For a moment Baver thought to think of other things, sing songs in his mind perhaps, because he didn’t want to tell. What ambitions might it arouse in this emperor? But he knew he wouldn’t leave this room before they’d wrung the information from him, and it might well be impossible to withhold from a telepath anyway. “Our homeland is a whole world,” he said, “so far away that the light from our sun takes more than seventeen years to get here.”
The emperor stared long and hard at Baver, inwardly sorting images and impressions. The strange foreigner thought what he said was true; there was no doubt of that.
He spoke to the guards who’d brought Baver. “Take him back to his cell,” he said. “Let him go without further food today, to worry him a little, but give him a soldier’s breakfast tomorrow.”
He would meditate on what he’d learned from this man, he decided.
THIRTY-FOUR
Nils had pressed hard since he’d left the road. He’d swing into the saddle soon after sundown and continue till half light in the morning, following game trails. The horses, he d found, saw little or no better at night than most humans, and where it was necessary to travel over windfall-littered or otherwise treacherous ground, he’d dismount and lead them.
At times he found himself near the Great Wall, which was buried in forest and somewhat meandering. It was unmanned. Once he explored a length of it, found a gateway with its gate long gone, and passed through.
He still didn’t know where he was going, but traveled on intuition. It would have been impossible for most men.
Mostly it was wild country, without sign of man except for the wall. He heard wolves one night, saw bear tracks along a stream, and again at a spring. Once on a mud bank he found tracks that made him think of the lion in the arena of Kazi the Undying. Seemingly they’d been made by some giant cat, for there were no marks of claws. Were there lions in this country? He knew no reason to doubt it.
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One dawn as the sky paled, he was following the crest of a forest ridge, watching the slopes on both sides for suitable cover to spend the daylight hours. The righthand slope was too steep to be promising. He paused on a rocky overlook to gaze southward, and some five or six kilometers off saw a hill with large buildings on its upper slopes and crown.
He turned downslope there, and picketed his horses beneath a thickness of old maples, leaving them to browse the abundant maple seedlings. Then he hiked back upslope to the overlook, where he lay on his belly. He tried to project his spirit to the distant structure, but nothing happened. Perhaps if he knew someone there, and knew he knew … It seemed to him he was looking at the imperial palace; at any rate it attracted him strongly, and at the same time repelled him. It also seemed the place he was to go, but . . . Not yet.
He continued to stare. Usually—continuously these last weeks—he moved decisively, whether or not he had a rationale for it. But just now there was no impulse to follow.
The sun was scarce degrees below the horizon, four or five, and the sky approached daybright. His concentration was broken by a gr-r-rawp! in the sky above him, and without raising head or eyes he looked up. An early raven soared effortlessly, a very large raven. In that moment his viewpoint entered its mind, and he was looking down at himself. Like Svartvinge, it was a raven elemental. But unlike Svartvinge, this elemental had been imprinted to resist him; in a moment it had cast out his mind, violently, and Nils found his viewpoint back with his body again, about his head.
His intrusion, brief but intimate and deep, had shaken the bird, shaken it powerfully because of the injunction it lived with, and turning, it fled toward the palace.
Now Nils knew his next move, though not the one beyond it. He trotted downhill to his horses, untied them and mounted one, then rode away, although it was daytime. The raven’s master would soon know of his pres-