Monsters and Magicians (7 page)

tales he was supposed to be the king of the fairies. Are you trying to tell me that Danna and I are fairies, too?"

The big grey cat's tail which had been curled and twitching slightly began to swish from side to side with a degree of force, lashing against the sleeping bag and his legs within it. "You are trying my patience, old friend. All right, let me essay to put it in terms that anyone could comprehend:

"A lump of dirty quartz may easily contain as much gold as a shiny coin, but it will not be either beautiful or at all valuable to a human until the raw ore in the quartz has been leached out and refined. Lack of refinement does not lessen the feet that gold is contained in that rock; but only a human with the requisite training or at least experience would know that rock to be different from any other common lump.

"Now, before you first set foot to those stone stairs on the day you went about digging a grave for the husk my spirit had but so lately quitted, before you first entered this land called Tiro-na-N'Og, you were akin to that chunk of dirty rock, seemingly no different from countless other mere humans. But now, after having been within this blessed land for even as cumulatively short a time as you have, you are beginning to become refined metal; you are acquiring powers—re-acquiring them, rather—no human of the common breed could acquire such powers no matter how long he or she dwelt herein. And it is as I have told you in times before this: the longer you stay in, live in and on the water and foods of this land, the

greater and more diverse will be the powers you reacquire. In the end, when the Dagda has invested you in the fullest as he alone can, you will be as the bit of pure, refined gold. You will be Sheedey, like the Dagda."

"Sheedey?" thought Fitz, blankly. "Animal, vegetable or mineral, Puss?"

The tail lashed again. "You are human, as the Dagda and the other Sheedey, but you are all more than simply human. You Sheedey are descended of the happy breeding between a very early stock of true humans with a few of the last living Elder Race, the beings who preceded you."

"Look, Puss, I realize this questioning is angering you, but if I don't ask, how can I be expected to understand any of it?" said Fitz. "Now this Elder Race, they mustve been human too, in order to interbreed with humans, right?"

"Yes . . . after a fashion," was the panthers reply. "They owned the ability—which ability is one of the powers owned by the Sheedey when in possession of their birthright—to shift their shapes at will, even to utilize natural materials with which to fashion new or different husks to inhabit for however long a time they wished. The Elder Ones who bred with humans had human shapes . . . mostly. But so well made and accurate to the tiniest of detail were the husks they had fashioned for themselves, to hold their spirits, that the issues of these matings were so human-appearing as to defy human scrutiny. Only the spirits and brains differed from those of the true, pure humans. Among humans alone, without one to waken

in them their powers, they might all have lived and died as the pure humans they seemed. But for them the Elder Ones were at hand to show and teach, to instill necessary self-discipline, to begin to channel the abilities of their few offspring and their many half-offspring, as well."

"If they could breed among themselves," queried Fitz, "then why breed with human beings at all?"

"The Elder Race," was the reply, "had exceedingly long spans of existence, old friend—thousands upon thousands of Earth-years did they naturally exist from whence they had come—but this place called Earth was not the place of their origin, and certain of its most common constituents were in ways inimical to their health and well-being. These elements not only shortened their lifespans and somewhat curtailed their powers but lowered their fertility drastically. Even so, it was the best place to reside that they had then found in the course of many lifetimes of searching.

"The exceedingly low birthrate was understood early-on in the earthly existence of this so-wise race, but it was nothing about which they then had much cause to worry—not back then, when so very many of them still existed. However, not even the Elder Ones were truly immortal and, as the courses of hundreds of millennia passed by on the Earth, their overall numbers became fewer and still fewer, as aged spirits flickered out faster than they could produce new carriers of the racial flame.

"Then did all of the remaining ones of the Elder Race meld their minds and decide upon a course by

which they might, they hoped, prolong the unique and irreplaceable qualities of their race, if not the race itself. Over a vast span of time, they sought out and subjected to multiple testings a whole host of different creatures, beings native to the place you call Earth. At length, they all decided upon a certain kind of terrestrial primate; you know what kind they chose, old friend."

"Cave men?" thought Fitz, wonderingly, "Neanderthals? Cro-Magnons?"

The big cat answered, "No, those of which I speak now were a for less refined raw material than those of whom you are thinking; ten thousand of the then-generations of human life separated them from those chosen by the Elder Race, who then slowly—allowing almost all of the natural courses of events to take place—guided those chosen, obliquely controlled their breeding, the developments of a culture of sorts, provided them now and then with the germs erf technology which could improve their chances of survival.

"In its fullness, time passed. Continents and islands and seas rearranged themselves upon the face of the planet, mile-thick ice-sheets expanded and contracted many times, lands rose above the seas, then sank back beneath them, seas themselves emptied out and their beds metamorphosed into bone-dry deserts or towering snow-capped mountains. A huge assortment of animals of all sorts died out in this time, but the Elder Race saw to it that the chosen species was spared despite their many and blatant vulnerabilities.

"At last, at long last, when the few remaining

Elder Ones felt that, were their long-envisioned plans to have hope of eventual success, they must begin, they went among the various groups of their primates and, again testing, chose those that they found to be the best—physically, mentally, emotionally— and, after bearing them to certain predetermined locations, began to assume shapes and breed with them.

"After several generations of hybrids had been guided and taught that which beings of power must know, the Elder Race determined that, although the hybrids and the get of the hybrids matured faster physically than did the pure get of the Elder Race, their powers were slower to develop and that, although significantly longer than pure humans, the life expectancy of the hybrids was even less than the severely-shortened lifespans of the still-extant Elder Ones. In hopes of possibly breeding to counter these distressing tendencies and traits, the Elder Ones visited the areas inhabited by the pure strains of humans on a regular basis, seeking out and bearing away healthy, young specimens of comparatively long-lived stock and with the best minds that pure-strain humans could be expected to have. In the enclaves, these specimens were bred to Elder Ones or hybrids and, very slowly, the strain was slightly improved.

"When enough mature hybrids were available to make it fairly certain that there would be plenty of teachers for the young they would naturally produce, the Elder Ones—having meantime discovered some large islands which contained fewer deposits of the natural elements which had proven so inimical to their kind—departed the enclaves, taking with them

a few of the most promising of the newer generations, added a few more promising pure-strain humans that they gathered from here and there, then began all over again in the newfound, more-salubrious lands."

"Is this place, this Tiro-whatchamacallit, one of those islands, Puss?" asked Fitz. "What ocean is it in, anyway?"

"It is . . . and it isn't," replied the feline. "Once, long and long and very long ago, as humans measure time, there existed an island exactly like to this one in the world from which you came, but shortly after most of the great ice-sheets melted away, it ceased to be, as did the entire archipelago save one island. No, Tiro-na-N'Og, wherein we now lie, long ago ceased to exist in the world from which you came, old friend. Fish swim over its bones and sea creatures of the great depths crawl upon them, in that world."

"How did the inundations affect the breeding experiments of the ones you call the Elder Race?"

"The subsidences were mostly gradual, so no lives were lost among the hybrids. Some of them and most of the ever-fewer Elder Ones went to the one remaining island, which had been most northerly of the archipelago. Of the others, small groups roamed here and there for a while among the savage, predatory races of pure-strain humans. Here and there, a few settled amongst their near-kin and, with their powers and relatively advanced technological abilities, became leaders of one kind or another to the primitives they and their get came to rule. But each succeeding generation became shorter and shorter lived and possessed less and less of the powers until,

in time, their descendants were only rarely different at all from their fellow pure-strain humans, so dilute had their precious heritage become.

"Other small groups, wishing to keep their heritage intact and pure in their children, sought out and settled in out-of-the-way places—mountaintops, oases deep in vast deserts, in the depths of swamps or the frigid wastes of the ice-lands, all of these places made comfortable to them by their great powers and that capable of being wrought by such powers. But these hybrids owned also great compassion for their near-kin, pure-strain humans, and despite the dangers— for more than just once, that great compassion for suffering beasts and humans has been the eventual ruination if not physical death of them and their

g get—they moved among their powerless kindred to teach them ways to live better-fed, more comfortably, threatened by fewer natural dangers. They did much to better the lot of the pure humans . . . and sooner or later all were repaid, but always in a hard, bitter coin—suffering and even death being the lot of some/' "Are there any of them still around in my . . . in

f the world I came from, Puss?" asked Fitz. "Any of the Elder Race or these hybrids?"

\ The response, though silent like all telepathy, bore

! a tinge of sadness. "Of the Elder Ones, old friend, no, there are none left in that world of humans and other beasts. But, yes, a few of the descendants of those who survived the subsidence of that archipelago still dwell here and there, though wishing to continue to survive, they have all used their powers

to conceal their true nature from their still-savage near-kin, the relatively pure humans/'

"These Elder Ones all finally died out, then?" asked Fitz.

"Five remain extant, in this world," stated the cat, "though even the youngest of them is old beyond the calculations of any pure-strain human. But not even the Dagda has knowingly seen or enjoyed converse with one in the space of centuries of human-reckoned time . . . or so I have been told."

"Then just how does anyone know that they are still alive in this world, or just how many they are, if they're not seen or talked to for hundreds of years, Puss?" demanded Fitz.

"They have ways of communicating, old friend," was the cat's reply. "Mostly they enter into the sleeping minds of the Dagda and other Sheedey, to explain and advise and teach, as they taught the hybrids of old."

"Why only in their sleep?" asked Fitz, puzzledly.

"Because," he was answered, "the Elder Race discovered, scores of millennia ago in the first generation of hybrids, that the minds of the Sheedey are most receptive, most porous, most retentive when generally unconscious to outside stimuli or influences. Also," the feline added, dryly, "in such a state, the pupil only hears, sees, smells and sometimes feels and tastes. He totally lacks the ability to ask endless questions, so the time of the teacher is not wasted in framing responses to trivia."

"Oh, really?" beamed Fitz. "Then if the pupil cannot ask any questions, how does the teacher know

that the lesson has been properly and understandably conveyed?"

The tail lashed really hard, hard enough to cause a degree of pain in Fitz's legs even through the thickness of the insulated bag. "The Elder Ones know, as do all the Sheedey who are in full possession of their mature powers ... as you will know too, if you will but hurry on to find the Dagda and be fully invested by him. He alone, of all the Sheedey in this world or the other, can render you fully awakened, can invest you with your full powers and thus see you become that to which you were born. Moreover, he needs you, he needs you soon; there are still many tests you must survive and precious little time remains.

"As soon as it is light, you must set out. Go east, go west or go north, but go."

"Not north, Puss," replied Fitz. "I tried that, only to end up at what looked like a bastard cross between a rain forest and the great-granddaddy of all swamps. The look of the place would've been daunting enough, but after checking with Cool Blue who said he'd been into it once, I decided there was just no way the three of us, a single Norman knight, a baby-blue lion and myself could handle the monsters Cool Blue says live and hunt in that place."

Once more the tail lashed. "There will be dangers, deadly dangers to threaten you in any direction you go. They are mostly tests and unavoidable, and they are assuredly deadly, but if you are to win to the Dagda's side and reclaim your heritage, you must meet and overcome them. Perhaps I erred in selecting the ensorcelled Hon as your guide, but it is done

now and soon, in any case, if you survive a few more tests, I will be able to place a second guide with you, as well as direct you to a place wherein you will be able to take possession of certain objects which will serve to increase those powers of which you are already aware and alert you to others you do not know you own."

"Fine," said Fitz, "but I can't start out in the morning, not unless Sir Gautier de Montjoie is back by then. He's gone off looking for his retainers. Besides, Cool Blue hasn't had good hunting and I more or less promised him I'd go down into the glen south of here and shoot him an antelope or four, in The morning. Oww! Damn it, Puss, take it easy with that tail of yours, will you? You break one of my leg-bones with it, and I'll be here a hell of a lot longer than just a few days."