“Aye. Teach me of honor.”
She had taken him by surprise again. “You want to take time with a subtle concept that can only inhibit your immediate benefit as it inhibits mine?”
“Aye, Lysan. My thirst be to know what I know not. An thou dost prefer not to play with me, teach me instead.”
“All right. Give me back my love for Echo.”
“I can not.”
“What?”
“Magic works but once in Phaze, an it be not inherent. I nulled the potion, but it be a far cry greater to null the null, and I fear it would be not the same.”
“But what will I do, when I am with Echo again?”
“I know not, and care not. Teach me honor.”
It was, he saw, a thing she needed to learn! She had carelessly changed his life in a way she could not reverse. An honorable person would not have done that.
He was Hectare. She was Hectare, in a sense. It was proper to provide what her alien tutoring had lacked. That might even have an effect on his mission, if he could make her appreciate her Hectare heritage.
“Then listen, child,” he said grimly. He started in.
The golem marched tirelessly south, through the day and night. Lysander talked, and slept, and talked again, with hardly a murmur from Weva, but she was listening and learning. He was surprised by the amount he knew of the subject, but realized that he had been thinking about it because of the awkwardness of his own position as an enemy of Phaze that a prophecy claimed could help save the planet. It was not that the definition was complicated, but that the nuances were. Weva wanted example after example, of what was honorable in a theoretical situation, and what was not, and why. She seemed fascinated by the subject, and he realized that he was abating a lack she had not before been aware of. She was Hectare, in this respect, and becoming more so as she absorbed the lesson.
“But how canst thou call it integrity, an thou dost prevaricate?” she asked.
“My loyalty is to my mission, in a hostile camp,” he explained. “I must complete it, and if telling the truth to an enemy would endanger it, then I must lie. However, in all things not related to my mission, I tell the truth. And when I make a deal, I honor it, even with the enemy.”
“Mayhap I fathom that,” she said.
Meanwhile it grew hotter as they neared the Pole. The dragons had long since been left behind; perhaps they could handle-the heat, but it was too far from their hunting range. There was just a sea of baking sand. Weva took off her cloak and fashioned’ it into a canopy to shade them from the sun; that, and the air rushing by, cooled them almost enough. But they needed water, so she risked a small conjuration to fetch a jug of it for him, and assumed the form of a humanoid robot herself, so that she didn’t need to drink. Throughout, she continued to listen to his discourse on honor, and to question it. Evidently the Hectare component intended to get this quite straight, and to live by it, in future.
There was something odd on the horizon. Weva, as the robot, saw it before he did, and inquired. “Be there a storm, here? Flach said naught o’ that.”
Lysander considered, fearing that it was a sandstorm, then realized what it was. “We are approaching the South Pole. There is an anomaly that would show up here, and perhaps also at the North Pole if a snowstorm doesn’t obscure it. That is the night.”
“But it be near noon!” she protested.
“Time for a small planetary physics lesson. The light comes to this planet from its sun, as is the case elsewhere, but it makes a right-angle turn, and—“
“Because o’ the black hole,” she said. “Phaze be but a shell round the hole, and the light be bent. Now I fathom it!”
“Black hole?” he asked blankly.
“Thou didst not know?”
He realized that she probably did know what she was talking about. “You mean what we take as a planet is something else? You say a shell—?”
“Aye. Half shell, now that the frames be merged. Canst not see it from space?”
“It looks just like a planet, from space.”
“Aye, a planet with only one side! Saw thou not the missing half?”
He tried to visualize what he had seen during his approach to the planet, but his normally clear memory let him down. He had no picture of the far side of Proton/Phaze. Probably he had seen only the near side, and not questioned it. That might be the case with all travelers; the effect that turned the light at right angles might also deceive the eye about what else was seen or not seen. This place was stranger than it seemed, and that was saying much.
Weva guided the golem to the edge of the night, sparing them the further ravage of the sun. They walked in shadow, and it was a relief. They had no trouble seeing ahead, because of the sunlight just to the side.
Lysander glanced up, cautiously. The sun was glaringly bright in its sphere, but stars twinkled in the adjacent sphere. There was no hint of the mechanism by which the light was bent; it was either full day or full night.
They came to the South Pole. It was a simple marking on the ground, across which the shadow felclass="underline" the shadow of night. That would rotate counterclockwise, always covering half the Pole as it did half the planet—or half the shell.
They dismounted. “Thank thee, Franken,” Weva said, donning her robe again. “What thou seekst be beneath the Pole, but it be protected by magic, so thou must wait for it to emerge.”
The golem stepped into the light and became immobile. It would wait until the end of the world, quite likely. Weva brushed off the Pole, and there was a small spiral stake. It had evidently been taller once, but broken off. She pulled, and it came up, revealing another chamber below.
“Is it safe to go in there?” Lysander asked. “If time is changed—“
“Aye, time be much changed, but needs must we go in.” She paused. “I apologize to thee, ‘Sander, for taking thy love, and will make amend an I be able. I acted before I fathomed honor, but after learning from thee, I know it be in my nature. Thou didst give me as much as I took from thee.”
“Echo will be here?” That would put him on the spot.
“Aye, they took another route. We went apart so that they could decoy pursuit from me. Mayhap Flach can help thee.”
“No. Say nothing. I’ll play it through as seems best.”
“There will be time, for it be magnified greatly here. To others it may seem but one day before the end, but we shall have nigh five years.”
“Five years! One day is five years?”
“Aye, almost. So hurry not.”
He nodded. Then he followed her down into the hole.
He was not aware of any time change, but did not question that it was happening, because he had seen how Flach and Sirel and Alien had aged in one week under the West Pole, and how Flach had aged again in a mere day. Weva had come into existence and become a dominant young woman in a bit over a month. Now she told him that time was much further accelerated here at the South Pole, and he had to believe her. The Adepts had needed something like this, to give them time to forge their weapon.
“Hello, Weva!” a voice called. It was Flach, looking another notch taller and older. “Methought to worry lest thou be lost.”