Chapter 26 Chapter Twenty-Five

Saul, the Consul, Father Duré, and an unconscious Height Masteen were in the first mound when the shots rang out.The Consul went out alone to inspect, slowly and carefully testing the strength of the time-tidal storm.They were driven into the depths of the valley by this tide before. "It's all right," he called back.Thor's lantern cast a pale glow, illuminating the back of the mound, illuminating the three pale faces and the robed saint. "The tide has dropped," the Consul shouted. Sol stood up.His neck rested on his daughter's small face, a pale oval. "Are you sure, that's the sound of the Lamia pistol?"

The Consul stepped into the darkness outside. "Nobody's got anything that fires bullets but her. I'll go out and see." "Wait," Thor said, "I'll go with you." Father Durley was still kneeling beside Het Masteen. "Go. I'll stay with him." "One of us will be back in a few minutes," said the consul. The valley reflected the pale light of the Tombs of Time.The wind was howling from the south, but tonight the air was higher and drifted over the cliff face, so the sand dunes on the valley floor were not disturbed at all.Sol followed the Consul, carefully walking along the rough path leading to the bottom of the valley, then turned to the upper part of the valley and moved forward.Occasional hallucinatory memories tugged at Sol's nerves, reminding him of the time tides that had been raging an hour ago, but now, the remnants of this eerie storm were retreating.

Near the bottom of the valley, the path widened, and Thor and the Consul walked together over the scorched battlefield of the Crystal Monolith. The light is scattered in all directions.They climbed a gentle slope and saw that the emerald tomb next to it was glowing with pale green phosphorescence. Then they turned a corner and walked along a smooth zigzag route towards the Sphinx. "My God," Thor whispered, running forward, trying not to wake the sleeping child in the cradle.He knelt beside a dark figure on the top step. "Is that Braun?" the Consul asked, stopping suddenly two steps away after climbing the stairs for so long, gasping for air.

"Yes." Sol was about to lift her head, but he withdrew his hand suddenly, and he felt something slippery and cool growing out of her skull. "Is she dead?" Saul held his daughter's head close to his chest and felt the woman's neck veins to see if they were still beating. "Alive," he said, taking a deep breath. "She's alive . . . but passed out. Give me the lamp." Saul took the flashlight and shone the light on the sprawling body of Braun Lamia, and along the way passed the silver thread-more like a "tentacle" to be precise, because it was attached to the flesh and blood. On her torso, it felt as if it had grown organically—the thread emerged from a nerve shunt in her skull, passed through the broad top steps of the sphinx, and passed through the wide entrance.Although the Sphinx is the brightest of the tombs, the population is dark.

The Consul came to them. "What is this?" He reached out to touch the thin silver thread, but withdrew his hand as quickly as Thor. "My gosh, this thing is hot." "It feels alive to the touch," Thor affirmed.He took Braun's hands and rubbed them together for a moment, and now he patted her cheek lightly, trying to wake her up.But she remained motionless.He turned around and shot the light of the flashlight along the thin line, and the thing snaked along the entrance corridor and disappeared from view. "I don't think she attached this thing to her body voluntarily."

"The Shrike did it," said the Consul.He leaned forward, activating the biomonitoring message on Braun's wrist comlog. "Other than the brainwave activity, everything is fine, Sol." "What is displayed above?" "It shows that she is dead. At least she is brain dead. But Gao Bo refuses to show it." Thor sighed and turned around tremblingly. "We'll have to see where the line actually goes." "Can't it be unplugged from the shunt socket?" "Look," Saul said, pulling back a mass of dark curls and shooting the light at the back of Braun's head.The nerve shunt is normally a small flesh-colored plastic disc a few millimeters in diameter, with a ten-micron-sized socket on it, and it seems to have melted now...a large red envelope grew out of the flesh, and the micro-leads of the thin metal wires parts joined together.

"Only an operation can cut it off," the Consul said softly.He touched the red and swollen meat bun.Braun remained motionless.The Consul took the flashlight and stood up. "You stay here with her. I'm going to track down the thread." "Remember to turn on the comm channels," Thor said, though he knew they wouldn't do much in the ebb and flow of the time tides. The Consul nodded and left quickly, without hesitation, without giving any chance to fear. The thin chrome thread snaked along the main corridor, all the way to the outside of the room where the pilgrims slept the night before, and then turned around and disappeared from view.The Consul glanced around the room, the beam of the flashlight illuminating the blankets and backpacks they had left behind in their haste.

He followed the thin line around the bend in the corridor; through the central entrance that divides the foyer into three narrow halls; Called "Tutankhamun's Highway"), he came to a low tunnel, and he had to crawl through it, carefully shrinking his hands and knees, for fear of touching the warm metal tentacles; An extremely steep slope, he had to climb up a chimney; then came a wide corridor that he had never been before in his memory, the stones protruded inward, arched towards the sky, and the moist water vapor dripped; after that, it fell suddenly , he scraped the skin on his palms and knees to barely slow down his fall.Finally, he climbed a path longer than the straight width of the Sphinx.The Consul was completely lost, and he hoped that the thread would take him back and out of the maze in time.

"Thor," he called at last, though he had never believed that the signal from this communicator could pass through the barriers of stone and the tides of time. "I'm here." The scholar whispered faintly. "I'm deep inside the goddamned place," the Consul whispered into the comlog, "deep in a corridor I don't remember us ever seeing. It feels very deep." "Find the end of the line?" "Found it." The Consul replied in a low voice, and sat down to wipe the sweat off his face with a handkerchief. "The nodes?" Saul asked, referring to the intermediary through which the inhabitants of the Ring connected to the data network, the infinite number of terminal nodes.

"No. The thing seems to go straight into the stone in the ground. The corridor ends here too. I tried to pull it out, but the connection was similar to the bump on her skull where the nerve shunt used to be. It seems to be one with the rock." "Come out," Thor's voice came through with the crackling of static, "let's find a way to cut it off." In the dank darkness of the tunnel, for the first time in his life, the consul felt a real sense of claustrophobia looming over him.He found it difficult to breathe, and he was sure that something in the darkness behind him was blocking his air, and he could only be relieved by escaping from here.His heart was beating violently, and in the center of this narrow stone corridor, the beating sound almost reached the eardrums.

He tried to relax, breathing in the air slowly, wiped his face again, and tried to suppress the panic as best he could. "That would kill her," he said, breathing in slowly and heavily. No answer.The Consul called again, but something severed their tenuous connection. "I'm out," he said to the silent communicator, turning around and sweeping the flashlight down the low tunnel.The wire seems to twitch?Or an illusion caused by light? The Consul began to crawl back the same way. At sunset, just minutes before the time storm struck, they found Het Masteen.The Saint was stumbling along when the Consul, Saul, and Dooley saw him first, and by the time they got to Masteen he was on the ground, unconscious. "Take him to the Sphinx," Thor said. Just then, as if dancing with the sinking sun, the tide of time rushed past them like a wave of nausea and hallucinatory memories.All three fell to their knees.Rachel woke up, crying with all her might, terrified. "To the entrance of the valley," the Consul gasped, standing up and lifting Het Masteen on his shoulders. "Go...to the valley...out." All three made their way toward the entrance of the valley, past the first tomb, the Sphinx, but the tide of time, growing stronger, lashed at them like a terrible dizzying wind.After another thirty meters, they could no longer climb.The three fell to the ground, and Heit Masteen rolled down the well-trodden path.Rachel had stopped crying and was squirming uncomfortably. "Go back," panted Paul Dooley, "go back down the valley. It's... better to go down." They turned back and staggered down the path like three drunks, each with a burden too precious to throw away.At the foot of the Sphinx, they rested for a while with their backs against a large boulder, and the fabric of space-time seemed to begin to change, swelling and bending around them, as if the planet was a flag that was waved away angrily.Reality seemed to surge and overlap in front of their eyes, rushing to the distance, and then rolling over their heads like the crest of a wave.The Consul put the saint down and let him lie on the rock, gasping for breath, clutching the dirt with his fingers in panic. "Mobius Cube," the saint said suddenly, he moved, but his eyes were still closed, "you must get the Mobius Cube." "Damn it," the Consul finally said.He shook Het Masteen roughly. "Why do we need that? Masteen, why do we need that thing?" The Saint's head drooped back and forth.He fell into a coma again. "I'll get it," Du Lei said.The pastor looked old and sickly, with a pale face and lips. The Consul nodded, put Het Masteen on his shoulders again, helped Thor stand up, and then staggered down the valley. As they gradually moved away from the Sphinx, they felt anti-entropy The torrent of the field is slowly weakening. Father Duré had climbed the path, climbed the narrow staircase, and staggered to the entrance of the Sphinx, clinging to the rough stones like a sailor in a raging sea. Stay on the rope that blows in the wind.The sphinx above the head seemed to be teetering, tilting thirty degrees to the left for a while, and tilting fifty degrees to the right for a while.Du Lei knew that it was just the tyranny of the time tide distorting his senses, but the sight still made him kneel on the stone and vomit. The tide subsided for a moment, like a ferocious ocean wave calming down between two terrifying waves of attack. Du Lei stood up again, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and crawled to the dark tomb. Without a flashlight, he groped along the corridor tremblingly, afraid to touch something cool and slippery in the dark, or to fall into the house where he had disembodied and returned to life, and found the body still in the grave Moldy and rotten, he shrieked with horror at the thought of these two dreadful things, but the tide of time surged back suddenly and massively, and his voice was lost in that hurricane roar. The room where they slept was very dark. In that terrible darkness, there was no light at all, and they couldn't see their fingers. But Du Lei's eyes gradually adapted, and he noticed that the Moebius cube was glowing slightly, and the signal device was blinking. bright. He stumbled across the messy room, grabbed the cube, and lifted the heavy thing with a burst of adrenaline.The Consul's synopsis recording mentioned the artifact—the mysterious luggage that Masteen carried on his pilgrimage—and that it was believed to be used to hold ergs, a force-generating force from outer space. The creatures in the field are used to provide energy for the saint treeship.Du Lei didn't know what was so important about Erg now, but he still hugged the box tightly to his chest, struggled back to the corridor, walked outside, stepped down the stairs step by step, and walked into the depths of the valley. "Here!" cried the Consul from the first mound at the bottom of the cliff face. "It's much better here." Dure staggered up the path, suddenly dizzy and exhausted, nearly dropping the cube to the ground; the Consul helped him the last thirty steps into the mound. It's definitely better inside.When Du Lei first entered the entrance of the cave, he could still feel the ebb and flow of the tide of time, but once he entered the back of the cave, he felt close to normal. The cold light of the fluorescent ball illuminated the intricate carvings inside. .The chaplain collapsed beside Saul Winterberg, setting the Moebius cube on the ground, next to Het Masteen, who was speechless and staring. "He woke up when you came in," Thor whispered.The child's eyes were wide open, and in the dim light they looked like black pools of water. The consul also knelt beside the saint. "Why do we have to bring the cube? Masteen, why do we have to have it?" Het Masteen was still staring straight ahead, without blinking. "Our ally," he whispered, "the only ally we have against the Lord of Mourning." The syllables he uttered were etched in the dialect unique to the planet of the Saints. "How could it be our ally?" Thor asked, clutching the man's robes with both hands. "How do we use it? When?" The eyes of the saint stared blankly at a place beyond the distant land. "There are factions within us vying for honor," he whispered, his voice hoarse. "The loyal voice of 'Sequoia' was the first to connect with Keats' reconstructed personality...but it was I who was bestowed with the glory of Muir Light. 'Yggoldla Hill', my 'Yggoldla Hill', granted in atonement for our sins committed before Muir." The saint closed his eyes.There was a slight smile on his stern face, looking awkward. The Consul looked at Dure and Saul. "It doesn't sound like the doctrine of the saints, more like the terminology of the Church of the Shrike." "Perhaps it's a mixture of the two," Du Lei said in a low voice. "There are even weirder mixtures in the history of theology." Thor stretched out his palm and touched the forehead of the tall man who was burning hot all over.Saul rummaged through their only medical kit for pain-relief skins and fever patches.He found one, but hesitated again. "I don't know if Saint is a standard medical constitution. I don't want him to die from allergies." The Consul took the fever sticker and stuck it on the saint's frail forearm. "They fit the bill." He moved closer. "Masteen, what the hell happened to the wind transport?" The saint opened his eyes, but his gaze remained unfocused. "Wind carrier?" "I don't understand," whispered Father Durley. Sol took him aside. "Masteen never told his story during the entire pilgrimage," he explained in a low voice. "The first night we were aboard the wind transport, he disappeared, leaving a trail of blood—lots of blood— — all over his luggage and the Möbius cube. But Masteen is gone." "What happened to the wind transport?" the Consul asked again in a low voice.He rocked the saint slightly to focus his attention. "Think quickly, Het Masteen, loyal voice of the tree!" The tall man's face twitched a few times, and his eyes finally focused. His slightly Asian features were carved with familiar stern lines. "I released the elemental from his containment field..." "He's talking about Erg," Thor whispered to the bewildered priest. "Then use the mind control technique I learned in the high branch of the sacred tree to restrain him. But at that moment, the Lord of Great Mourning came to me without warning." "It's the Shrike." Saul whispered, not as if speaking to the priest, but more like talking to himself. "Is that your blood that was sprinkled there?" the consul asked the saint. "Blood?" Masteen pulled his hood forward to hide his bewildered expression. "No, it wasn't my blood. The Lord of Mourning held... a... victim. The man struggled. Trying to escape from those spikes of atonement..." "What happened to Nargo?" the consul asked aggressively. "Elemental. What did you expect it to do for you? . . . to protect you from the Shrike?" The saint frowned and raised his trembling hand above his brow. "It wasn't... not ready. I wasn't ready myself. So I put it back in the shelter. The Lord of Mourning grabbed me by the shoulders. I'm... happy... to be able to sacrifice At the same time as I released my tree ship, I was able to atone for my sin." Saul moved towards Du Lei. "The treeship Yggdrasil was destroyed in orbit that night," he whispered. Masteen closed his eyes. "I'm tired." He whispered, his voice fading away. The Consul shook him again. "How did you get here? Masteen, how did you get here across the Sea of ​​Grass?" "I was lying between the mounds when I woke up," whispered the Saint, eyes still closed, "I was lying between the mounds when I woke up. I was so tired. Must sleep. " "Let him rest for a while," said Father Durley. The Consul nodded and put the robed man down so he could sleep. "It's all meaningless," Thor whispered, as the three men and a baby sat in the dim light, feeling the ebb and flow of the tide of time outside. "A pilgrim disappears, and another appears," the consul muttered. "It's like someone's playing some crazy game." An hour later, they heard gunfire echoing down the valley. Saul and the Consul crouched beside the silent Braun Lamia. "We had to cut that thing out with a laser," Saul said. "We lost our weapons when Kassad disappeared." The Consul shook the young woman's wrist. "Maybe cutting it off will kill her instead." "But according to the biological monitor, she is dead." The Consul shook his head. "No. Something else happened. Maybe it tapped into the Keats-Syber personality she's been carrying around. Maybe when this is over, our Braun will be sent back." Saul lifts her three-day-old daughter on her shoulders and looks out into the shimmering valley. "It's like a madhouse. Nothing is backfired. If only your goddamn ship was here...in case we had to get Lamia out of this... this thing... with the ship The cutting tool in the bag, and also put her and Masteen in the doctor's office, and give them a chance at life." The Consul was still kneeling on the ground, his gaze distracted.After a while he said, "You stay here with her." He stood up, and disappeared into the dark abyss at the entrance of the Sphinx.Returning five minutes later, with his large travel bag, he pulled a rolled-up blanket from the bottom and spread it out on the top stone steps of the Sphinx. This is a blanket with a long history, less than two meters long and more than one meter wide.Though its delicate texture has faded through the centuries, the single-fiber flight control wires still gleam like gold in the dim light.The Consul was removing the high-precision battery above, connected to it by various thin wires protruding from the blanket. "My God," Thor whispered.He thought of the story the Consul had told, of the tragic love affair between his grandmother Sealy and the Overlord's crewman, Merren Asbik.It was that love that sparked a rebellion against the Hegemony that plunged Maui into years of war.In the story, Merren Asbik once flew to the first stop on a friend's Huoying flying carpet. The Consul nodded. "It belonged to Mike Washoe, a friend of my grandfather Merren. Shirley left it in the grave, to Merren. He passed it on to me when I was a kid— — just before the Battle of the Archipelago, in which he died with the dream of freedom." Sol ran his hand over this centuries-old artifact. "Unfortunately, it won't come in handy here." The Consul looked up at him. "Why can't it be sent?" "Hyperion's magnetic field is below the critical level for electromagnetic vehicles to take off," Saul said, "so electromagnetic vehicles cannot be used here, only airships and skimmers, the floating cruise ship 'Benares' is here Can't float." He suddenly felt stupid explaining this to the man who had been Consul of Hyperion for eleven native years, so he stopped. "I don't know if I said something wrong?" The consul smiled and said, "You're right. The standard electromagnetic car is unreliable here, and the weight-to-buoyancy ratio is too high. But the Huoying Flying Carpet can lift the whole body, and its mass is almost negligible. I tried it when I lived in the capital. But The itinerary was not smooth... But it is still possible to sit alone." Sol turned his head and looked down the valley, beyond the shining outlines of the Emerald Tombs, Obelisks, and Crystal Monoliths, to the entrance of the cave mounds, which was hidden by the heavy shadows of the cliff walls.He couldn't help thinking of Dooley and Height Masteen, wondering if Masteen was still asleep... if Dooley was still alive. "Ever thought about using it to call for help?" "We can send someone for help. Bring the boat back. At least unleash it and let it sail back on its own. Draw lots for who will go." It was Saul's turn to laugh. "Think about it, my friend. Dooley's not in shape to run around, and he doesn't know his way. And I..." Saul lifted Rachel up, bringing her little head to his cheek. "This journey may take days. I—we—have little time left. Not knowing what else to do for her, we'll just stay here and try our luck. You're the only one left to go. " The Consul sighed, but made no rebuttal. "And," said Thor, "that is your ship. Only you can free it from Pleasant Stone's ban. You and the Governor are old friends." The consul looked west. "But I don't know if Theo is still in power." "Let's go back first and tell Father Durley our plan," Saul said. "Besides, I forgot the milk bag in the mound, and Rachel is hungry." The Consul rolled up the flying carpet, threw it back in his pack, and stared at Braun Lamia, at the sickly thin thread that snaked into the darkness. "Is she all right?" "I'll have Paul come over with a blanket and watch over her overnight, and then we'll bring the other patient here. Are you going to leave tonight, or wait until morning?" The Consul rubbed his cheek wearily. "I don't want to fly over the mountains at night, but we don't have much time left. I'd better pack up and go right away." Sol nodded and looked towards the entrance of the valley. "Wish Braun told us where Silenus went." "I'll look for him after I fly out," the consul said.He looked up at the stars. "It will take about thirty-six to forty hours to get back to Keats. Then it will take a few hours to release the ship. It may be back in two days." Thor nodded, shaking the crying child.There was a tinge of misgiving in his weary but genial expression.He put his hand on the consul's shoulder. "We should really try, my friend. Come on, let's talk to Father Durley, see if the other fellow traveler is awake, and have a meal together. Braun seems to have enough supplies to last us Have a good meal."