The Dark Design by Phillip Jose Farmer

The more astute would discover a message there. Some of these would surely decipher it. Among these would be both recruits and agents.

Who would get to the tower first?

He must be the one who did.

And he must survive the perils of the journey. Probably the greatest of these would be the inevitable battle between the two great boats. Clemens was determined to catch up with King John and kill or capture him. It was possible, highly possible, that both vessels and their crews would be destroyed.

Savagery! The idiocy of the tiger!

All because of this frenzied desire for vengeance which had seized Clemens. Clemens, who was otherwise the most pacifistic of men.

Could Clemens be talked out of this childish passion for revenge ?

Sometimes he agreed with what the Operator, in a depressed mood, had once said.

“Humankind sticks in the throat of God.”

But. .. Evil will bless, and ice will burn.

And the Master of Dark Truth was riding on unpredictable Change.

“What…?”

The glowing lines and symbols had disappeared.

For a few seconds he stared, his mouth open. Then he uttered a string of code phrases. But the surface of the grail remained grey.

He clenched his fists and his teeth.

So … what he had feared had at last happened.

Some element in the complex of the satellite had suddenly quit working. No wonder. After over a thousand years the circuits were due for a checking, but no one had been able to inspect them on schedule.

From now on, he would no longer know exactly where the other men and women were. Now he too was in the house of night, bounded by fog. The passing of the lights on the grail had left a deeper gloom behind. He felt like a tired and companionless pilgrim on a lonely shore, a shadow among shades.

What would go amiss next? What could? For one thing, no, surely not… But if it did, then he might not have all the time needed.

He stood up and straightened his shoulders. Time to go.

A shadow among the shades and running out of time. Like the recruits and the agents, like the Riverdwellers, like all sentient creatures, he would have to make his own light. So be it.