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now.
We will tend to each at a later time. They are hardly going anyplace. Now, go.
The master awaits us, and there is so very much to do.>
master ?>
The tone of the response was ugly, even dangerous.
orders again or they will still  speak in hushed tones of your agony in the
days when the last sun grows cold! We have plans for them yet.>
The lesser demon bowed humbly.
Now all were gone outside except the one prince, who walked over to them as
they stood, still within the exceptionally crude pentagram. He looked at it
and them with amusement.
he commented dryly.
comprehend just the barest hint of the powers you have been playing with. Your
pathetic attempt to guard against us even here with this crude and meaningless
bit of geometry is high comedy. >
"What do you plan to do with us?" Jimmy asked him aloud.
to recognize us in theological, rather than mere mythic, ways. Your knowledge,
in particular, has been astonishing. That such ancient, primitive faiths built
upon ancestral memory would have survived interstellar expansion and
cross-racial societies intact is incredible. Our ancient enemies are far more
resourceful than we believed.> He suddenly paused, and his great homed head
cocked slightly, as if listening to something. Then he added,
have free run of the city. We have locked you out of materializing anything
but food and drink, but that you now know how to get. Soon this city will live
again, but, by then, I or someone else will have returned to tend to you. In
the end, all of you will learn to worship and to serve us. All but you,
priestess. I have already made a promise to you as to your fate, to wander
forever through our new empire, bound by your stupid vows, powerless to affect
events. Until later, then farewell. >
He started to walk away and Gun Roh Chin muttered, "We could still cheat him.
They cannot stop us taking our own lives."
The demon stopped and turned.
deliver
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Marathon%203%20-%20Ninety%20Trillion%20.txt you to us without effort. But
you most of you won't. You are survivors. That is why _ you got this far. >
And, with that, he was gone.
Modra Stryke shook her head in wonder. "This is impossible. Things like this
just don't happen. Not for real. Not in this day and age."
"They are the distillation of everything that was within everyone who ever
gave me orders," Josef commented. "I always hated them, too."
"That thing is still outside," Modra noted with a shiver. "Still, we might as
well make ourselves as comfortable as we can in here until it goes."
"You think it's safe to leave the protection this early?" Krisha asked,
looking nervous and ashen.
Josef shrugged. "He laughed it off anyway. Pathetic, he called it."
"I'm not sure," McCray told them. "He never crossed it. The power of authority
is great in and of itself, and they lie with total conviction. I doubt if it
would even be noticed by their master, but we were irrelevant to him, if, as I
doubt, he noticed us at all. But the combination of sounds, geometry, and
faith, which gives us a confident power as well if true enough, can stop or at
least slow the more conventional creatures. We must remember that the Quintara
are but another race of beings. They eat, probably sleep, even go to the
bathroom. Their power comes from two external sources their master, and the
knowledge of superior technology and their access to it. And we must never
forget that they can be beaten. Even their master was imprisoned in a sense.
Thousands of years ago somebody beat them and sealed them away. These are the
hordes of the ancient enemy of all races, and their master was that enemy
personified."
"You're not seriously suggesting that their master is some kind of
supernatural entity?" Josef asked, skeptical.
"None other. So powerful that he could only be imprisoned, and, even from
prison, could influence and shape events. All our ancestral memories of demons
and devils springs from here, from this source."
"If that is true," Krisha responded slowly, "then where are the gods?"
"The solution to that question might well be the solution to it all," he told
her. "We still have far too many questions."
"I agree," Gun Roh Chin put in. "All along I have been trying to fit the
pieces of this puzzle together and still I have far too many pieces that do
not fit."
"How can such as we comprehend the supernatural?" Krisha asked him.
"Because you've got to get out of that way of thinking. This is just another
problem, the same as all the other problems in all the alien environments all
of us have worked within at one time or another. We Mizlaplanian, Mycohlian,
and Exchange combined are a new arm, a new team, a new unit. For the first
time, we are faced not with lesser races but with greater ones. All three
empires now stand a good chance of being overrun and conquered just as our
individual races were overrun and conquered by the empires. He called us
survivors, but we're better than that! All of us are better than that! We're
fighters'."
"We are six helpless prisoners in an alien capital without weapons, without
access, reduced to the level of our primitive ancestors," Josef retorted. "And
if we do not figure out a way out of here, we're no more than victims."
"I agree that finding a way out is the key, but not to the rest," the captain
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Marathon%203%20-%20Ninety%20Trillion%20.txt replied. "Get out of this cult
mentality. I have seen many a world whose culture is so primitive, so
undeveloped, its people yet ignorant, who would worship us as gods for the
magic our knowledge and technology and experience appears. It's no different
here, but we're more mature than that."
"Do you honestly believe we can stand a chance against that thing!" Modra
asked him.
"Not by ourselves, no. And we are six against the Quintara hordes. We need
help.
We know where to go to get that help, I think. They aren't the only ones with
the keys to this knowledge. Someone their 'ancient enemy' they called them set
these locks and walked away. I think we are agreed on who that has to be. But
first we must get to them."
Jimmy McCray looked around the temple. Where Kalia had gone he couldn't guess;
she hadn't passed them, but she didn't seem to still be in the temple, either,
although it was hard to tell. The mass on the altar was nothing but charred
flesh. He spotted Molly's body, looking unconscious or dead, face down in a
far corner. No not dead. He thought he saw her move. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]