Darva had wandered off for a few minutes to see if anybody was around and awake whom she knew. When I saw her talking to a small group near a large tent, I decided to join her.
She looked over at me as I approached, smiled, nodded, and turned back to the trio by the fire—I saw one of them was frog-man, another the bird creature—and I strode right up to them. Before I could say anything, though, the flap of the tent behind me opened and I heard a familiar voice. “Why, hello, Darva! Hi, Park! My, you look stunning in your new suit!”
I whirled about in total surprise, and looked into the face of Tully Kokul.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Koril’s Redoubt
Tully and I walked along the beach. “Tell me,” I asked him, “are you Koril?”
He laughed. “Oh my, no! I couldn’t hold a candle to him! I’m really a very simple man, Park. In ancient times I’d be the parish priest, a man looking for rest and place to contemplate and experiment with a minimum of interference. Bourget was like a dream come true for me. Nobody around higher up to give me all sorts of orders, a peaceful village filled with good, profit-minded simple folk, and a very distant government that left us all alone. I was extremely happy there.”
“So how come you’re here, then?” I asked him. “Surely you didn’t just come along for the ride.”
He chuckled. “Oh no, but I’m like the pacifist who stays home, locks himself in his house while the war rages, then suddenly finds the opposing armies marching and shooting through his living room. I’m only a fair sore, but I’m a good politician, Park. I knew what was going on in and around the village. I knew too that eventually the idyll would end, although I put off all decisions until the last minute. It was painful to lose—but when Matuze took over it was only a matter of time. She’s a real nut case, Park. Morah keeps her protected from the Synod for his own purposes, and she’s able to indulge her every crazy whim. She’s sadistic, cruel, but very, very imaginative—and very ambitious. So when she took control, I more or less got my credentials from this group, although I kept a hands-off attitude almost to the last minute. It really wasn’t until Morah himself showed up that I knew the game was up.”
“Why not just go along with him and then settle back like before?” I asked him. “You didn’t have to cut and run.”
“Oh, things will never be like they were before—not after that stuff in the square. Morah’s been publicly humiliated. Matuze will take it personally. If those people in Bourget have any sense—and the majority don’t—they’ll all cut and run. Even though they missed their targets, Bourget’s going to become a big, ugly example. Permanent troops and a Synod sore will be installed there from now on, bet on it. You won’t be able to blow your nose there without permission.”
I told him of my suspicions about Morah.
“Hmph. Morah an alien. Hadn’t thought of that before, but it could be—providing we accept a couple of givens. One is that the aliens can catch the Warden bug themselves—Morah’s just loaded and he knows how to use that power better than anybody I’ve ever seen. But if they can catch it the same as us, how’d that delegation five years back come and go without getting trapped?”
“They could have the cure,” I noted. “Their whole deal with the Four Lords is predicated on that claim. What better way to prove it?”
“You may be right,” he agreed, “but I’m not so sure. True, I know nothing of Morah’s background, but that’s not unusual. And then there’s that fine show he staged at the end.”
“You mean that monster he became?”
He nodded. “Get a good look at it?”
“Not really. Everything happened so fast. A multi-headed dragon, that’s about all I can remember. Three heads. That’s about it.”
“That’s fair enough. In fact, there were four heads, not three, and each of the four was extremely different. One was saurian, one like some great insect, one a creature of the sea, and one vaguely humanoid. See any significance?”
I shook my head. “Not really.”
“Charon, Lilith, Cerberus, Medusa. The living sign of the Four Lords of the Diamond.”
I gave a low whistle. “Symbolism to the very end.”
“Almost the real end too,” he noted. “Look, the only reason he wasn’t totally fried was that he wasn’t really there at all. You couldn’t sense it, but I saw. The moment the first shot was fired, the one that unfortunately missed, he was off that platform and into the crowd. I lost him at that point—he cast a spell on himself so complete I couldn’t tell him from the victims.”
I looked around nervously. “Then he could be here with us now.”
“He could, but I doubt it. He would be the only one capable of coordinating the hunt, not to mention reporting to the government. Besides, he couldn’t fool Koril, so once he got here he’d just have betrayed us anyway. No, don’t worry about that part. But that was quite a show all the same… Say, speaking of shows—how the hell did you wind up like that, anyway?”
Briefly I told him the sequence of events.
“Fair enough. I thought you’d have sense enough to stay in the town hall, damn it, so I didn’t pay any attention to you. I was far too busy trying to keep out of the line of fire while trying to spot Morah; then I got bogged down helping with the escapes.”
“How*d you know it was me here?”
He smiled. “Your wa—your Warden brain pattern. It’s unique, distinctive, as everybody’s is. Not that I remember everybody’s, but you were around for months in the same building.”
“What about these spells, Tully? Are they really permanent?”
He stopped and turned to look at me. “Nothing’s permanent, particularly not on Charon. But it’s far, far easier to add than to subtract, if you know what I mean. When you cast a changeling spell, you form a mental set of instructions in your mind and transmit them to your subject’s Wardens. Those Wardens then proceed to do whatever they’re instructed to do. They draw energy from somewhere—external, certainly, but where nobody’s ever found out. They draw the energy in, convert it into matter often at astonishing speed, and apply the redesign.”
“Yeah, but it’s not just changing shape,” I replied. “Hell, I need a far stronger backbone; I have a different digestive system better adapted to this; a different balance mechanism—and a million other things, big and small, that make this creature that’s the new me work. You can’t possibly know or think of all the little details required. It would take an extensive biomedical library complete with full biological design capabilities to do that”
He looked at me seriously. “Want the truth? I warn you, it’s something we don’t tell everybody.”
“I sure do.”
“We haven’t the slightest idea how it’s done, and that’s the truth. Some of it, I think—the basic stuff—simply borrows from the Wardens elsewhere on the planet. Information requested and exchanged in a way we can’t comprehend—it’s a whole different form of life. The bunhar parts of you, the pigmentation and so on, are probably borrowed like that. In fact, we know they are—one can sense the request for and flow into the subject of that information. But when there’s no equivalent, or when you have to put bunhar and human together and make the new creature work, well, that’s a whole different story. The Warden organism doesn’t think. It’s more like a machine, waiting for instructions. It’s too simple a thing to think, even if you considered all of them on the planet as a single organism. Without instructions, it’s totally passive.”