“We’re having a good conversation here and might be here a long time. But we’re able to talk together—don’t ask me to explain the ins-and-outs right now—and the King has agreed to pull back his people. Can you check that for me?”
“Hold on, son.” A few minutes passed, then: “Clint, all disappeared a short time back. Looks like everyone’s playing on the level.”
I relaxed. The situation could still get bad, but it looked like we were past the worst. “Good, Father. You guys pull back too, then. Me and Jodi can find our way back if we have to, and I don’t think we’re in any danger here.”
“Will do. Be back every few hours to check on you, though.”
“Okay, Father. Take care.”
“You take care of that girl, hear me?”
“Yes, Father.”
“Good luck.”
I put the transmitter away. “You know, I think we’ve forgotten all our manners. I’m Clinton Slade. This is my fiancée, Jodi Goldman.”
The Nome King had apparently seen plenty of introduction scenes. He rose up on his slender pipestem legs and gave a low bow. “A pleasure, Mr. Clinton Slade, Miss Jodi Goldman. I am Rokhasetanamaethetal, the High Spirit of the Nowëthada.”
We returned his bow. “Rokasta . . . ?”
“Rokhasetanamaethetal,” he repeated. Jodi frowned, and I caught the impression of sounds involved in that name that I couldn’t even describe.
“I’m not sure I can even say that properly, sir,” Jodi said.
“Ah, yes. I recall that the vibrations that formed your language did seem to have, relatively speaking, great simplicity. We can reproduce any such vibration very easily, but you seem to be more limited. Choose another name for me, if you wish. I will see if it suits me.”
I was strongly tempted to call him Ruggedo and see if he’d take it, but it was time to drop that line of thinking. “Let’s just shorten it a bit, sir. How about Rokhaset?” The name sounded vaguely Egyptian, said that way, and the tube-beard did kinda look like the tight little beards you saw on the Egyptian statues.
“That will do well enough. Come then. You have stood long before my throne, and in the images your people send through the air the makatdireskovi has noted that you prefer to sit, as do we if the time is overly long.”
He gestured with his great scepter, and the other Nomes parted along the line of the gesture. It was a smooth and well-practiced movement that simultaneously gave me great respect for their attentiveness and reaction time, and a bit of wariness about our so-far genial host. That kind of coordinated, instant obedience I’d only seen in humans when the boss was a pretty hard-assed tyrant . . . or in a very heavily drilled military establishment.
At the far end of this pathway, a passage was visible in the light of our lantern. Noticing the beam again for the first time in a while brought something urgently to mind. “High Spirit, sir?”
“Just call me Rokhaset, as you have named me. Might I call you Clinton Slade and your friend Jodi Goldman, instead of by formal terms? Yes? Very well, then. What is it?” The High Spirit led us down this new course.
“Your people see using senses we don’t—I guess the word you’re using for it is ‘turan’—and we see using ones you don’t. The problem is that our light’s going to go out in not too many hours, and we’ll really be pretty helpless without it.” This was something of an exaggeration, as we had several light sources on us which would enable us to manage some kind of illumination for quite a while, but I wanted to see what his reaction was.
He tilted his head. “Rather as I am matturan near you and your iron and steel, eh? Give me this lantern of yours for a moment.”
“Be careful with it,” Jodi admonished him.
“As though it were a child, I assure you.”
Reluctantly she handed him the lantern. He took the hard-plastic-cased giant flashlight and examined it carefully, running his fingers across it. “How do you activate it?”
Jodi indicated the on/off switch, then had to physically place his fingers on it, as he couldn’t actually see the gesture. While his people often gave the impression of sight like our own, things like this constantly reminded us that what we were seeing wasn’t what they saw.