Journey - Book II of the Five Worlds Trilogy (10 page)

“Hold it, Sire,” Shatz Abel warned, halting their progress. Ordering Dalin to stay where he was, the pirate walked on, studying a heave in the ice.

After inspection he signaled Dalin forward, and they stood together, looking over a tall tumble of cracked ice blocks, which looked as though they had been blown up and out of the ice; around them the lake had refrozen, making a strange sculpture.

“Whatever did this was big,” Shatz Abel said.

Dalin scoffed, “It’s nothing but an ice fault.”

They walked on, but the pirate shook his head. “There’s more stories about this planet,” he said. “About things they tried when they were building Tombaugh City. Something like the old yarns you hear about alligators in the Martian aqueducts—”

Dalin guffawed. “You mean those tall tales about pets being let loose when they got too big?”

The pirate retained his serious look. “It’s all true!” Dalin laughed even harder, forgetting his hunger and thirst.

“Laugh if you want,” Shàtz Abel said. “You laughed about the goblins…”

Waving his hands in superstitious dismissal, the pirate walked on, away from the mound of ice blocks.

Dalin followed, his eye momentarily caught by what appeared to be a long black wiggle of movement under the ice.

“Shatz—” he began, then thought better of telling the pirate what he had seen; the man was superstitious as it was.

The king studied the ice, and again saw a long dark movement beneath them through the opaque blue; it slithered away from them and was gone.

Then the ice rumbled.

“What in hellation?” Shatz Abel shouted.

“I just saw—” Dalin began.

But then, before them, the ice broke upward in a mighty heave, and they beheld what Dalin had seen a glimpse of beneath it.

A long tendril, studded with jet-black suckers, drove upward through the surface; it was followed by two more tentacles and the beginnings of a bulbous head.

“Sire—get back!” the pirate shouted, as a crack of lurching broken ice drove toward them.

They dove to either side, and Dalin watched as the monster’s head broke from the surface, covered in dripping water; its flat red eyes regarded their surroundings while its tiny mouth made a horrible sucking sound.

With a mighty shudder the monster dropped back into the deep. A rush of falling ice dropped after it, and already the surface of the lake began to freeze back into place, monolithic chunks of ice forming a new frozen sculpture.

Shatz Abel was running toward the lately opened surface of the water.

“What are you doing?” Dalin shouted in alarm. The pirate ignored him, and drove himself forward.

“Sire—water!”

Dalin saw the serpentine movement of a tentacle under the ice beneath him; he needed no other incentive to move and soon stood beside Shatz Abel, who had fallen to his knees and was scooping cold water into his mouth from the shrinking ice hole.

“Water!” Dalin shouted, and drank his fill before the ice battled his hands and the hole swelled shut with a thickening film of ice crystals.

The two men stood, panting.

“That tasted like liquid gold!” Shatz Abel said. Dalin nodded.

In the near distance, there was another shudder of ice and two tentacles thrust up before dropping down again.

“Beginning to believe in tall tales, Sire?” Shatz Abel asked.

Wiping water from his mouth before it froze in place, Dalin said,
“Yes.”

A
day later, further refreshed from two close-by water openings, they climbed the far shore of the lake and left it behind. Another series of hillocks led them to a broad, snow-swept valley—and then, suddenly, there in the distance was Tombaugh City.

“It looks huge!” Dalin said, studying the skyline.

The pirate laughed. “It’s little more than an outpost! You’ve been living in the snow too long!”

What had appeared as a green glow from the distance now resolved itself into a brightly lit town bookended by two tall buildings. In between was a dotting of homes and lower structures; and, on the edge of the valley that separated them from the city, a port. As they watched, the needle-nosed shape of a freighter pulled upward in a burst of flame and was gone in a moment. Backdropping the city, hugging the horizon as if always on the rise, was the dark curve of Charon, Pluto’s moon, half as big as the planet itself and locked in synchronous rotation around its parent.

Shatz Abel ignored Pluto’s moon and pointed at the port.
“That’s
how we get off Pluto,” Shatz Abel said.

T
he valley, boulder-strewn and treacherous with ice and snow-covered craterlets, proved more difficult to negotiate than they thought it would. Once, Dalin had to pull Shatz Abel from Pluto’s version of quicksand, a seemingly benign patch of snow that effectively hid a deep pit bottomed with icy slush. The king was able to keep his grasp on the big man and haul him out; after that mishap, their progress was even slower.

But, a day and a half later, marked by SunOne’s stately warm progress above, they staggered, hungry and once again thirsty, to the fence that bordered Tombaugh’s port.

This they circumvented, being careful not to be seen, and made their way into the city itself.

It was now that Tombaugh’s bright lights, which had provided them with a beacon on their journey, proved to be a detriment. Their appearance, hungry, unshaven, dirty, bruised, and exhausted, not to mention without money, would have landed them in custody on the main street in a matter of moments. Shatz Abel was chagrined to see that Tombaugh was well patrolled by Wrath-Pei’s forces. Though it made their task more difficult, it by no means made it impossible.

They kept to the shadows and darkened ways between buildings, waiting for an opportunity to present itself. They picked a spot in the center of town, amid the gambling spots and bars. It was now that Shatz Abel’s confidence soared.

“Sire, I’m finally back in my element!” he crowed, looking happier than Dalin had even seen him.

And soon an opportunity did present itself, as a portly gentleman left the gambling establishment across the street and negotiated the icy main thoroughfare; he would pass right by their hiding place.

“A chicken ready for plucking,” Shatz Abel said, rubbing his hands together.

Dalin took hold of his shoulder. “No! I won’t have you assaulting a common citizen.”

Shatz Abel turned on him with surprise. “What! How do you think we’re going to get clothing and money?”

Dalin said, “Pick someone more … worthy of assault.”

The pirate furrowed his brow. “In my business, Sire,
everyone’s
worthy of assault!” he added, “Except for yourself, of course.”

“Just find someone who deserves it more.”

The pirate shook his head in resignation and watched in frustration as the fat gambler, singing to himself, waddled by their hiding place and moved safely on.

But, in a moment, the pirate’s eyes glinted with pleasure at the sight of another pedestrian approaching.

“Well, I’ll be …” The pirate chuckled.

“I thought I told you—” Dalin began.

“This one I know, Sire. And we’ll need neither money nor clothing from him. But as for that meal I promised you …”

As the man passed them, Shatz Abel reached out a meaty fist and pulled him into the alley.

“Remember me, old friend?” Shatz Abel said, grinning into the man’s startled face. For emphasis, the pirate lifted him so that the man’s feet barely touched the ground.

“Why,
Shatz!
Shatz
Abel! My
friend! H-how h-have you been?” the man stammered, while trying to keep his feet on the ground.

“Not as well as you, Peyton, I’ll fancy,” the pirate said. “How is the restaurant business these days? Care to give an old friend a hearty meal—and whatever other help he asks for?”

“Of course!” the man said. “It’s b-been a long time, Shatz Abel!”

“That it has,” Shatz Abel growled, setting the man down. “And a debt is still a debt.”

“Of course!” Peyton grinned, with a hopeful and strained look.

“And I’ve not forgotten your role in my capture,” Shatz Abel said, causing the color to drain from the other man’s face.

“Th-that was unav-voidable! Wrath-Pei—”

The pirate grabbed Peyton’s tunic front up in his clenched fist, causing the proprietor to partially levitate once more.

“Don’t mention Wrath-Pei in my presence again,” Shatz Abel hissed. He brought his face to within inches of the other’s.

“N-never!” Peyton stammered.

“Good.” The pirate dropped the man back to his feet, but stood towering over him. “Now, this is what I want…”

T
wenty minutes later found Dalin and his pirate cohort seated in a back room at the most lavish table either had ever seen. Even in Dalin’s court days he could not remember a meal so magnificent, from the Martian goose and Earth roast to the Titanian cheeses. There were wines from all four worlds, a new Plutonian beer with a distinctive flavor, and desserts from one of the finest bakers—a local man—that Dalin had ever come across. If he had still been on Earth and in power, he would have hired the man immediately.

“And now,” Shatz Abel said, standing and belching, “I will attend to our accommodations.”

“For the night?” Dalin asked languidly; he knew he would pay dearly later, after the years of lean living, for the rich meal he had just devoured—but he didn’t care.

The pirate laughed. “No, my king! If we stay on this rock much longer we will be caught and dropped back in our ice cave in no time! There’s nowhere to hide on Pluto—even for the night. We’re leaving
now!”

Dalin showed his obvious pleasure with a belch of his own. “Excellent!”

The pirate then left, meeting Peyton at the door to the back room and grabbing the man once more by the scruff of the neck—and leaving Dalin to the dregs of the wine and the crumbs of the desserts, which he proceeded to devour with relish.

A
nd then, in no time—they were off Pluto!

In a whirlwind, Shatz Abel returned, grabbed Dalin by the arm, causing him to drop the last bottle of beer, and dragged him through the restaurant, out the front door, and into the open door of a dark-windowed ground transport. In what seemed like no time at all they had reached their destination and were hurried from the transport straight into the open hatch of a freighter. Still groggy from both the speed of their escape and the quantity of wine and beer he had consumed, Dalin was barely strapped into his couch in the freighter’s hold before the ship was thrown from its pad and shot straight up.

Blearily, Dalin turned to the nearby window and watched Pluto quickly recede, turning from a blue-white sheet of ice pocked by Tombaugh City and its environs—Dalin could just make out the valley between the mountains he and the pirate had traversed, and, beyond it, the hills and ice plain, before swirling dust and distance obscured the view—to a shiny marble circled by a dark moon half its size and SunOne, its artificial source of heat and light.

Yawning, he turned his sight from the window and lay back against the couch’s headrest; he felt drowsiness overtaking him, and noticed how cosily
warm
the freighter’s cabin was.

Sleep.

His eyes were half closed when a commotion up at the front of the freighter commanded his attention—it sounded like pots and pans were being thrown around.

“I said
now!”
Shatz Abel roared; there came mewling sounds of agreement—and then suddenly the hold’s door was thrown open, revealing a grinning Shatz Abel holding yet another prize by the scruff of the neck: a grizzled old man who looked very unhappy.

Behind the old man and pirate, muffled, precise voices sounded, and the old man turned angry for a moment, twisting around in the pirate’s grasp to shout back into the cockpit:
“Ye
two hunks o’ junk! I’ll turn ye into aluminum foil, I will!”

Shatz Abel stood aside, still holding the old man, and Dalin was treated to a partial view of the ship’s cockpit, manned by two confused and arguing robots.

Straining against the pirate’s grip, the old man twisted around, trying to kick and punch at the nearest robot.

“Idiot! Tin shadrool! I’ll trash ye!”

The pirate shook the old man, turning him around to face Dalin again. Shatz Abel grinned from ear to ear.

“Sire,” the pirate said, “meet Captain Weems, who also owes me many favors.” Addressing the captain, Shatz Abel continued, “I believe we were considering passage to Europa as partial payment, were we not?”

“Yes! Yes!” the captain said vigorously. “Whatever ye want, Abel! Ye an’ th’ sprite can go wherever this bucket’lI take ye!”

“Sprite!” Shatz Abel said, in mock horror. “Is that any way to talk to Dalin Shar, King of Earth?”

Captain Weems started, then stared at Dalin for a moment. “Aye, it must be him at that. Though the way your sweetheart described ye to me, I’d be expecting more of a boy.”

“You know Tabrel Kris?” Dalin said hopefully.

“Aye,” Captain Weems said. “Transported your sweetheart once, three years ago, before Wrath-Pei got his evil hands on her. Tabrel Kris …” He preened, which only managed to make him look even more grizzled. “Think she took a fancy to me, too.” He looked meekly up at Shatz Abel. “I’ll wager this’ll strike us even—eh, Abel? Wi’ the two o’ ye as dangerous cargo, I mean?”

“We’ll see, Weems,” Shatz Abel said.

“That we will,” Weems said. “That we will.”

Behind Captain Weems, over the heads of the two robots piloting the ship up front, Dalin caught a brief glimpse of Pluto, now nothing more than a frozen blue dot.

Chapter 11

T
he Machine Master was not a hard taskmaster, nor a cruel one, but he was difficult in many ways. He kept odd hours, paid attention neither to clock nor calendar, and considered meals an annoyance rather than sustenance. He was sloppy in his dress, as well as in his work habits, did not take proper care of tools, and never put them in their place. Consequently, he spent much time in search of what he needed, and further energy on anger when he could not find it. In these areas, Visid was able to help him; but, though her organization reduced the amount of time the Machine Master spent in search, and seemingly lessened his anger at not having at hand that which he needed, it did not make him any more agreeable, nor less preoccupied. He was, in many ways, difficult. He never smiled; and levity was a virtue he considered a vice. Preoccupation seemed his occupation. When involved with a problem he was anything but of the world; he was outside it, in another place, and could not be reached, even if the normal course of events demanded his attention. When the High Leader, especially, was in need of him, the Machine Master was very often busy and treated the Martian magnate like any courier boy or common attendant. More than once, Visid had (from her own hiding place) seen the High Leader’s wrath build to the point where it seemed he might swoop down on the Machine Master with all of his metal limbs clacking and crush or tear him to bits. And though this had not happened, Visid felt that with each audience the Machine Master, through his own single-mindedness and inattention to anything but his own concerns, walked a tightrope he might one day fall from.