More Than Fire by Philip Jose Farmer

Author:Philip Jose Farmer [Farmer, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: sf

During the next two months, Kickaha and Clifton spent at least four hours a day teaching Thoan to him. Meanwhile, they lived in luxurious rooms a story above the hospital room and were served food, some of which was tasty and some of which repulsed them. They also exercised vigorously. And the scaly man had returned Clifton's ring, now resized to fit the Englishman's finger.

Their host's name was Khruuz. His people had been called Khringdiz. He, the lone survivor, had never heard of Thokina, the name given his kind in Thoan legend. But Kickaha thought that the Lords had adapted Khringdiz to their own pronunciation.

They were deep underground below the "tomb"-itself very deep-to which Kickaha and Anana had gated. Khruuz did not know why they had been transported to his place of millennia-long rest. But when Kickaha told him that he had used the Horn of Shambarimen, a sonic skeleton key to all gates, Khruuz understood. He said that it was still an accident that they had gone through the gate there. What had happened was that the gate, like many closed-circuit gates, had a "revolving node." Anywhere from ten to a hundred gates were continuously "whirled" in the node. The gatee might be passed through any one of them, his entrance being determined by which one he encountered when a gate became activated by an energized portion of the node. The Horn had been blown just as a "crack" or flaw opening to the tomb had come by in its rotation. The flaw was not a true gate, that is, it had not been made by a Lord, but existed in the fabric. But the Horn had made the difference.

"That means that Red Orc might know how to get into here," Kickaha told Khruuz. "You used a series of gates to trap us and the Thoan's clone. If he has detectors, and I think he does, he may get into here. Or he may send another clone, somebody anyway, with a bomb a thousand times more powerful than the one the clone carried. Of course, he can't know just where the clone went or what happened after he got here."

By then, Khruuz had heard everything that Kickaha knew about Red Orc. He had also been told as much of the history of the Thoan people as Kickaha knew. Khruuz spoke in his heavily accented and just barely understandable Thoan. His tongue-tendril now and then struck parts of his palate and formed sounds that were not in Thoan and probably only in his language.

"I have closed all the gates for the time being. That keeps anyone from coming in, but it also does not permit me to gather information from the outside."

Khruuz had told Kickaha that parts of the outline of the legends about the Khringdiz were close to the truth. But the details were usually wrong. When the Thoan people had killed off all of the Khringdiz except for him, he had made this underground retreat. After being there

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