“What do you have to dry?”

  Dillan ceased paddling, and he twisted around to look at me. “I’d show you, but it might attack and possibly try to kill you if I did that.”

  “You’re carrying an animal?”

  “No.”

  “What then?”

  “I’m…I’m not sure you’d understand.”

  “Do you know how lame that sounds?”

  “Mr. Bayard, there’s much about the Brotherhood I doubt you know. It’s esoteric and might sound farfetched to a soldier of your training and mindset.”

  “I’m a Marine.”

  “I don’t understand what you mean by that.”

  “I’m not a soldier. I’m a—I was a United States Marine.”

  Dillan shook his head.

  “Okay, we can land,” I said finally, seeing that it was useless to try to explain. “Do you need a fire to dry out your whatever?”

  “I do,” Dillan said.

  I turned the canoe and headed for shore. Soon enough, we dragged the canoe onto a sandy beach, pulling it onto grass higher up. There was driftwood about. We collected some and made a fire. Dillan had a thing like a lighter, and we soon sat around the crackling flames, each of us sitting on a flattish rock.

  The real Thal Dillan looked nothing like Horst. As I said earlier, he was much smaller and narrow-shouldered. He had a hairless cranium, a sharp nose, slanted eyes and angular features. His orbs were black and his hands rather small and dainty, the fingernails painted black. He wore large metal rings, huge items really, telling me they were fashioned from iron ore. Each ring had a strange symbol on the face, one of them the arrowed sign of chaos, with many arrows pointing outward from a circle. His garments were silky but had proven tough enough, so they weren’t silk like from on Earth. Despite his small size and rather delicate nature, he didn’t seem feminine. I wouldn’t call him masculine either. There was something alien about him, about the way he moved his hands and canted his bony wrists.

  “Are you human?” I blurted.

  Across the flames, Dillan stared into my eyes before his gaze darted away as if guilty.

  “You’re not human, are you?” A new sense of dread filled me. He was inhuman differently from the rat-men, a true alien from the stars, something desperately evil or at the least, vile.

  “I’m human,” he said.

  Did I believe that? I didn’t think so. A deep part of me urged me to kill him this instant. I hedged, asking, “Are you Homo sapiens?”

  “I imagine that’s what you call yourselves on Earth?”

  He was dodging the issue.

  Dillan nodded then in that strange alien manner. “I’m the same species of human as Horst. There’s no difference.”

  “Seeing you, I’m finding that hard to believe.”

  “I know.” Dillan sighed, and he did so a second time. “It’s because of the Zero Stone.” He said that as if the words were pulled out of him.

  “I don’t comprende.”

  Dillan cocked his head at me.

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “Ah. I do understand that. The Zero Stone is alien, quite alien to Kaldar, Earth, too, I suppose, and any normal human.”

  There was a ring of truth to that. A Zero Stone, he said. “How about you explain that, huh?”

  Dillan sighed once more as he stared at the flames. “I’m not privy to all the old knowledge. Mordel knows it, but he’s held it close to his chest for…a long time.”

  “How long is that?” I asked.

  Dillan shook his head.

  “How old are you?”

  Dillan sighed for the umpteenth time. I was getting sick of it. “I can’t believe how quickly we came to that. Maybe I wanted you to know. Would you believe me if I said I was hundreds of years old?”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. So, I didn’t.

  “What if I said I was over a thousand years old?”

  “A thousand Kaldar years or Earth years?” I asked.

  “I don’t know what you mean by Earth years. I mean Kaldar years, of course. Is there a difference?”

  That meant was he something like three hundred and thirty-three years old, having been born after the Atomic War.

  I said as much.

  “That’s right,” he said. “We were born after the war.”

  “Did the Brotherhood cause the war?”

  Again, Dillan sighed. What was the root of that?

  “Like any group,” he said, “the Brotherhood has factions or sides. One group of the Brotherhood we’ve named the Others. They were influential in launching the first rockets of the Atomic War. None of the Others survived the conflict. From what I know, the mechs made sure of that. Before the Others died, however, they put the mechs to sleep. Mordel was instrumental in waking a few of them, the mechs, I mean. He convinced the rest of us we could use the mechs to continue the experiments on longevity.”

  I studied Dillan. The sense I got: most of what he said seemed reasonable. But not the last part. I grinned at him. “You’re lying about the longevity.”

  His head twitched as if I’d slapped him.

  “If you’ve all lived a thousand years,” I said, “you don’t need some new serum for extra longevity. Either you’ve discovered a method to keep the body young—” A hideous thought struck me. “Are you vampires?”

  Dillan grimaced. “You mean dead creatures that drink human blood?”

  “That’s a vampire all right.”

  “No. In fact, I find the question insulting. I live and breathe just like you. I—I’m the product of advanced life sciences.”

  I studied the little sucker and snorted with contempt. “I’ll tell you what. I’ll give you one more chance to tell me the truth. That’s three times. After that—” I shrugged. “Then, I might as well shoot you because I know you’re a hopeless liar and will never be able to tell me the score.”

  Dillan’s narrow shoulders deflated as he nodded. “I know what’s happening, why you’re having these insights. I used my Zero Stone on you earlier. It created a link between us. In some fashion, you severed the control but not the link. Thus, you seem to be able to sense when I’m…lying is the most accurate word for it.”

  “There you go. I bet it feels good to bare your soul for once?”

  Dillan raised a leg as he leaned back, clutching the knee with his hands. He peered up at the stars, sighed wistfully and shook his head. “The truth is far too strange for you to make sense of it. But given these circumstances, I suppose I’ll have to try. We of the Brotherhood are human, but the Zero Stones have altered us throughout the millennia. The stones are alien relics and possibly contain alien memories that have colored our thinking over time. Each of us took a stone a long time ago. We spent years learning to think into it and thereby developed our mental powers. It isn’t exactly telepathy as the psi-masters of old practiced it. The Zero Stones act as a lens for our thoughts, amplifying them and giving them weight. We can mind-link with trained creatures. We can Far Speak, and Mordel…he raided the Old Subterranean Citadel, finding an X-band. He paid a price for that, of course. He awoke the guardians of the Vault, the mechs. Now, the mechs seek us. No. That isn’t the full of it. The mechs have revived the ancient machine that constructs mechs. Given time to expand, the mechs will subdue everything on Kaldar, including the Dark Brotherhood and our Zero Stones.”

  “What does any of that have to do with the Others and the Atomic War?”

  “Don’t you understand? The mechs would have expanded back then. The Others made the grim choice to stop them.”

  “Why nuke innocent cities when the mechs were the enemy?”

  Dillan shook his head. “This might be difficult for you to understand, but the attack expanded because the mechs had gained secret control in too many places. They launched a counterstrike, escalating everything.”

  “Dillan, I hope you don’t mind me saying that his last part sounds like BS. What really caused the Atomic War?”

  He looked away.

  “All right, if you can’t answer that, tell me this. Where did you originally find the Zero Stones?”

  “They came from the first moon,” he said softly.

  “Are there more of these stones on the moon?”

  Dillan barely nodded.

  “Did these Others attempt to launch an expedition to the moon to collect more stones?”

  “Yes,” he whispered.

  I squinted at him, and I believe I understood something critical. “The Others did all this or the Zero Stones controlling them did.”

  Dillan sat up straight as he released his knee, and his eyes glowed with an eldritch light. “Puny mortal, you’ve presumed too much on my forbearance. I sought to do this the soft way. You have abilities we need. But these ceaseless questions from a monkey like you has nauseated me beyond my acceptance. You will submit to the plan or I will make you wish you had.”

  “Uh…is this Thal Dillan speaking or the Zero Stone that controls him?”

  “You know nothing.”

  “Wrong. I know how to cross from one planet to another.”

  “The only reason you still live,” Dillan or the Zero Stone through him said.

  “What is a Zero Stone?”

  “Do you comprehend the words ‘cease speaking’?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then put it into practice.”

  “Is Horst still alive?” I asked.

  Dillan lurched to his feet.

  I drew the Colt.

  A sinister smile spread across his face, and a force of will slammed against me.

  I’d been expecting that, and I’d mentally braced for it. I closed my eyes as the force hit me, but I’m sure I pulled the trigger several times. I didn’t hear any reports or feel the Colt buck against my hand.

  I peeled my eyes open, though, in time to see Thal Dillan sway before the fire. A terrible look of shock filled his narrow face. He was blinking fast and then grimacing. Moving slowly, he brought his hands to the holes in his chest. He coughed, spitting blood, and then he wore a blood beard on his chin.

  “You fool,” he whispered. “The stone will use you as a rider. You have no idea what you’ve done.”

  I might have had an inkling.

  With the Colt still smoking in my shooting hand, I watched Thal Dillan topple backward, twitching and then dying on the ground.

  It was at that point the true battle began.

  -33-

  I was vaguely aware of holstering the Colt. Then, it felt as if I oozed out of my body. I didn’t float anywhere as an astral form, it just felt like an out-of-body experience.

  Did that mean I was dying?

  At that point, I realized a mental or spiritual assault struck me, or had been doing so since Dillan passed away.

  The campfire, the corpse, the nearby lake all disappeared from my senses. Instead, I seemed to stand in a gray land of spongy soil with a gray sky and an orange sun shining high above. A pink cloud drifted toward me. It did so in fits and starts, not all of the cloud moving at me at the same time.

  “You’re sentient, aren’t you?” I said to the cloud.

  My voice sounded strange in this realm. It lacked any vibrancy or echo, and had a dead quality.

  The pink cloud didn’t answer. It kept tumbling toward me in fits and starts. I half-expected to see eyes appear in it. No such thing happened, though.

  “What are you?” I asked.

  A sense of foreboding struck me, definitely emanating from the cloud.

  I crouched and clawed at the spongy soil, trying to pick up a clod to hurl it at the cloud. That didn’t work. I checked my person. I had nothing to use as a weapon.

  I backed away from the approaching cloud.

  A sense of delight blossomed, and fear surged through me. Did it want me to run? Fear—it would use fear against me.

  I looked around. How had I gotten here? I couldn’t see any method of escape. No. I didn’t accept this. I had to reason it out—if I had the time.

  The cloud jerked and drifted in sections toward me. I had the feeling that if any of the pink substance touched me, my time as a free man would be over.

  Okay… Okay. The Zero Stone was alien. Thal Dillan had carried it. I don’t believe the stone liked getting wet. The Zero Stone had bequeathed him longevity, mental powers—it had allowed him to appear as Horst the Hunter.

  “You’re an illusionist.” I looked around again, and I had an idea this gray land was an illusion. How had I freed myself from the illusion the first time?

  Right. I knew then. I bent my head and I concentrated to break the mental link as if the Zero Stone were Psi-master Spencer.

  That will not work against me. I heard the words reverberate in my mind. It hurt, and I tasted something coppery, too.

  “You don’t mind if I give it a try then, do you?” I asked.

  Submit, Bayard. That is the wisest option.

  “Yeah, well, I’m a Marine, or was. We don’t do ‘wise’ all that often.”

  I bent all my mental efforts to severing the linkage between us. Linkage—a mind-link, this was a mind-link between the Zero Stone and me. This is what Mordel had done with the shrike and Dillan with his scimitar cat. That cloud over there: I bet it represented the Zero Stone itself. I bet it wanted me to touch it, and that would strengthen the link between us. If that was so, and stones didn’t walk, I bet in the real world I shuffled toward it.

  I laughed, and I redoubled my efforts.

  This is vain, Jake Bayard. I can offer you so much.

  “Thanks, but no thanks.”

  You must be wise. Think of the power you can wield.

  “As a slave to an alien stone? I don’t think so.”

  I can do this the hard way. You will have little volition then.

  I clenched my fingers, making fists, and I roared as if I was a crazy lifter trying to max out on dead lifts. I raved like a lunatic, and I had a feeling the Viking berserkers of old had felt something like this.

  I severed the mental or spiritual link between the Zero Stone and me.

  I staggered as the entire gray world vanished, including the blazing orange sun and the pink cloud. In its place, Kaldar flooded back upon my senses. I smelled the damp ground, saw stars twinkle overhead and heard the lap of lake water against the sandy shore. By the flickering fire, I saw the dead man and an eerie stone sitting on his chest. The stone was mainly blue with pink bands, and those bands radiated with power. The stone was smaller than his fist, about half the size of my fist. It was alien and creepy, and it was old and manufactured. I had no idea how I knew the last, but there it was.

  I drew my Colt. I was two steps from the corpse.

  The pink radiated more. Listen to me, Jake Bayard. We can make a deal.

  The words were faint in my mind, as if calling from far away.

  “How did you stones reach Kaldar’s smaller moon?” I asked.

  Don’t worry about that.

  “I am worrying. Answer the question, stone.”

  We came long ago in what you would call a flying saucer.

  I made a connection. “In a saucer flown by Draconians?”

  I don’t know what you mean by that. I cannot see properly into your memories.

  “It doesn’t matter. I don’t care enough to really want to know.”

  If you would let me look—

  The stone radiated pinker colors again, and the gray world attempted to sneak up on me.

  “Wrong move, stone.” I concentrated. My world solidified, and I aimed the Colt at the stone.

  You must not do that. Do you desire women, Jake Bayard? I can ensure you have a thousand women at your service.

  I squinted, and I fired. The Colt bucked in my hand, and a bullet slammed into the corpse.

  Cease, cease this at once. What do you desire? Tell me, Jake Bayard, and I will give it to you.

  “Better aim,” I said, firing again. This time, I chipped stone from the greater alien artifact.

  I heard a howl in my mind. It hurt, and it made me grin with delight.

  I held the Colt with both hands, moved closer and fired once more. This time, the stone smashed apart into pieces, and the howling abruptly quit in my mind.

  As that happened hundreds of scenes and incidents flashed before me. I saw lifetimes of memories flow past. They flickered, and a thing or creature here and there caught my eye. I saw a scimitar cat licking its paw. A Draconian threw dice onto a green board. A star exploded, spewing matter as a saucer sped away.

  I groaned as more sights, sounds, smells and sensations flowed past me. I sensed unbelievably great age from the shattered stone. It was much older than Thal Dillan, older by several factors. I dimly perceived a vast chamber where a machine stamped stones, creating these things. Alien creatures that defied description appeared and then vanished from my mental sight.

  The time on Kaldar was but a brief interruption in the lives of these Zero Stones, if one could call it life. It wasn’t life as we knew it, but something artificial or mechanical.

  I quailed before the age of the shattered stone, and thankfully, I mentally retreated from the flowing memories spewing into the ether.

  I staggered back, stepping into the fire. I shouted, hot footing it out of the fire and found myself panting in dismay.

  I’d destroyed a Zero Stone. I sensed other stones searching and seeking for the location of the destroyed one. A sense of revenge quickly built up against me.

  I had two routes to go with that. I could continue to quail from the alien malice and hate. Or—

  “Hey, you idiot stones,” I shouted, “guess what, Jake Bayard messed one of you over. That’s right. It was me. Come and get me if you can. A human did it to one of you. And guess what, I’m going to do it to more of you, too.”

  I sensed outrage—and that abruptly quit.

  Huh? What did that mean? I had an idea, and used what little I knew of this stuff, shutting down any mental reception on my part.

  I must have barely done that in time, because I sensed a massed assault against my mind. I hunkered low, physically and mentally, and I avoided the smashing mental attack against me.