For nearly a full minute, Thomas was speechless, unable to believe his luck. He opened his mouth to speak, but then realised that he couldn't actually think of a question. After all the agonising, he couldn’t think of a single thing to say. He racked his brain frantically, and while he was doing so his eye fell on the red sun again. “I couldn’t help but notice your fascination with the red sun, which we call Derro. If it’s not too private or personal a thing, I’d like to know what it means to you, why you were staring at it so intently. Please tell me if the question offends you, and I’ll withdraw it and never ask again.”
“It is no great thing,” the slaver replied. “The red sun triggers an ancestral memory of our own sun, Cthillisol, which warms our ancient homeworld, Cthill, many thousands of light-years from here. Your red sun appears much smaller than Cthillisol, which is over ten times larger in our sky, but is almost exactly the same shade of red and reminds us of the time when we walked freely on the surface, basking in its rays. Unlike your race, who have no memories from your ancestors and are born with a completely blank, empty mind, we contain a great many ancestral memories, going all the way back to the very dawn of our race, and under the right conditions they rise to the surface, so that we relive a portion of one of our ancestor’s lives. It happens frequently, and is unimportant to our daily lives, of no interest except to historians and cthillologists, or so it was until we became stranded on this world where we are barred from the surface by the hellstar, what you call the yellow sun. Now these ancestral memories evoke what in your race would be called homesickness, if we allowed ourselves to experience such a pathetic emotion.”
“Stranded?” asked Thomas softly. You mean you can’t ever go home?”
“That is correct. The device we used to travel here was destroyed during a conflict with a race native to this world. We are waiting for others of our kind to come, to restore contact between us and the rest of our civilisation.”
“Will you all go home then?” asked Thomas.
“Some will,” replied the cthillian. “For most of us, though, this world is our home and we have no desire to leave. Even so, though, the sight of a red sun in the sky can still stir profound feelings.”
“Have you explored many worlds?”
“Many beyond number, and we have settled colonies on some of them, those that can support herds of food animals compatible with our biochemistry. We farm them and breed them, to increase the size of their livers and hearts. Also to lower their intelligence, making them more docile and compliant.”
Thomas swallowed nervously. Herds of food animals? Was that how they saw mankind? Would they be breeding and feeding on us if the yellow sun didn’t keep them off the surface? He decided to change the subject. “What’s your homeworld like? Is it very beautiful?”
“I doubt that you would think so, and beauty is not a concept that has much meaning to us, although we have come to understand it from contact with you. The surface would be too dark for your eyes in any case. Most of the sun’s light is blocked before reaching the surface by the sky plankton, which covers the whole of the day side, not just the habitable crescent. If you ascended into the sky, to the altitudes where the winds even out the temperatures between day and night, you would see that the sun hangs above the horizon, moving only in a small circle around a fixed point in the sky during the course of the year that lasts about ten Tharian weeks. The ground vegetation, which grows mostly in dense forests, is many shades of ashleen, a shade of infra-red beyond the range of your vision and which would appear almost black to you. The gravity is low enough that we can levitate continuously, without tiring after a time and being forced to return to the ground as we are here. That’s in the habitable crescent, of course. Nearer the centre of the day side it is too hot for my species to survive, although other forms of life thrive there. The night side is almost lifeless, although rivers and air currents carry enough organic matter to support a very limited biosphere.
“So you don’t have days and nights there, like we do here?”
“No. The planet takes as long to rotate on its axis as it does to circle the sun, so the same face of the planet always faces the sun. There are cycles of greater and lesser light, though, caused by sunspots that can cover up to half the face of the sun, but they are irregular and cannot be predicted.” The creature’s telepathic voice gained a dreamy, nostalgic quality, as if it was lost in a memory. “When it grows dark, the plants produce fruiting bodies in every shade of ashleen, some of them luminescent, some shining in short wavelengths of light that might be visible to human vision, and they release spores that spread in clouds across the sky. The trilings go through their breeding cycle at the same time, their larvae spinning webs that reach miles into the sky, held up by flotation bladders, that catch the spores so that the adults can eat them.”
“Filter feeders!” said Thomas in fascination. “On this world, we only have filter feeders in the oceans.”
“The atmosphere of our world contains enough flying and floating life that it can completely block sunlight from reaching the surface, plunging entire continents into darkness. Up in the clouds, though, there are entire ecosystems of hunters and hunted, and some of them grow to great size. The largest of all are land based, though, such as the balhorns that live in mountain valleys and settle permanently in place. Every part of their bodies then withers away except their mouths, hundreds of yards across, that catch everything that blows through on the wind. They are covered with poisonous spines to deter predators, and in ancient times our ancestors harvested those spines as weapons.”
“Weapons?” said Thomas. “So you fight wars, like we do?”
“No more. Once we did, back in the childhood of our race. We divided into factions and fought over matters that now seem ridiculously trivial. Over the space of a million years, though, we matured. A ruling elite emerged to which all cthillians pledge their loyalty for the greater good, and now we live in eternal peace and prosperity. Every cthillian knows and accepts their place in the hierarchy. Disobedience, crime, dissatisfaction, such as exists in your human societies, is unknown. Our civilization has achieved a perfect stability that marks our emergence as a mature race.”
“Fascinating!” exclaimed Thomas. “I wish I could go there. There are magical artifacts that allow us to see in almost total darkness.”
“You wouldn’t last long, even if it were possible,” replied the slaver.
“Why not?” asked Thomas. “Is the climate inhospitable to human life?”
“Do I really have to explain such a self evident thing to you?” exclaimed the cthillian impatiently. “I had begun to think that perhaps you were a little more intelligent than the average human, intelligent enough for me to converse with you without shame, but now I see I was mistaken. If you cannot see the danger of visiting the homeworld of my race, then you are as stupid as the rest of them. I will speak with you no longer.”
With that, it increased its pace and left the wizard behind, staring after it in crushing disappointment. Thomas had been so taken up with the conversation that he’d completely forgotten that the creature he’d been talking to was ruthlessly evil, and would have simply killed him without a thought in other circumstances. For a few brief moments they’d been simply two travelling companions passing the time with one another, and he fancied that even the slaver had temporarily forgotten that the person he was talking to was supposed to be a member of a despised lower race. Slavers were social creatures, after all, and solitary slavers, separated from their fellows, might get lonely, just as humans did. Perhaps this one had been grateful for any companionship, even the companionship of a creature that would normally have been its slave. If so, there might well be more opportunities to talk to it in the days ahead, and Thomas excitedly began thinking up questions he would ask it.
☆☆☆
More days and nights went by, and as the mountains loomed closer ahead of them the savannah gradually gave way to forest. The garran trees, one of the few trees able to survive and even thrive in the semi-arid conditions, were about twenty feet tall with tough, spiky leaves, their trunks bare below ten feet due to the grazing of long necked forest goats. They were ablaze with golden blossom that was faintly luminous in the darkness, attracting great clouds of pollinating fireflies, and Lirenna gasped out loud at the beauty of the display they made.
“I always dreamed of seeing the famous garran trees in bloom, equally beautiful during the day or night,” she said softly. “My grandmother told me of them when I was little. She used to live in this part of the world before she met my grandfather.”
“Are there shae folk in Haldorn, then?” asked Shaun. “I never heard of there being any in this part of the world.”
“A few small communities live in the woods, that’s all. This is where my roots are, though. My human grandmother was Haldornian.”
“I never knew that,” exclaimed Thomas in surprise. “Why did your parents move to Haven, then?”
“My grandfather was from Haven, and he took my grandmother back to live with him. She was happy there. She loved my grandfather very much and the Havenfolk took her to their hearts and made her feel fully at home, but she never stopped missing the garran woods, especially during the spring and summer. Now I can see why.”
“Be silent,” said the slaver suddenly, the telepathic command taking them by surprise and nearly making the demi shae jump out of her saddle, a look of revulsion on her face. She’d almost forgotten how thoroughly unpleasant cthillian telepathy was. “I sense a large band of humans nearby, moving in this direction.”
“How many?” whispered Shaun, guiding his horse over to it.
“At least thirty, maybe more. Get off the road.”
They obeyed, moving into the trees and dismounting, but the undergrowth was very thin and the illumination from the garran trees and the fireflies meant they were still visible from a great distance away. “They’re bound to see us,” muttered Douglas, fingering the shaft of his hammeraxe. “I hope they’re friendly.”
“Who could they be, moving around in the dead of night?” whispered Jerry. “Bandits?”
“Not necessarily,” replied Lirenna. “After all, we’re moving around in the dead of night and we’re not bandits.”
“Silence,” repeated the slaver. “They are here.”
They all fell silent and stood like statues, straining their eyes and ears for any sign of the approaching strangers, but it was several more minutes before they heard the crunching of horses hooves on dry leaves some distance away, leading Thomas to wonder about the acuity of the cthillian’s telepathic senses. As Douglas had warned, they saw each other while they were still a hundred yards apart, and they saw that the Haldornian group was composed entirely of men. They prayed for a moment that they might be soldiers, honest men who would pass by in peace, but that hope faded when they got close enough to see clearly.
They were a nasty looking bunch. Swarthy and grim, dressed in strips of cloth pinned in place with jeweled brooches and carrying scimitars of real steel that were deeply notched from frequent use. Their leader, a giant of a man with an eyepatch and a nasty scar running down his cheek, gave a wicked grin and an evil laugh when he saw them and beckoned the other cutthroats in their direction. The soldiers and the trogs drew their weapons and the wizards readied their spells, preparing to fight for their lives. None of them had any doubt any longer that these were outlaws, moving around under cover of darkness, and that they intended to kill them, the men at least.
They considered mounting up and trying to escape but, weighed down by all their potholing equipment, they had no chance of outrunning them, and it would take too long to discard all their heavy baggage. Jerry and the trogs, mounted on small ponies, couldn’t have outrun them in any case. They had no choice but to stand and take their chances. Thinking of what would happen to Lirenna and Diana if they fell into the outlaws’ hands, Thomas grabbed a handful of powder from his pouch and got ready to cast his most powerful spell, for what it was worth. He looked around for the slaver, thinking that this would be a good time for it to demonstrate its much boasted of power, but the subterranean creature was nowhere to be seen. Run off, he thought bitterly. So much for the so called superior being. He returned his attention to the outlaws and prepared to die in a futile attempt to defend Lirenna. The women, he corrected himself hastily.
The outlaws formed a ring encircling the eight questers, and their leader cast his eyes hungrily over the women and Shaun’s sword, its blade reflecting the glow of the garran trees and the fireflies.
“We don’t want any trouble,” said the soldier in his best warning voice. “All we want is to be allowed to pass in peace. Please let us pass.”
The outlaws’ leader said something in Haldornian to his men, making them laugh evilly. Then he turned back and spoke directly to Shaun. “My name is Ashlazzar, which means spiller of blood." He grinned widely, revealing black, rotten teeth. "You may have heard of me, I have a certain reputation in these parts. Many people say that I am cruel and vicious, that I kill without mercy and take what I want, but the truth is that I am a reasonable man. Give me your weapons, your money and your women and I give you my word that I will let you go free.” One of the other outlaws sniggered, and Ashlazzar shouted a furious word at him, making him scowl and grit his teeth.
“If you want them, come and get them,” said Shaun, lifting his sword. “I promise you, though, that some of you will not live to enjoy any of them.”