highly prized books and journals. While a couple of Dornvald’s outlaws were
packing these items into bundles with Lofbayel’s charts and securing them, Thirg
covered the remainder of his books, his study samples, and his finer measuring
instruments in oiled wrappings and locked them in chests which two more outlaws
carried to a concealed hole, sealed by a boulder, at the base of the cliff a
short distance from the house.
Then Thirg stood to take a last look around his garden while the outlaws who had
been helping him remounted. Another led forward a sleek, powerful-looking mount
with a dark, copper-tinted sheen and titanium-white flashes around its head and
neck. Thirg eyed it apprehensively as he stepped closer—riding was not one of
his greatest skills —and then cocked an imager-shade curiously as he noticed the
royal crest etched into its rear flank. Dornvald followed Thirg’s gaze and
laughed. “Until recently the swift carrier of one of His Majesty’s messengers,
who has departed for a place to which that steed could not take him. We must
make haste now, Collector-of-Books-and-Objects-That-Mystify-Me, or His Majesty’s
servants will be here to take his property back for him.”
Thirg mounted carefully while one of the outlaws held the animal’s harness to
steady it. Then the riders formed up with Dornvald at the head, Thirg next with
Rex waiting suspiciously but faithfully alongside, and the remaining dozen or so
falling into a column behind. Groork crept out from the shadows at the back of
the house and watched. They had left behind one steed, which Dornvald had
ordered to be tethered to a pillar at the edge of the clearing.
“Which officer is it who leads the soldiers?” Dornvald inquired casually to
Geynor, his lieutenant, as the riders moved off. “Do we know of him from
encounters past, or by repute, perchance?”
“Oh indeed,” Geynor replied, speaking just as loudly. “Captain Horazzorgio, no
less, whose rage causes even his own soldiers to tremble, or so I have heard
tell.”
“Not the Horazzorgio whose inventions of tortures and torments are beyond the
ability of even the keepers of the King’s dungeons to bring themselves to
speak?”
“The same. Tis said heretics have been slowly melted, starting at the toes.”
“Really? How awful!”
The column filed out of the clearing into the gully of the stream, and began
following the narrow trail that led upward toward the High Country. They had
covered only a short distance when Fenyig, the rearguard, called to attract
Dornvald’s attention. A lone mounted figure, holding well back to keep its
distance, had come into view lower down the trail. It halted when it saw that
the column had stopped to wait. Groork’s voice came floating up hollowly from
below. “Thy demons have damned thee, Thirg. Even now doest thou go willingly
with the servants of Darkness to deliver thy soul into eternal bondage. Heed my
words, for surely wilt thou melt in the Great Furnace.”
Thirg smiled to himself as he turned back, and Dornvald ordered the column to
resume moving. From there on he kept his eyes on the peaks of methane-capped ice
looming in the distance ahead. His future lay beyond the mountains now, and that
was where he should look.
13
TITAN, SECOND IN SIZE AMONG THE MOONS OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM only to Jupiter’s
Ganymede and then by just the barest of margins, had been a constant source of
enigmas for astronomers and planetary physicists virtually since its discovery
by Christiaan Huyghens in 1655. One of the first questions to be asked was
whether it possessed an atmosphere, thus making it unique among the planetary
satellites. When that was at last resolved affirmatively in the early 1940s,
other questions arose: What did the atmosphere consist of, and what were its
physical conditions at various depths? For more than thirty years attempts at
measuring the body’s optical, infrared, and radio spectra yielded inconsistent
and sometimes contradictory results. Then the close flyby of the American
Voyager I probe in 1980 resolved some of the basic issues:
Titan’s atmosphere was mostly nitrogen, with significant proportions of argon,
methane, and hydrogen, plus trace amounts of numerous hydrocarbons and
nitrogenous compounds. Surface pressure was around 1.5 times that of Earth’s