CLOUD. Always. This time, all the way to the ground.
There was a beacon, a pulsing whine to the ear. It did not get louder as they neared it, but the pod spoke mechanically during the descent, counting off Ks. At point-one Hanna expected to break through the cloud at any moment, but seconds passed with no perceptible change. And when the naked-eye monitor showed something besides fog, they were so close to the ground that it seemed possible to open the hatch and simply jump out, onto a surface that made the cratered landing field at Rowtt look sophisticated, and the little island in the river, lush.
The pod set down, and Hanna and Gabriel looked in bewilderment at what was on the monitor. They were some distance from Wektt’s chief city, but they had expected some sign of habitation, even though advance observation had found none. But there was nothing here: only dust and desert and outcrops of rock, gray-brown in the fog, and livid patches of moss.
More bewildering still was the figure that stood next to Kwoort, as tall as he, gray uniform blending with the surroundings just like his. Hanna thought she was seeing double for an instant, until she extended a tendril of awareness and met a hostility that made her open her lips to cry Abort!—then the certainty came that the hostility was not directed toward her; that there was indeed another Soldier with Kwoort; and that the hostility was that of the two for each other.
Her wariness had seeped out to Gabriel. He said softly, “Who’s that?”
“I’ve no idea . . .”
God only knew how the aliens had gotten to this desolate spot; there was no sign of conveyance. Something that looked like a large satchel was slung over Kwoort’s shoulder, and another hung carelessly from the other’s hand. Next to them was a cone-shaped artifact, wider at the base and tapering toward the top, a bit over half a meter high. Hanna eyed it distrustfully until she realized it was the beacon.
She muttered, “If we’d come in blind we might have landed right on top of them.”
“Accidentally squashing a couple of aliens wouldn’t look great on your CV.”
“Is that supposed to be a joke?”
“Displaced anxiety. Kwoort’s never brought anybody with him before except a Holy Man, and he is Holy Man here. So who’s this?”
Kwoort did not, evidently, intend to wait for them. He began walking toward the pod, and without hesitating, the other did too. Female, Hanna thought, watching the figure move. She shook herself and got up and went to the hatch. Then they were outside, and the sense of seeing double vanished as the pair came close and their faces were clear.
“I greet you, host,” she began, but Kwoort interrupted.
“I am your guest. We are guests. I could not avoid telling this fellow-Soldier of your arrival and your origin. She insists she must show you something and show it to me too. We will go in your aircraft.”
We will? Hanna thought, but she was not going to refuse. She could tell without effort that Kwoort was in a rage; and there was a keening impatience in the other.
Gabriel was oblivious. He said easily, “I greet you, fellow-Soldier of Kwoort! My name is Gergtk, and yours?”
“I am Kakrekt Commander,” she said. “We will go now. Unless this Holy Man—” the translator could not convey a sneer, and Hanna could not read it on the Commander’s face, but she felt it—“has deceived me about your willingness to do his bidding.”
It was not until much later that Hanna remembered Kakrekt had not stated her age, but by then she had seen that many other things were different about Kakrekt.
• • •
“There,” Kakrekt said. “Do you see where a landing place has been cleared in the vegetation? I send workers to maintain it. There.”
“A waste of Soldiers who could fight,” Kwoort said.
“It is not waste. These not-Soldiers will see that even if you do not.”
For some time they had moved slowly over a solid mass of green, at treetop level, assuming those were trees down there. They had flown for an hour to get there, after nearly three hours of consultation with Endeavor, and finally broken free from cloud near the end. Kakrekt had brought detailed coordinates in her satchel, but Endeavor’s navigators had had their hands full adapting the script to human terms and programming the pod to follow them. They had stayed in contact through the hour of flight, too, hovering in spirit, making Hanna hope she would never be as over-anxious a mother as these navigators were for their charges—and giving her no chance to draw back in silence and delve into the bitterness she felt between Kwoort and Kakrekt. She had ventured only one question—“Kakrekt, what is your position in Wektt?”—and Kwoort had answered for Kakrekt: “She is my High Commander. My High Commander!” with a fury that made Hanna blink.
She thought it would be a relief to escape from the pod, but they got out of it into vicious heat. Hanna’s face poured with sweat before she had taken three steps. So did Gabriel’s, and so, Hanna saw, did the aliens’.
But Kwoort just said, “Pleasant,” and smiled.
“Aren’t you hot?”
“I have been cold since coming to Wektt. This is pleasant,” he said, and Kakrekt made an untranslatable sound that might have been the equivalent of a snort.
They walked a cleared path that was a suffocating tunnel walled and roofed with trees and vines. The air was swollen with humidity. Kakrekt walked swiftly, leading them; Kwoort followed more deliberately, and Hanna and Gabriel slowed to his pace. Tough creepers caught at their boots and in places rose to Hanna’s knees. Kakrekt’s workers had not been here for some time, or the undergrowth reclaimed territory quickly no matter how brutally it was cut back.
The narrow trail wound between lofty, rounded green mounds which Hanna began to suspect were overgrown ruins. Kakrekt was soon out of sight, but they could not mistake the path. Kwoort walked in silence; his legs appeared to ripple, with a strange boneless quality, when he wanted to avoid especially dense tangles. Hanna and Gabriel swerved with less grace. Then the track took an abrupt right-angle turn, and they faced an opening that might once have held a door. Vines had been clawed away on either side but were trying to take the portal back, thrusting out new shoots that waved, questing, as Kwoort followed Kakrekt through them into darkness. He went in silence, in no mood for speech. Hanna felt him think angrily of the humans, anticipating how they would react to what they approached. Kwoort had not even seen it yet, but he had already made up his mind—
Hanna hesitated an instant, glanced at Gabriel. They followed Kwoort into the dark, just in time to see a flare of light.
Kakrekt stood before a panel of newly polished copper inset with bright gold, holding the light. Hanna was too startled to speak. But Gabriel whispered: “Is this a temple?” (Chirp, said the translator on the last word.) He hesitated and went on, “How old is this place?”
“No one knows,” Kakrekt said. “A scout found this, I think it must have been a city, by accident. I came myself, I found this structure myself, I found the way in myself.”
She stroked the surface of the panel, fingertips lingering here and there, as if she could absorb information from it. Hanna moved closer and saw that the panel bore the image of a face, half life-size. It was not stylized; the individual would be recognizable if he walked into the chamber now. A series of written characters framed it.
But it was not the face of a Soldier . . . assuming those slits were eyes, that protuberance a nose, the rounded appendages at the top ears, that fleshy blob at the bottom a mouth.
“Can you tell me what the writing says?” Kakrekt was saying. “This Holy Man says you have experience, can you tell me what that not-Soldier is—”
Hanna could not speak. She had even stopped thinking.
Presently Gabriel said very quietly, “There’s nobody.” Nobody that looks like that.
“No.” By now Hanna had gone through the same sequence of images that Gabriel had—as if she had not known immediately, as if flipping through the mental catalog, like a child’s picture book, would make it not so. No F’thalian looked like that, no Zeigan, no Uskosian. No Girrian, and Girritt had not developed spaceflight anyway.
She looked finally at Gabriel, and then at Kakrekt. She said, “I don’t know what this is. Have you found other artifacts like this?”
“There are other such images in the deeps below Wektt. I want to know what they are.”
Hanna turned away with an effort. She said, “I didn’t know you speculated about such things. I didn’t know anyone did. Isn’t it forbidden? Why have you been permitted to do this?”
“There was no one to tell me not to,” Kakrekt said. She swung around and looked at the silent Kwoort. “There is still no one,” she said.
Kwoort erupted, at that. “Do you think I cannot fight this war without you?” he shouted. “You are mistaken!”
Kakrekt took her hand away from the wall. She said nothing, but Hanna felt the oddest conviction in her: that Kwoort would not stand in her way for very long. She could not tell why Kakrekt thought that, but eyed her thoughtfully.
She said, “What does this place—its maintenance, its investigation—have to do with your war?”
“It has nothing to do with war,” said Kakrekt, and Kwoort snarled, “This Warrior only found it because she was left to her own devices too long, and that was the fault of Tlorr.”
“Tlorr! How does Tlorr come into it?”
“Prookt was next senior after me in Rowtt. Now that I am gone, Tlorr is left with Prookt as High Commander. She resisted that necessity, she postponed it again and again. My departure for Wektt was delayed much too long, summer after summer after summer. And for all those summers while Quokatk descended into madness, this Warrior has refused to become Holy Man and has done as she pleased, ignoring the directives of the god, with no one to prevent her, because Tlorr did not want to let me go.”
“I don’t see—oh. Prookt.”
“Yes. Would you like to rely on Prookt as your High Commander?”
“He is—a little lacking in imagination.” Translating as foresight. “So–”
“This Warrior—”
Kakrekt interrupted. “This High Commander chose to investigate the report of the site. I shall continue to investigate. Look at it! What do you think? Do not-Soldiers have sites like this?”
Hanna began, “There are many—” but Kwoort had swelled with fury again at the interruption.
“It’s of no importance what they think! I will have the place destroyed! And if this Commander has made records of it they will be destroyed too!”
Kakrekt said very calmly, “I am sure there are other places like this. They will be reported to me.”
“It does not matter. In time you will forget. In time it will all be forgotten,” Kwoort said with dreadful satisfaction.
But Hanna said softly to Kakrekt, “One of our people said to me that he thinks all your crèches are built on bones. Layers and layers of bones, he said.”
“Yes,” Kakrekt said. “But I do not think they need to be.”
“It has always been that way!” Kwoort’s voice was loud and got louder, he trembled and seemed almost to vibrate in the dark. He shouted, “It will always be that way!”
Hanna held her breath; she thought he would strike Kakrekt, but he did not. The passageway was stifling and except for the radiant wall everything seemed black. Kakrekt turned suddenly and moved deeper into the passage, and Kwoort hurried after her as if afraid to let her out of his sight. There were more of the ceremonial panels, but Kakrekt’s Soldiers had not cleaned the rest. Copper was crusted with green oxidation, gold with layers of grime. The passage dead-ended in rubble after only a few meters and all of them stopped. Kwoort did not turn around. Hanna suddenly backed up a pace and bumped into Gabriel. He put his arms around her but he did not seem to be aware that he was doing it. Hanna touched Kwoort’s mind and found that he was staring at the rubble with hatred, and that Kakrekt was staring at it too—but she was absorbed in contemplation of what might lie beyond the rubble, the knowledge there.
Hanna said very quietly, “We could help you learn more.”
Kakrekt whispered (Hanna felt the leap of hope), “How could you do that?”
“Not-Soldiers know a great deal about their past. The civilizations that led to the present have been traced in detail, cities like this excavated, the lives of rulers and ordinary people examined. We have done this through the cooperation of many sciences. We could teach you the sciences; we could help you reclaim the past.”
Kwoort said, “It is of interest to no one. Except to the few who live too long.”
The dark weighed heavily, stone and earth and riotous jungle overhead, and Hanna wanted to break for the outside. She resisted the urge to run and said, “Why is it of no interest? What is the authority that says Abundant God forbids the study of history?”
“The Holy Men say so, they have said so forever. Always, it is remembered and written down again, everywhere in every time, in the holy books found in Rowtt and here too. Only, I wonder if those Holy Men said it because they knew they would forget, that all forget.”
“The end-change, the forgetting—”
“Don’t speak. I do not wish to talk any more. Go away. You too,” he added to Kakrekt, but Kakrekt did not move.
Hanna was glad to obey. She turned and urged Gabriel before her back through the passage, dimly visible in reflected light; they turned a corner and saw the opening to the outdoors, and went to it and stepped with relief into the tropical day.
The heat seemed to have gotten even more stifling in the minutes they had spent inside the mound. The air felt thick, like liquid, and it was hard to breathe. There were sounds, bird sounds, Hanna supposed, though the birds she had seen had been silent to human ears, but she did not hear the calls she might have expected somewhere else. She heard small moans like intermittent cries of pain. Gabriel started to say something but she put a hand on his arm and said, “Hush.”
“Hush,” Gabriel repeated, and quoted, “‘Don’t speak.’ ‘Go away.’” He sounded exasperated.
Hanna shook his arm a little. “I want to see what Kwoort is thinking. So hush.”
She expected fragments of a quarrel, but the aliens were silent now, Kakrekt watching Kwoort and taking hope from his concentration. For Hanna that concentration produced abstractions, few concrete referents, hard to decipher:
...and others have come to this point and must have known what I know that I will leave nothing behind nothing that I write until the end all that came before lost because I have forgotten it and forgot where I hid it and in time I will even hide this sack and forget where I hid that too. As they forgot. Nothing but the end and what would happen if I shouted to them before then shouted you are wrong! All of you are wrong, you have always been mistaken, the god you believe is false! They will say I am not in my right mind I have come to that change and they will feed me and bathe me and seek another Holy Man and all will go on as before
“It’s all right,” she said. “You can talk. Kwoort’s thinking about forgetting. I would bet the chemistry of memory is tied right into that second pair of eyes. That there are tiers of memory—it would take forever to untangle the relationship, even if we could get some of them to volunteer to be studied. I wonder . . . I thought they’re not interested in us enough to volunteer. But Kakrekt’s different.”
“Volunteers is what we want, isn’t it?”
“And Kakrekt might be willing to order them to do it, if we can help her learn some history. I wonder,” said Hanna, “if we should concentrate on her instead of Kwoort.”
“Or on . . . whoever they were? Whenever they were here?”
“No! Not now. It’s been a long time since ‘they’ were here . . . One problem at a time.”
They sat on the ground and waited. Sweat crawled on their skins. There were insects, too, some of them with wingspans like Earthly eagles, but the insects were not interested in human fluids. Hanna and Gabriel scrambled up when they heard the aliens’ voices drawing near. Quarreling about where to go next, but Kakrekt had just conceded.
Kwoort said to the humans, “It will not be so hot at the next place. Maybe you are pleased to hear that.”
“I don’t know,” Hanna said. “Is it another place of ruin?”
“Ruin. Yes.”
• • •
More interminable consultation with Navigation: at least it was cool inside the pod. Eventually they flew toward the southwest, until— “You’re landing on that?” said the navigators.
“It’s just a desert, isn’t it?” Hanna replied.
“Not exactly,” they said, but she didn’t know what they meant until she got out of the pod and they began to walk across a glassy surface barely masked with windblown dust.
The damn stuff was slippery and lumpy. It had solidified erratically, so that the uneven ground in places had edges that would have cut bare feet to shreds—for a change Hanna had sensibly worn tough boots, and even those started to show damage—and in others betrayed balance as badly as ripples of melting ice. The sun was well up but there were black shadows that made rounded humps look edged and hid the depth of ankle-turning pits beyond edges. And where winds had swept the dust away the rock was shiny, and reflected light in disorienting flashes like a forest of tiny mirrors. It lay all around them in hills and hollows, red-brown and brown-black, and though the sun beat on it, fog lingered from night air meeting heat retained from the day before, and mist lay in strata here and there, damaging depth perception even more. Not that it was cool. They had not changed latitudes by much, and the climate was only cooler by comparison.
Kakrekt hung back stubbornly by the pod, but Kwoort wanted to walk on the tormented surface. He did it easily, with inhuman balance.
“Why,” said Hanna, “and how far?”
“I wanted to see this with my own eyes. A weapon was used here at its most powerful—a test, perhaps, of its ultimate formulation. Most areas of the dead continents are like this, I think, but I have not been to them since the weapon was used. There are blasted areas in Rowtt and elsewhere in Wektt, but not like this.”
“Do you intend to cross all of it on foot?” She raised her voice; Kwoort had already gained ground on the humans.
“Perhaps,” said Kwoort, who must know they were fifty kilometers from anything resembling ordinary landscape, but he did not mean it. Since the translator could not convey the complaint in Hanna’s tone, he must have deduced it, because she saw that he certainly recognized her reluctance, and responded as if she were a whining Soldier. And however far he meant to go, he obviously expected Hanna and Gabriel to accompany him, because he stopped and waited for them to catch up. They did not hurry. They did not dare; the footing was too treacherous. Hanna hoped Kwoort would not linger long. The ambient radioactivity here was slightly elevated over the norm of other places she had been to on Battleground; short-term exposure should not be dangerous, but she would not want to live there.
He waited at the top of a shallow rise, but when they got there they saw that the other side descended much more steeply. At the base of some tortured hillocks lay a pair of pools. Hanna could not tell how far away they were; in the absence of anything for comparison, distance was hard to gauge, and the hillocks might really be respectable hills, the pools small lakes. There was heavier mist over them, and the water, at a distance, looked milky.
Perhaps it was not water. Hanna thought she probably would not want to breathe the mist.
Kwoort started downhill, toward the pools. Hanna called after him, “We are not going there!”
He was moving fast, and his voice barely floated back to them. “I order you,” he said.
“No,” said Hanna, not raising her voice this time, but directing a negative to his mind so that he could not ignore it. He swung around, surprised. No one ever disobeyed orders. Except, maybe, Kakrekt—if he dared to give her a direct order and find out.
Look at us. Do we look like Soldiers?
The answer was grudging, but at least it was No.
It made no difference to Kwoort, whatever he intended to do. He turned and continued walking down the long slope, toward the murky pools. After a minute Hanna set her communicator for visual imaging and recorded the scene. Gabriel watched her curiously.
“Why didn’t you do that back at the other place?”
“Because I didn’t think of it, all right?” said Hanna, and cursed herself for it.
Kwoort got to the pools and stood motionless for a long time. He had almost forgotten about the humans; he was thinking of the power it had taken to turn once-fertile land to rock, thinking of the spaceflight that weapons technology had accidentally made possible, thinking the population had grown again and would soon explode, wondering if the world would survive.
“They are self-destructing,” Hanna whispered, “and he knows it.”
For the first time she felt pity—for Kwoort, for Kwek, for Kakrekt and Nakeekt—and she resisted. It was a good deal less painful to hold onto dislike. And when Gabriel asked her to repeat what she had said, because he had not quite caught the words, she only shook her head.
After that they went far south, toward Wektt proper, and followed the curve of the world still farther south to someplace where it was the end of winter, as in the city, but with temperatures colder still, and they had followed it too to the middle of the night. The sky was black and without stars (because there were, of course, clouds), and Kakrekt stalked ahead of them into a cave of ice, and they went through two sets of doors and walked into warmth and light.
“What,” said Hanna after a moment’s silence, “do you call this?”
“Waste,” Kwoort growled, “wastage of labor and energy.”
But Kakrekt said with simple pride, “It is only an adjunct to my billet. It is not physically proximate, of course.”
Gabriel said, “It’s Kakrekt’s garden.” His cold hand took hold of Hanna’s.
It used hydroponic principles, but no protein-based vegetable food was grown here. Flowering vines climbed the walls and containers studded them, dripping with leaves and more flowers. There was rock underfoot, in erratic paths that led between banks and beds of more flowering plants. They had been planted without, apparently, regard to any plan.
Kakrekt said calmly, “Perhaps they make things like this at That Place.”
No grasp of design, Hanna was thinking, the implication of Kakrekt’s words escaping her at first.
“Then why did you not go there?” Kwoort said to Kakrekt. “It would be an excellent move for you to go there now.”
And then Hanna was all attention.
Kwoort turned to her and said, “Is that where my former record-keeper went? Record-keepers have a high incidence of going to That Place. I myself was Rowtt’s record-keeper for some time.”
Hanna looked up at Kwoort and saw the thrusting smile. His ears unfurled and flapped. Laughter at what he knew must be her surprise.
“How much do you know about That Place?” she said.
“Why should I answer your questions? You offer nothing in return.”
Hanna looked at him in silence. Spyeyes. Fuel modules. Weapons that kill organisms but leave structures intact. Shall we give them the fruits of our mastery of death?
“I think,” said Kakrekt, “they will offer me the knowledge I want.”
And Hanna was still silent, but now her thoughtful gaze was on Kakrekt.
Deserts and lakes and mountains and rivers and deserts. And more deserts. Sites of battles, Kwoort plotting courses on maps he took from his satchel and unrolled. Human voices, Endeavor’s patient navigators. An incongruous stop to relieve themselves, Hanna and Gabriel behind separate bushes: Hanna made sure there was nothing in sight that looked like an eat-anything. After that, the changing border with Rowtt, flying low though Kwoort assured Hanna they would not be detected and fired on this far from Rowtt’s chief city. It was hard to stay alert hour after hour, and the tension between Kwoort and Kakrekt became both grating and monotonous. Talking of military matters they were amicable enough, but it was evident to Hanna that their final goals were very different. She could not tell exactly how they differed. The discordance was too great, their thoughts jangled like orchestras at war, and her own mind went numb in response.
“Hanna,” said Gabriel. He was not standing behind her now but sitting on the floor, back to the back of her seat and leaning against it. He was tiring, too.
“What?”
“I thought I heard a Communications signal.”
Hanna opened her eyes and saw a blinking light. It was green: not an emergency. But she activated the link, and to her surprise, instead of hearing a voice, she saw words scroll across her field of vision. Kwoort and Kakrekt could not read them, and obviously they were not meant to hear them.
Say nothing that might threaten ongoing talks. Maintain friendly relations at all costs until further notice. By order of Commissioner Jameson.
“What does that say?” said Kwoort.
“A routine status report,” Hanna lied. Gabriel got up and looked at the message as it repeated. He said nothing, but Hanna heard the question he did not ask. What the words said was clear, but why someone had found it necessary to send them was obscure. She wondered what had happened.
Jameson, returning to Earth on Heartworld III, reflected that he really had missed the yacht.
He meant to make some changes—Edward’s taste was not his—but the vessel would do for now. He could reach anyone from it, just as he could from Admin, and access any information he needed; he could conference, debate, field questions and demands, as easily as he could on Earth. His staff was just as accessible, his working days just as frequently interrupted even in deep space. All the old authority was back, complete with accoutrements and image.
Maybe not the image.
“Answer,” he said automatically at the communications signal, and did not think of the picture he presented until he saw the astonishment on Karin Weisz’s face.
“Oh,” he said, and looked down and around. Mickey was sprawled across his lap, asleep. The Dog took up all the space on the seat to his right. The Cat was wound tightly against his left hip, a gray ball of fur with one protruding white paw. None of them looked like waking up.
“If you can spare the time,” Weisz said.
“Go ahead . . .”
He rolled up the reader he had been holding (rather uncomfortably) just above Mickey’s head and put it aside. On the Cat’s side. The Dog liked to play grab-and-keep-away. If he was very lucky, the animal would outgrow the game—
Irrelevant. The Dog wouldn’t be living with him much longer. Or the Cat, or Mickey.
Weisz said, “I just saw the last Endeavor conference. Why didn’t you alert the rest of us?”
“What’s the urgency? You’ve seen it now . . .”
“We could be the Commission that doubles human life spans, or triples them, or more! How long have you known?”
“Known what? Hanna found out how long-lived these people are the first time she made contact with one of them. That does not automatically translate into longer human lives. We’re looking at years of research that might come to nothing.”
“I want all the information you have.”
“You already have it.”
“I have précis. I want everything.”
“I’ll see that you get it,” he said equably—he would inundate her with it, millions of words, billions of numbers, every scrap of information on the Battleground mission.
“Immediately.”
“I’ll call Zanté as soon as we’re done. What do you mean to do with it, by the way?”
She said after a perceptible pause, “I just want to be fully informed.”
“You understand the secrecy here?”
“The existence of the mission is not secret. People are wondering publicly if there’s been a contact, and if so what we’ve found.”
“I hope you don’t intend to answer those questions.”
“Of course not,” she said.
“Good-bye, then. Let your staff know the data’s coming. Endit . . .”
She was gone, her eyes in the last seconds speculative. He was speculating too, but he was sure he did not show it.
She had lied about maintaining secrecy, he thought. Colony One had a high turnover in commissioners; for several weeks Karin had been looking at the prospect of becoming another commissioner emeritus. Crying Live for a thousand years! might gain her quite a lot of time. And if she did that, Jameson could not afford to be seen standing in the way. Kwoort’s cooperation—or the cooperation of somebody in authority on Battleground—had just become critical.
• • •
“Enough,” Kwoort said finally. “Enough for today. Return us to the plateau where the beacon is placed. Come back tomorrow.”
“That is acceptable,” Hanna said.
“I did not ask you if it is acceptable. You will do it unless you want to end all contact with Wektt. You could return to Rowtt, of course, and deal with Prookt.”
“Or Tlorr,” Hanna said.
“Tlorr will not cooperate. I told her you will not consider aiding any of us, and she has no further interest in you. At best she will delegate Prookt to deal with you, and then where will you be? Where you started.”
“If you believe we will not help you, why do you want us to come back?”
“I myself lied to Tlorr,” Kwoort said. “I still intend to obtain your assistance, but I already knew that I would come here, and then Tlorr would be my enemy. So I lied. You are assisting me now. That is what you have been doing all day. You have nothing to show for it. Come back tomorrow, and maybe you will get something of what you want. Come and stay. Yes. Come and stay some days. Stay until we agree.”
Gabriel said, “Will we be able talk with Kakrekt Commander as well?”
“Yes,” Kakrekt said, but Kwoort said, “Why do you want to talk to her? Is talking to me not enough? Kakrekt is very busy. I was very busy as High Commander—busier than I am likely to be as Holy Man. It is my duty to pray, however. That will require much time.”
“You had time for us as High Commander of Rowtt,” Gabriel said. “Surely Kakrekt can make time, if she thinks she can get something useful from us.”
Hanna looked at him in surprise, but Kwoort’s ears moved on the edge of laughter.
“You are more demanding than I thought you would be. Very well. Kakrekt may find some time for you, if you stay long enough. And if I do not order her to be too busy.”