The one with the chilling voice began to swear.
“I feel the same way,” the first speaker agreed. “I think you’d better go advise the Vlagh that your scheme didn’t work. The Maag fleet’s on the way to Dhrall, and there’s nothing we can do now to stop it. Our war in the west won’t be as easy as we thought, I’m afraid.”
“I am not foolish enough to be the one who takes that message to the Vlagh,” the one with the rasping voice replied. “Bad news angers the Vlagh, and those who tell it things it does not wish to hear seldom live long enough to watch the sun go down.”
“I’ve noticed that. I’d say that you’ve got a bit of a problem. Your scheme was clever enough, but Kajak was a poor choice to carry it off.”
Veltan sauntered past the muddy little alleyway where the two had been speaking, and they both tried to shrink back into the shadows to stay out of sight, but Veltan had already seen enough. The one who’d brought the news looked much like any other Maag on the streets of Weros—fur-clad, hooded, bearded, and dirty—but he was much smaller than an ordinary Maag. The other one was also wrapped in a hooded cloak, and Veltan caught a single glimpse of a face with huge, bulging eyes, a mouth surrounded by mandibles, and two long antennae sprouting from the top of an oval head.
Veltan strolled on past the alley as if he hadn’t seen or heard anything out of the ordinary, but he was quickly revising a few preconceptions. Given the general tone of what he’d just heard, it was fairly obvious that the insect outranked the human in the social structure of the Wasteland. They were both far more intelligent than Veltan had expected, however. The term “hive-mate” hinted at an insectlike mentality, and that raised the possibility that That-Called-the-Vlagh might just be “the queen bee of the Wasteland.”
The intelligence of the two in the alley sort of confirmed a notion that Veltan had reached during his sojourn on the moon. It had seemed to him that intelligence might just be a characteristic driven by necessity. If your enemy was large, size would be very important, so each generation would be larger than the preceding one. That had suggested to Veltan that a clever enemy would virtually demand the expansion of one’s mind in response. The alternative would be extinction.
“Enough,” he muttered, walking purposefully through the rest of Weros to the edge of the town. He crossed the stump-dotted field to the west of Weros, and once he was in the woods, he called out to his thunderbolt. “Let’s get out of here, dear one. I’ve heard and seen enough. It’s time for me to have a talk with my sister.”
It didn’t take Veltan very long to find Sorgan’s fleet. There were a few ships in the harbor of each village he and his pet passed as they flew south along the coast of Maag, but Mother Sea had implied that there would be many ships at the place where Zelana was. The difference between “few” and “many” wasn’t too precise, but Veltan was fairly certain that two or three didn’t exactly qualify as many, so he kept going south.
Then his pet carried him to a shabby village far to the south of Weros, where dozens of Maag ships were anchored. “I think this is the place, dear,” he told his pet. “Put me down a little ways out, and I’ll walk on in. You’re lovely beyond words, but we don’t want to attract attention. You’ll be able to crash and boom to your heart’s content when we go back to Dhrall and start smashing ice.”
She flickered affectionately at his cheek and then set him down at the edge of a large grove of trees a little way to the west of the village.
Since Zelana had come to Maag to recruit an army, Veltan was fairly certain that the one the aliens had called Sorgan was the one he should try to find, and that his sister would probably be on board the ship called the Seagull.
The weather was unpleasant as Veltan walked down across the open field toward the shabby village. A gusty wind swept in from the east, and a steady drizzle of rain swirled in from the harbor, wreathing like fog and half obscuring the shabby buildings.
When he reached the village, he found it teeming with sailors despite the chill drizzle. It didn’t take him long to locate a small group of men who served on board the Seagull, since every seagoing man he spoke with pointed them out to him. They were down near the waterfront, loading barrels and big, bulky sacks into several small boats. A large fellow with a neck like a bull seemed to be in charge.
“Excuse me,” Veltan said politely to the big man, “I’m looking for a lady named Zelana. Do you happen to know where I might find her?”
“She’s on board the Seagull,” the sailor replied. “Is it important?”
“I believe it is. She’s my sister, and I’ve got some information for her that’s probably quite significant. Things are heating up in the Land of Dhrall, so it’s time for her to come home.”
“Rabbit!” the big man barked. “This is Lady Zelana’s brother, and he needs to talk with her. Row him out to the Seagull.”
“But it’s raining,” the small sailor whined.
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Couldn’t we wait a bit? It could clear up before long.”
“Almost any day now, but you’re not going to wait, Rabbit. You’re going right now.” The big man’s voice was hard, and the look he gave the smaller man was threatening.
“All right, all right. Don’t get excited. I’m going.” The little man grumbled as he led Veltan out onto a rickety dock, and he continued to mutter as the two of them climbed down into one of the small boats.
“How’s my sister been lately?” Veltan asked as the little man rowed them out into the rain-swept harbor.
“She was sort of worried up until a few days ago,” the little fellow replied. “Things brightened up for her after me and Longbow killed a whole bunch of people who were planning to cause trouble.”
“The one you call Longbow’s the archer, isn’t he?”
“That he is, and he’s the best there is in the whole wide world. Me and him are real close friends.” The little man stopped rowing and wiped the accumulated water off his nose with his sleeve.
“Is Eleria with my sister?”
“They don’t never get too far apart. That’s one sweet little girl, ain’t she?”
“Indeed she is,” Veltan agreed. “It was Longbow, then, who shot arrows into the foreheads of the enemy sailors, wasn’t it?”