"You live in a ... cave?"
"Five of us. We moved out there a year ago, when High Elder Brill had Sabastian arrested as a heretic. We broke him out, but we knew we couldn't go back to Fairhope. Brill knows we're up there, but he can't do anything about it."
"Why not? If you only have five people . . ."
"High Elder Brill won't let the deacons or the Sons of God come up to the cave. Good thing for us. They have better weapons than we have, and they know how to use them. They could sneak up before dawn, wipe us out and still get back to the temple in time for morning prayers."
"Why won't he let them do it?"
Ogram shrugged. "He says Lord Tern told him it was forbidden. Lord Tern is big on rules nobody can understand. According to him, the Holy City was put there for the elders. The deacons and the Sons of God live in dormitories around the temple, but they can't leave the roadways that go directly to the temple from Fairhope. They can't cross the river and they can't go into the area of the Far Peaks. They'd have to do one of those things to get to our cave."
Beep, beep, beep.
Startled, Ogram looked up at the vidscreens.
"Uh-oh."
Paul followed his gaze and saw a small dark point hovering in the middle of the aft screen, just above the horizon. "What's that?"
"Brill's flyer." He shot a suspicious look at Paul.
"Unless you arranged to have one of your Guard friends follow us."
Paul shook his head. "I wanted to, but Dorland wouldn't hear of it." Not even the staff knew where they had gone. As far as the staff was concerned, Dorland had been called away on a personal emergency. Only Jeffrey Hanes knew the truth, and he had promised not to interfere, although it was clear he hadn't liked it.
"They must've been waiting for us," Ogram said.
"How could they know we'd be coming?"
"Somebody must've tipped 'em off. The Holy Order has lots of spies."
The speck grew rapidly into the oval frontal view of a flying craft.
"Can we outrun them?" Paul asked.
"Not a chance. That flyer's a lot faster than this old scout. But we might be able to outsmart them. Brace yourself. They're going to—"
The blast threw Paul's head into the back of the seat. The scoutcraft veered as though slapped by a giant hand. Paul's ears roared. Ogram struggled with the controls, swearing.
"That was too damn close!" he said after the craft had steadied.
A quick glance at the readout screen told Paul they had lost five hundred meters. He twisted around to look into the passenger compartment. Dorland sat rigidly, his hands gripping the arms of the chair. His eyes were open.
"Are you okay?" Paul asked.
Dorland kept silent, but his head moved in a slight, affirmative gesture. Paul barely had time to make sure Doriand's safety straps were pulled tight when the craft jerked sideways under the force of another blast. Paul heard the whine of the stabilizer engines as they fought to keep it on course. Ogram pulled out the stream drive controls and keyed in a quick sequence. He muttered something, slapped a bar to cancel the sequence command and started over. On the aft screen, Paul could see the flyer 62 William Greenleaf
lining up for another shot. He braced himself again as light flared from the flyer's nose—
The scoutcraft lurched, leaving Paul's stomach somewhere behind. It took him a moment to
realize that they hadn't been hit. The scene on the vidscreen had changed. The other craft was gone. Paul stared at the screen, puzzled as much as relieved. "Did you hit them with something?"
"Naw." Ogram was grinning with undisguised pride. He folded the stream controls away and repositioned the flight wheel in front of him. The craft's nose turned down toward a wooded area below them. "We just skipped over to the far side of the Peaks where they can't see us. I'll take 'er down low. We shouldn't have any more trouble." Paul still didn't grasp Ogram's meaning until Dorland spoke up: "We made a local skip."
"Yeah, right!" Ogram exclaimed. "Something they can't do in that flyer. My father used to do it all the time."
Paul stared at the vidscreen. There was no sign of the ruins or the village of Fairhope.
Ogram leveled the craft at an altitude that was barely above the treetops. He glanced over at Paul.
"You look a little pale. Feeling okay?" Paul shook his head wonderingly. "I've never seen anyone skip that close to a mass-plus before."
"Mass-plus?"
"Clarion. The planet. The gravitational basis for the skip."
Ogram shrugged and turned back to the
vidscreen. Paul realized with growing horror that Ogram didn't realize how close he had come to killing all of them. Even a navigation computer needed a few seconds to compute the maneuvers that were required to move a craft through the kohlmann stream using a local mass-plus. And with the mass-plus less than a thousand feet below them ...
CLARION 63
Slowly, Paul released the deathgrip he had taken on the arms of the seat. Ogram was guiding the streamer along the scar of an old riverbed, twisting through the connected bases of low, rolling hills. He reduced the craft's speed and left the riverbed to fly up the gentle slope of a hill that was covered with lush vegetation. His eyes searched the vidscreens that were now set on wide-angle. When the craft crested the hill, Paul could again see the valley, and scattered signs of the ruins of Chalcharuzzi.
"Ah, here we are." Ogram swung the craft into a gentle turn and climbed the slope a few hundred meters. Then he brought the scoutship to a stop and hovered unsteadily above a grassy clearing that was sheltered all around by high trees.
As the craft dropped closer to the ground, a warning light winked amber on the console screen. Paul waited for Ogram to lower the landing struts and realized with a sudden surge of panic that Ogram hadn't even noticed the light. He tried to speak, but his mouth had gone suddenly dry. Frakes had said something about that other man from Clarion: He came down too fast. . . stasis engines blew. . . crispy by the time they got him out. . .
"The struts!" Paul yelled. "Lord—" Ogram's head jerked around; then he reached forward and hit the four banded switches an instant before the streamer landed with a bone-jarring thump.
"Sorry," Ogram said. "Guess I could use a little more work on that, too."
Paul released a breath, drew another. His heart hammered.
"Anyway, we're here." Ogram swiveled around and pressed the bar to open the hatchcover. The outside environment sensors went to work while Ogram tapped his fingers impatiently on the arm of 64
William Greenleaj CLARION 65
his chair. A moment later the hatchcover lifted with a pneumatic hiss. Two men waited outside near the edge of the clearing. Ogram unsnapped his harness, ducked out through the hatchway and trotted down the short ramp. He stopped at the bottom and turned back to Paul and Borland.
"Coming?"
Paul looked at Dorland, waiting. Doriand stared at him; then something in his face softened a little and he offered a weary grin.
"Sorry about all this. You shouldn't have come." Paul didn't know what to say. In truth, he was beginning to feel the same way.
Dorland fumbled with his harness and got it loose with Paul's help; then the two of them went down the ramp to join Ogram. The ground underfoot was spongy. The air was cool on Paul's sweaty face and neck, and carried a pleasant outdoor scent.
One of the men stepped forward and tilted his head at Dorland. "Is that him?"
The voice didn't match the appearance. Paul looked closer and realized that the person who had spoken was a young woman with short hair. She wore dark coveralls like Ogram's. A belt pouch hung from her waist, cinched with dark cord.
"Dorland Avery," Ogram said by way of introduction. "This is Karyn DiMemmo. She—"
"I remember," Dorland said. A brief smile touched his lips, and he held his hand out at waist level, palm down. "You were this high when I saw you last. How are your parents?"