Phaze Doubt

Alien was the one who spied it, flying ahead in the predawn darkness, scouting the way as he fed on insects. As ‘Corn he had seen the Hectare, when his father turned himself in; ‘Corn himself had been beneath notice, and promptly assumed his Phaze identity so as to remain clear of the invader. The Hectare had been cognizant of the fact that operations would be smoother if households were allowed to maintain themselves, so only the dangerous individuals were impounded. Thus Trool, the Red Adept, was prisoner, his Book of Magic mysteriously missing. But his wife, the beautiful vampire woman Suchevane, and son Alien remained at the Red Demesnes. Similar was true elsewhere. The families remained scrupulously inactive—until this present mission with Nepe.

They halted as soon as Alien returned to give the alarm. None of them could afford to be spied in Nepe’s company by a Hectare, and Nepe hardly dared show herself in recognizable form. But the Hectare was standing directly on the West Pole; there was no way to avoid it.

They took shelter in the lee of a great gnarly blue birch tree and consulted, all taking human forms except Belle, who had none. So she lay and rested in feline form, alert for any intrusion from without, while they focused their lesser human senses on the problem.

“ ‘Sander, you know about Hectare,” Nepe said. “Maybe now is when you fulfill the prophecy. How do we get to the Pole? Can we lure the BEM away, distract it, or something?”

“You can’t do that,” Lysander said from seeming air. “No Hectare has any interest in anything local except its assignment, which is obviously in this case to prevent any native from approaching the Pole. I presume that someone told them that the Pole was important, so they covered it.”

“Mayhap they espied us coming here, so laid in wait,” Sirel said.

“More likely they realized that there was activity at the North Pole, so set guards at all the Poles,” Nepe said. “I think Purp made Brown send golems north, but the West Pole is temperate, so a Hec can handle it. But we have to reach that Pole by the end of today, or we fail.”

“Fail in what?” Lysander asked.

“If I knew, I wouldn’t tell you!” Nepe retorted.

“Now wait, Nepe,” Echo protested. “You want his help, but he has to know how his expertise relates if he is to provide it. Maybe between what you know of the mission, and what he knows of the Hectare, you can find a way through.”

She was right. Echo was a woman in love, but she had a good human mind. “I apologize, Lysander,” Nepe said. “I’ll tell you all I know, if you’ll te!l us all you know that relates.”

“It’s a deal,” he agreed.

“I have three messages, which I must listen to and implement in order, not even listening to the next until the first is done. The first was to go to the North Pole. So Flach went. He got the help of the snow demons, and used his magic to keep them from freezing him or him from melting them, and they took him to the North Pole. Under it was a chamber where the Black and Green Adepts were. They had planted a Magic Bomb which will destroy the planet if we don’t stop it. We came back with them, and they gave themselves up to the Hec. My next message was to take a Hec seed to the West Pole, by the end of today, and to bring along whom the wolves sent. I don’t know what’s there, but maybe another chamber. Maybe that’s where the Book of Magic is. So I have to take the seed there, and that’s all I know.”

“That must be all the Hectare know, too,” Lysander said. “If there had been anything there to find, they would have found it. So they posted a guard and are waiting to see what your business here is, if there is any. They are probably guarding all the Poles as a matter of routine precaution, after discovering the activity at the North Pole; they may not know whether any other Poles have activity. So this is probably just a guard, not an administrator. But why haven’t they dismantled the Bomb at the North Pole?”

Nepe smiled. “It’s not possible. It turned out that it’s frozen slow under the Pole. They actually set off the Bomb, but things are so slow there that it’ll take six weeks for the blast to get out of the chamber. When it does it’ll destroy the planet, and all of us with it. So the Hec will never get to exploit this world, no matter what. Maybe Clef is waiting with the Book of Magic to null the Bomb at the last moment after the Hec give up and go home; I don’t know. I just know I have to do what I have to do, or it’s all gone.”