massive stone wall. Don’t they seem like that to you?”
She looked off in the distance. The range was never far away anywhere in Alkazar, it seemed, and right now it seemed not much farther, jungle or not, than it had back in the city.
