However, Urizen wanted him to come after him and so should not make it too difficult or impossible for him to do so.
Lords must eat. Wolff had a light breakfast served by a talos, one of the half-protein robots, looking like knights in armor, of which he had over a thousand. Then he shaved and showered in a room carved out of a single emerald. Afterwards, he clothed himself. He wore corduroy shoes, tight-fitting corduroy trousers, a corduroy short-sleeved shirt, open at the neck but with a collar that curved up in back, a broad belt of mammoth leather, and a golden chain around his neck. From the chain hung a red jade image of Shambarimen, given to him by the great artist and artificer of the Lords, when he, Wolff, had been a boy of ten. The red of the jade was the only bright color of his garments, the rest being a thrush-brown. When in the castle, he dressed simply or not at all. Only during the rare occasions when he went down to the lower levels for state ceremonies did he dress in the magnificent robes and complex hat of a Lord. In most of his descents, he went incognito, clad in the garments or nongarments of the local natives.
He left the walls of the castle to go out onto one of the hundreds of great balcony-gardens. There was an Eye sitting in a tree, a raven large as a bald eagle. He was one of the few survivors of the onslaught on the castle when Wolff had taken this world back from Ar-woor. Now that Arwoor was dead, the ravens had transferred their loyalty to Wolff.
Wolff told the raven that he was to fly out and look for Kickaha. He would inform other Eyes of the Lord of his mission and also tell the eagles of Podarge. They must inform Kickaha that he was wanted at once. If Kickaha did get their message and came to the castle, only to find Wolff gone, he was to remain there as Lord pro tem. If, after a reasonable interval, Wolff did not return, Kickaha could then do whatever he wanted.
He knew that Kickaha would come after him and that it was no use forbidding him to do so.
The raven flew off, happy to have a mission. Wolff went back into the castle. The viewers were still searching, without success, for Kickaha. But the gate-finders, needing only microseconds to scan and identify, had gone through all the universes and were already on their sixth sweep. He allowed them to continue on the chance that some gates might be intermittent and the search scan and gate on-state had not coincided. The results of the first five searches were on paper, printed in the classical ideographs of the ancient language.
There were thirty-five new universes. Of these, only one had a single gate.
Wolff had the spectral image of this placed upon a screen. It was a six-pointed star with the center red instead of white as he had seen it. Red for danger.
As plainly as if Urizen had told him, he knew that this was the gate to Urizen’s world. Here I am. Come and get me-if you dare.
He visualized his father’s face, the handsome falcon features with large eyes like wet black diamonds. Lords were ageless, their bodies held in the physiological grip of the first twenty-five years of life. But emotions were stronger even than the science of the Lords-working with their ally, time, they slashed away at the rocks of flesh. And the last time he had seen his father, he had seen the lines of hate. God alone knew how deep they were now, since it was evident that Urizen had not ceased to hate.
As Jadawin, Wolff had returned his father’s enmity. But he had not been like so many of his brothers and sisters in trying to kill him. Wolff had just not wanted to have anything at all to do with him. Now, he loathed him because of what he had done to innocent Chryseis. Now, he meant to slay him.
The fabrication of a gate which would match the frequency-image of the hexaculum-entrance to Urizen’s world was automatic. Even so, it took twenty-two hours for the machines to finish the device. By then, the planetary viewers had all reported in. Kickaha was not in their line of sight. This did not mean that the elusive fellow was not on the planet. He could be just outside the scope of the viewers or he could be a hundred thousand places elsewhere. The planet had even more land area than Earth, and the viewers covered only a tiny part of it. Thus, it might be a long long time before Kickaha was apprehended.