He slipped outside to the blessed cover of darkness. A moment later Dorland stood beside him. Crouching low, they made their way to the low wall. Paul lifted his head just far enough to see over
CLARION 113
it. There was no sign of the sentries. He motioned to Dorland, and they silently climbed over the wall and started across the roadway.
The sentry must have been standing in the deep shadows down by the comer. Paul was unaware of his presence until he heard the shout. Then he and Dorland were running across the roadway. Shadowy figures loomed suddenly in front of them. Paul fumbled for his knife, and a hand grasped his arm.
"This way!" Karyn hissed.
Several hundred meters down David's Tube they stopped to rest. They had lost the pursuers in the maze of roadways before they went up the access port to the tube.
"Are you okay?" Selmer asked.
Dorland kept silent. Paul nodded, but he didn't feel okay, and he was sure it showed. He felt as if he had been . . . raped. Something slimy had entered his mind. It had pulled open his private thoughts and memories and pawed through them. He wasn't sure he would ever feel totally safe again. Karyn and Selmer were full of questions, but Dorland was withdrawn and uncommunicative. In a few halting sentences Paul described the ceremony he and Dorland had witnessed. Without even considering why he did so, he kept silent about the other experiences—the shadows that had reached out to his mind, the visit from Shari. That part was private between him and Dorland.
"You actually saw Lord Tern in there?" Karyn asked when he had finished.
"We saw something. It came out of the chauka."
"High Elder Brill. . . called it?" Paul hesitated. Somehow it was hard to remem-ber exactly how that had happened. "I think so. He was chanting and making motions with his hands. Then it came."
114
CLARION 115
William Greenleaf
"Came from where?" Selmer asked, making no effort to hide his skepticism. "You said the chauka was shaped like a shallow bowl. That's the same way Cleve described it. You also said Lord Tern was almost as big as a man. How could he come out of a shallow bowl?"
"Well. . ." Paul thought back to what had happened when High Elder Brill waved his hands over the chauka, and the appearance of the creature above the chauka like a spindly insect. "We saw something.'1'1 But Selmer was right. There was no way Lord Tern's body could have been concealed inside that shallow dish. And there was something else—
He looked up at Dorland. "But I'm beginning to wonder if what we saw was really Lord Tern."
"High Elder Brill called him," Dorland said. "He came. How can you doubt it was Lord Tern? We saw him."
"I know." It was clear that Dorland's statement carried a deeper meaning. We felt his black heart. That was the bothersome part. "But he didn't look . . . solid. I could see through him." K-aryn's brow pulled down. "Lord Tern was . . . transparent?"
Paul shook his head. "Not exactly transparent. But he didn't look completely solid. He moved around a lot. A couple of times, when he turned at the right angle, I could see the light globes shining through his body."
Karyn was watching him with interest. "I don't understand."
"I'm not sure I do, either. I guess—" We felt Lord Tern in the room with us. He could come up with theories about Lord Tern's appearance, but how could he explain what he and Dorland had felt inside that room? "Maybe the Tal Tahir transmitted the image from somewhere else."
"Transmitted?" Selmer asked.
"Like fartalk, but with pictures as well as words." That would explain why Lord Tern hadn't left the chauka, even though Paul was sure the creature had sensed their presence in the cabinet. If he was only a projected image . . .
But if he was only an image, how could he detect our presence^
Karyn shook her head. "I don't get it."
"Paul's suggesting that the picture of Lord Tern was sent from someplace else," Selmer said. His eyes returned to Paul. "There would have to be a receiver." He hesitated. "The chaukaT'
Paul shrugged. "Could be."
Karyn's brow furrowed. "If the picture was transmitted, where did it come from?"
That was the obvious question. "There's no way to know," Paul admitted. "If the transmitter's powerful enough, it could send the image from anywhere on the planet. Most of Clarion hasn't even been charted. There might be a Tal Tahir city that hasn't been found yet. Or the Tal Tahir may not even be on Clarion anymore. The chauka may be capable of communicating over a long distance."
"Well . . . maybe," she said doubtfully. "But that would mean they've been communicating with elders of the Holy Order for two hundred years. Why wouldn't they come here?"
Paul shrugged. "There are a lot of questions. We may never know all the answers."
"We know one thing for sure," she said. "The chauka is the link between High Elder Brill and Lord Tern. There's no doubt of that. That means we have to get back to the temple and destroy it."
"No."
Everyone turned to look at Dorland.
"We can't do that," he said. His eyes were clear now, and filled with a certainty of purpose that Paul had never seen before. "The chauka is our 116 William Greenleaf CLARION 117
only way to contact Lord Tern. We have to keep it open."
Paul issued a harsh bark of laughter. "You can talk to Lord Tern if you want to. I never want to see him again."
"We have to."
"No, we don't. Maybe arkies will someday, but not us. Besides, you're forgetting something. We can't reach Lord Tern or anyone else with the chauka because we don't know how to operate it."
"Let's go back and break it," said Selmer.
"Nobody wants to do that more than me," Paul said. "But I don't think we'll be able to get back into the temple so easily. There were more sentries than you expected tonight. Brill has obviously pumped up security around the temple. Now that he knows we got inside, he's likely to take steps to make sure it doesn't happen again."
"They haven't had time to get organized," Karyn argued. "They won't expect us to hit them again so soon."
"I think there's someplace else we should go," Dorland said.
Karyn opened her mouth, then looked at
Dorland and kept silent.
"The pedestals we saw inside the chamber—I've seen them before."
"Where?" Karyn asked.
"A place my father took me to," Dorland said.
"We were exploring. My father was Second Speaker. He could move freely through Chalcharuzzi. We had gone to the other side of the city, close to the river, when we came across a building that caught my father's interest." He looked up as if suddenly remembering that the others were there with him.
"There was little damage."
"Why was your father so interested in it?" Karyn asked.
"The building was not a dome. It had a square shape, like that of the temple. And it had a spire. Part of one, anyway—most of it had fallen into the river."
"A spire?" Karyn repeated. "Like the one above the temple?"
Dorland nodded. "Vines had nearly covered the building, but we searched until we found a way inside. That's where I saw the pedestals. Father went inside, but I was afraid. I only looked through the doorway. When my father came out, he was even more excited. I'm sure he intended to go back, but he was killed not long after."
A brief silence was broken by Karyn. "Do you think it was another temple building?"
"I don't know," Dorland said. "If so, it had not been used in a long time."
"Even if we can find the building," Selmer said,
"how could it help us?"
"I didn't go inside," Dorland said, "and my father did not say what he saw in there. But I know he was very excited. I think he may have seen another chauka."