More Than Fire

Red Orc walked out of the small doorway near the big one. He stood well back of the armed men and looked up. Though he seemed small at this distance, his voice was loud.

"Bring the boat down slowly, and give yourself up! If you don't, I'll detonate the bomb in your boat!"

Kickaha shrugged and then did as ordered. This was most probably the stonewall end of his life. He was sure that the Thoan did not need the Trickster anymore. Besides, his enemy had slipped away from him so slickly so many times that he would no longer chance his doing it again. But then, you never knew about Red Orc, a slippery and unpredictable customer himself.

Kickaha turned off the motor. At the command of the soldiers' officer, he threw his backpack and weapons out. Red Orc would now have a gate detector for his own use. He'd be one-up in the ever-shifting conflict between himself and his foes, Khruuz and Manathu Vorcyon. Kickaha got out of the cockpit and stood, hands held high, while the officer ran a metal detector over him and patted him down. The officer spoke in Thoan, and Kickaha put his hands behind his back. The officer used a hold-band to secure his wrists together.

A woman walked through the doorway and then stopped by Red Orc's side. She was beautiful. Her long straight black hair fell past her shoulders. Her dress was a simple red shift; her feet were sandaled.

Kickaha cried, "Anana!"

She looked blankly at him and questioningly at the Thoan.

"She doesn't know you, Kickaha!" Red Orc said. He put one arm around her. "I haven't told her about you, but I will. She'll find out what a vicious and murderous man you are. Not that she'll be very interested in you."

Many bad things had been happening to Kickaha. This seemed the worst to him.

Red Orc told the officer to take the prisoner away.

"We'll see each other soon," he said. "Our final talk will be, in a sense, our last one."

In a sense? What did that mean?

Anana was looking straight at him. Her face showed pity for him. But that would soon change to repulsion when the lying Thoan told her what a cowardly backstabbing lowlife he was.

"Don't believe a word he says about me!" Kickaha shouted at her. "I love you! You loved me once, and you'll love me again!"

She pressed closer to Red Orc. He put his hand on her breast. Kickaha surged forward but was brought to his knees by a beamer butt slamming the back of his head. Dazed, his head hurting, and with vomit rising, he was marched away. Halfway to the building that would be his prison, he got the dry heaves. But his guards urged him on with kicks.

Even though sick, he observed the land around him and the big building he was headed for. It was in a large clearing surrounded by trees. These were growing so closely together that their branches interlocked, moving up and down and sometimes bending around other branches. They looked as if they were feeling each other up. He did not need to be told that they were watchdog trees. Whether or not they just held an escapee or ate him, they were tough obstacles.

The sky was blue and clear except for some very high and thin clouds. The sun was like Earth's. That meant nothing, because many suns in many worlds looked like the Terrestrial sun. Some were as large as the sun; some very tiny, though they looked large.

The guards were tall blue-eyed men with Dutch-bobbed brown, red, or blond hair. They wore yellow calf-length boots and baggy green knee-length shorts attached to a harnesslike arrangement over their shoulders. Broad leather straps ru

Kickaha had never seen such uniforms before. For all he knew, he could still be on Earth II but in a place distant from the "Los Angeles" area.

The building into which he was conducted was onion-shaped, and its front bore clusters of demonic and snakelike figures locked in combat or copulating.

He was marched between two squads through a vast foyer and then halted before an elevator door. Its door did not open. Instead, the shimmering of a gate appeared, and he and one squad walked through it and into a large elevator cage. It was the only one he had ever seen furnished with a washbowl, its stand a rack with towels, a toilet, a fully rotatable blower, a showerhead, a floor drain, and a chair on which was a roll of blankets. The cage accelerated upward for several stories. When it stopped, he expected the door to slide open. But it lurched sideways and began to move swiftly on the horizontal plane.

Presently, the cage stopped. The squad marched out through a shimmering that had appeared over the doorway. As soon as the last man had left the cage, the gate vanished.

So, the cage was also his prison cell. An hour after entering it, he saw a small section of the wall slide up. A revolving shelf came out of the recess. His meal was on it. Okay. He had been served before in just such a ma

He did not eat for several hours. Though he had recovered somewhat from the blow on the head, he still felt sick. Most of that, though, was because Anana no longer knew him and might never know him again.

When he had seen her in the huge hangar, her face had looked, in a subtle way, much younger. It was as if without his realizing it before, every hundred years of her mille

A square section of the wall glowed, shimmered, then became a solid picture. He saw Red Orc, nude, sitting on a chair behind a table. Behind the Thoan, by the opposite wall, was a huge bed.

He lifted a cut-quartz goblet filled with red wine. He said, "A final toast to you, Kickaha. You led me a hot chase and a quite amusing one. To be frank, you also worried me now and then. But you made the hunt more interesting than usual. So, here's to you, my elusive but now doomed quarry!"

After sipping the wine and setting the goblet down, he leaned back. He looked quite satisfied.

"You did what I could not do during my intermittent searches: you found a way into Zazel's World. But that was because I was too close to the problem. You were fresh. However, I owe you thanks for what you did for me, and you're one of the very few I've ever felt gratitude toward. In fact, I owe you double thanks."

He reached out a hand to something Kickaha could not see. When he brought it within vision, it held the gate-detector device.

"I also owe you great gratitude for your gift even though you were not so willing to tender me this. Thank you, again."

"You call this gratitude?"

"I haven't killed you, have I?"

He sipped again, then said, "I don't know what happened to my son, that is, the clone I sent after you into the Caverned World. I suspect that you killed him. You will tell me in every detail what did happen."

To refuse to tell the Thoan of his experiences there would be useless, even stupid. Red Orc would get it out of him and cause him unendurable pain while doing it. Reluctantly, Kickaha described how he had traveled to the place and what had occurred there. But he did not mention Clifton or Khruuz.

Red Orc looked neither frustrated nor angry. He said, "I believe some of your story, but I'll wait a while for verification for my son Abalos to return. Whether he does or not, I will get into Zazel's World in time. I have no doubt that I'll be able to reactivate it, though it may take a while."