Despite himself, the younger priest was instantly fascinated. He had been as far east as Otwah and into many wild areas of the North, but the far South was a closed book to almost everyone. For every mutated plant or animal in the northern part of the Kandan continent, there were a dozen in the South. There were rumored to be monsters so awful that a herd of morse would be but a mouthful to one of them, and trees so huge that it would take a man half a day to walk around the bole of one. Most of these tales could no doubt be relegated to fancy, rumor, and trappers’ lies, but Hiero knew enough to know there was a grain of truth in many of them. He himself had been just far enough to see the southern end of the Taig and its countless pines and the beginning of the monster trees of the southern forest edge, which had few conifers, but many deciduous trees of far greater size. The lost empire of the once fabled United States had lain there, and every school child knew that The Death had hit it harder than anywhere else in the world, causing horrible changes to all life, such as had barely touched northern Kanda. Endless marshes, inland seas, and vast tracts of poisoned desert, the latter lit by the undying, blue, bale fires of the Dead Zones, were said to exist in the unknown area. And the Lost Cities themselves, the very places he was to go, they were the worst of all! Metz children were frightened into obedience with tales of the towering, vine-hung cliffs of the ancient, tottering buildings, even a glimpse of which was said to bring a horrid end. There were Lost Cities in the north country too, but most had long been either isolated or explored, that is, if known at all. And on them, in any case, the terrors of The Death had been laid lightly. Daring rovers and free rangers occasionally risked the anger of the Abbeys, political, not religious, and explored to the South, but few departed thus and fewer returned. All this flashed through Hiero’s brain on the instant, as he looked into Demero’s wise old eyes.
He sat back, for once effectively silenced, and the long, window-less room, lit only by the fluors on the wall, stayed quiet while both men took thought. It was Hiero who broke the silence, at length.
“Do you have any idea what it is I am to seek for, sir?” he asked quietly. “Or is it anything, just something that may turn up?”
“Well, there’s that all right,” the older man said. “But we’re a bit more hopeful and knowledgeable, mind you, than that. We’re looking for weapons, obviously. Now, The Death was caused by weapons. We don’t want those again, certainly. The plagues, the nuclear poisons, all those things ought to stay buried. Unless the Unclean revive them, and I fear that mightily, I tell you! No, we want none such. But there are other things of power which are more or less intangible, at least in ordinary terms.” He seemed to change his thoughts, and for a moment Hiero was puzzled.
