Part 10 : Travelling North

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At first Suak followed the travellers, sometimes wheeling high above them and at other times flying quite close to the horses. Lyr who had grown up with the alegoyle was quite unafraid but although Paramal recognised Asanka's companion as a friend he was still skittish and snorted his complaints when Suak came too near, so that Crinomu had to reign him in firmly. At night they camped out of the wind; once in the shelter of a thin copse of beech trees, and once on a strip of narrow ground where a spring of icy water emerged at the bottom of a chalk gorge. They met no-one else and on the afternoon of the third day Suak left them with a final high call of farewell, circling back south towards Kalonia. Now gradually and by degrees the land began to drop, the winding chalk gorges petered out and a different kind of terrain opened up. Despite the lower altitude it became markedly colder. On the fifth day they came to a place where snow had clearly fallen already and still lingered in drifts and hollows, although a couple of days of milder weather had started a thaw. Then it began to snow again from steel grey skies. A sparse forest of strange trees stretched before them. Their trunks were tall and spindly with a knobbly, glossy brown bark and their large waxy black leaves were star shaped, sharply toothed and spiky.

"These are an alien species," Crinomu said. "They are called innobol trees and they come from a planet much colder than ours. The Earth is home to many alien flora and fauna now. They were brought here at the behest of the Galactic Compact in the service of the new gene sea. The creation of the new gene sea was part of the deal of the Vow Of Earth at the beginning of the Great Forgetting, though not everyone thought it a benign policy. Once there were no innobol on Earth and no alegoyle either. Now we have them and much else besides..."

Asanka shivered as the snow fall thickened. The forest was an eerie place and they still had far to go.

They spent the night in the forest and in the morning found that the clouds had cleared leaving a pale blue and bitterly cold sky. Half an hour after breaking camp the innobol trees thinned out and they came all at once to a high bluff overlooking the river Osynder. It took Asanka's breath away. Vast and slow moving it looked more like a lake than a river as it flowed slowly but inexorably north. "Yonder lies the Beacon of Ulon", Crinomu said, but he did not need to point for the island they were seeking was obvious. A small building occupied a flat plateau in the centre and Asanka judged that the "spire" Hirrilow had spoken of was a long thin pole rising from its roof. Three large dishes were clustered round the beacon and a long stone bridge gave access to the island.

"We must backtrack a little," Crinomu said. "We have come to the river too far to the west and need to work our way down from these heights to reach the bridge."

"The Beacon of Ulon has been inactive for more than three hundred years since Conclave Routing Edict XCIV prioritised the sea node protocols and reconfigured the topology of the local vurtiverse to reinforce the Curse of Kalonia. But all the beacons are constructed with memware sustain architecture and this one is powered by deep geothermals. It will have degraded much less than you might expect in that time and reactivating it should be reasonably straightforward with the right logic. These are the codes Hirrilow has provided and it is to be hoped that his friends in the Conclave have access to the proper levels of security."

Although Asanka understood little of Crinomu's technical explanation he took very careful heed of his next words. "The beacon may be occupied. The Conclave will have set some kind of guards to watch their property. As far as we know they are not expecting us to pay this visit but for simple routine security and to keep curious Riders away there will be wardens. Of what kind I do not know but we must be prepared for the possibility of a fight."

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Legends of Klane Kalonia 01 : Station of Seers

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Part 10 : Travelling North

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