He was trembling.
"I thought I might skip the grand tour for now. Just out of curiosity, what does come up that ladder?"
"No one for thirty or more of your years, Valentine. And before that for a long march of years, much more disappeared
down it than came back up. Remember, there were hungry minds on Kur for centuries before we seized your planet."
Valentine's imagination, always too eager to supply visions at the wrong moment, visited him with images of bound Haitians being thrown down the well to blood-smeared shapes below. The torchlight's dancing shadows turned to a magic-lantern show of human souls in torment.
Valentine's eyes met the Kurian's, and he felt that sinking sensation again, not unpleasant this time, for it calmed his pounding heart.
"You're a sensitive man, young Valentine," the Kurian observed. "What leaps your mind makes."
"I've seen enough," he said, sniffing at the substance clinging to his clothing. It smelled like flour. The procession capped the torches and took up lanterns and the aged Kurian and left the well-room. From his seat on the bearer's back, the Kurian smiled at Valentine's relief.
"We leave the Citadelle tomorrow morning, and I shall take you to my true home, the palace ruins. I invite you to share my hospitality under these austere roofs, but somehow I think you will prefer to sleep outside the walls tonight."
"You read my mind," Valentine said.
"What I could. Your father was-what is the expression-an 'open book.' You keep more of yourself under lock and key. Afraid of what's in there?"
Valentine backed out of the room before the Kurian could say more.
They strung mosquito netting between wrecked trucks. Valentine and Ahn-Kha bedded down inside a defunct tap-tap, still brightly painted where the encroaching rust had not yet touched. Faces, slogans, depictions of food, and animals adorned the old shell.
Ahn-Kha gnawed on the leg of something Valentine guessed to be a dog.
"My David, you saw a Door?"
"Yes."
"My father told me they were simple-looking things. Just an arch of stone, no different from the gate we used to go into the courtyard."
"This one was in a well. It couldn't have been one of the original Doors of the Interworld Tree-those were supposed to be huge. They were built by the race that came before the Lifeweavers."
"I did not know this. I thought the Kurians built the network between worlds."
"Yes, but it's built on an older one, or they learned how to do it from an older race. Some kind of creatures made out of pure energy. The man who told me about it called them the Pre-Entities. They go back hundreds of millions of years. They were the original beings that existed on vital aura. They left behind their science when they finally died out, and the Lifeweavers found it. There was some kind of schism, and a bunch of Lifeweavers on a planet called Kur learned how to live off vital auras, becoming vampires, in effect."
"This word, Lifeweavers. In my tongue, they were called the 'prime movers,' I think it would be in English. Some of them use you, yes?"
"Help us."
"And the Gray Ones and other creatures who fight you, are they being 'helped' by the Kur?"
"Okay, use us. Change us even. You've heard people say they bred the Grogs. Maybe they did the same with us. Once a Lifeweaver told me that my species 'exceeded their expectations.' It makes me wonder. Lately I've felt like a pawn in a game of chess, but I can't see the rest of the board."
"Paw in chest?"
"A pawn. Chess-an old strategy game. Remember the Big Man's office in Omaha? You've seen the board. Eight squares by eight squares. The pieces are figures meant to represent different medieval icons. They move into an opposing piece's square, and it is removed from the game. The
pieces are supposed to be kings and queens and knights and things. The pawns, well, they're the-"
"Cannon fodder," Ahn-Kha said, ears dancing, as they tended to do when he was pleased with himself.
"Yes. They tend to get taken off the board by the more powerful pieces."
Ahn-Kha crunched the bone between his teeth, like a ruminant with its cud. "Tell me, my David. In chess, can a pawn kill an enemy king?"