Fractal Mode

CHAPTER 10—RABBLE

DARIUS blinked, acclimatizing to the gloom. They were in a cave or tunnel that seemed to be the continuation of the hole of the giant mandolin, leading straight on into the rock. Perhaps they had simply passed through the petrified back of the mandolin, which had blocked the passage.

It was dark, but the darkness was not total. As they walked, the light brightened somewhat, until they had no trouble seeing their way.

“But where is your contact mind?” Darius asked the horse.

It retreated in alarm as we arrived. But there is another approaching, I can not read it, I only sense its presence. It is female.

“Did you read anything in the original mind?”

No. It was stupid. I reached only as far as its eyes, to help you conjure us.

“Keep working on the new mind. First test for hostility, and warn us. We want only to hide safely until Colene and Provos return.”

“You must be ready to use your magic here, Nona,” Stave said. “The rabble may be dangerous.”

“You call them rabble?” Darius asked, not amused.

“That is what we call them,” Nona explained. “All the people and creatures who have been banned from the surface because they lack even illusion magic. There are stories that they have an awful society in the center of the world, and live only to break out and slay all those on the surface. Both the despots and theows watch constantly to be sure that there is no escape for them.”

“They may not be friendly, then,” Darius remarked with irony.

“Yes,” Stave agreed. “But there may also be too many for us to oppose physically. Since they do not have magic, Nona should be able to protect us against them.”

“I will try,” she agreed. “But I depend on Seqiro to alert me to danger.”

She is here.

They paused and let the woman approach them. She was young and comely in a belted brown tunic. She smiled and spread her hands, showing by gesture that she intended no harm. Her hair and eyes were the same shade as her tunic, a nice match.

“This is a banished inhuman monster?” Darius inquired.

I can not yet read her mind, but she is alone and seems friendly.

“I had gathered as much,” Darius said wryly.

The woman came to him. She said something.

“I can almost make it out,” Nona said. “I think she said she loves you.”

Darius snapped a glance at Nona. “This is humor?”

“Maybe I misunderstood,” Nona said.

The woman put her arms slowly around Darius, embraced him, and tried to draw his head down for a kiss.

“But I don’t think so,” Nona added.

He resisted. “But I don’t know her!” he protested. “And Colene would be upset.”

“I will try to explain to her,” Nona said. She spoke to the woman, and because Seqiro continued to translate her thoughts, he heard it as his own language, “Woman, this man is taken.”

The woman clung to Darius, speaking emphatically.

I can get only a glimmer. The thoughts are not coming through, but the fringe of the emotion is.

“There is no other,” Nona said, translating.

“Yes, there is,” Darius said firmly. “Her name is Colene, and she is my love.”

Seqiro’s thought came again, while Nona tried to get through to the woman.

That emotion is not love as you feel it. It is not quite lust. She desires to breed with you, but for some reason other than your physical appeal. She wants to foal your offspring. I can not fathom why.

The horse was not conscious of irony. Seqiro was not insulting Darius, merely admitting that the woman’s motive for choosing this stranger was unclear.

Meanwhile the woman was answering Nona. Nona was catching on to the variant of the language.

“She says that when you come here, you are hers.”

“She can say what she chooses. I am not hers.”

The woman finally let him go. She turned and walked ahead of them down the tunnel. Darius found her retreat as intriguing as her advance. He glanced at Stave and saw agreement there. The brown tunic was as close-fitting in back as it was in front. Whatever the woman was, she was no physical monster.

“Do we follow?” Nona asked. She too was watching the rabble woman, and her expression was just about what Colene’s would have been: assessment and marginal resentment.

“There seems little else to do,” Darius said.

They followed. The woman rounded a turn and disappeared, but in a moment they saw her again as they rounded the same turn. She was waiting for them, and now stepped forward to embrace Darius again. She said something.

“Her name is Potia,” Nona reported. “She says you must breed with her.”

This is odd, Seqiro thought. I thought I was making progress, but it has become harder to reach her mind.

“She must realize that something is happening, and be closing her mind,” Darius said, gently pushing the woman back. “To what I say as well as to your probing.”

A second woman approached. She too was in a brown tunic, but her hair and eyes were yellow. She was as pretty as Potia, but in a different way. She approached Stave.

“Hey,” Nona protested as the woman embraced Stave.

The woman spoke. Darius was beginning to recognize the patterning of the language. This woman was saying the same thing to Stave that Potia had said to him, Darius.

Stave looked at Nona. “May I tell her that you are my love?” he asked.

“Is there any danger in that?” Darius asked. “Could that woman decide to get rid of Nona, if she sees her as a rival?”

There does not seem to be hostility, only urgency. She is interested only in Stave.

Nona was hesitating. Then Darius realized, as he felt the underlying emotions Seqiro picked up, that it was not just a matter of safety, but of uncertainty. She was not in love with Stave.

“Perhaps I am not,” she said apologetically.

Stave spoke to the woman. “I am not looking for love at the moment.”

The woman hardly paused. Her name, she said, was Keli. He had to breed with her. She clarified this by taking one of his hands and placing it on her full bosom.

Stave, intrigued, nevertheless demurred. After a moment Keli withdrew, disappointed, and joined Potia, leading the way on around the turn. They disappeared.

“Again we follow,” Darius said, somewhat bemused by this pattern.

As before, the women were waiting for them, as if surprised that the party had not kept up. Each embraced “her” man again, despite lack of encouragement.

They are not hostile. But their minds are odd. I have lost progress again. There is something strange about this situation.

Darius and Stave laughed. There certainly was!

Then a young man approached. He was in brown, too, with brown hair and yellow eyes, and quite handsome. He approached Nona.

Both Darius and Stave moved to block him from her. “No, let him come,” Nona said. “These folk seem to have their way of greeting us.”

They did indeed! Darius and Stave moved out of the way, and the man came to embrace Nona. He sought to kiss her, but she turned her face aside. “I am Lang,” he said. “I am to breed with you.”

“Not yet,” Nona said, disengaging much as the men had. “But thank you for the offer.”

He let her go, though evidently disappointed. He joined the two women in brown and they led the way on down the curvy passage, walking quickly.

“This grows familiar,” Darius said. But he did not rush to keep the pace, knowing that the three would wait the moment they got out of sight.

So it was. In a moment they rounded the bend and rejoined the three, who were waiting expectantly. This time all three stepped forward to embrace their chosen people, as if long separated from friends. Darius, Stave, and Nona submitted with resignation.

“All we are missing is a mare,” Darius muttered as they followed the rabble folk on down into the planet.

There was the sound of hooves.

It was a brown mare, with brown eyes and yellow mane. She nuzzled Seqiro. She seemed to be ready to mate.

Her name is Bel, Seqiro thought. But her mind is as obscure as the others. It seems to be of similar intelligence. She will soon be in heat.

“These encounters are no coincidence,” Darius said. “They saw us coming. They must be trying to lull us by suggesting that they find us attractive for breeding purposes. But what is their real object?”

I can not fathom that in any of them.

“But as long as we are sure they are not hostile, we can go with them,” Nona said. “If they remain friendly long enough, we shall be able to endure until Colene and Provos return with our information.”

“I think I would rather have encountered vicious monsters,” Darius said. “Then we could have settled with them and known where we stood. These folk may be friendly, but let’s not reveal the several powers we have until such time as we have to.”

“I was thinking the same thing,” Nona said. “They won’t expect magic in a woman.”

“Or in men who have been exiled,” Stave said.

“Or in a horse,” Darius added.

Agreed.

“Are we sure we have magic here?” Stave inquired. “The rabble are confined because they are subhuman, having no magic at all, but that might be because no magic works here.”

That could account for my difficulty getting into their minds, Seqiro thought. My ability is limited in range on the surface, and perhaps limited in depth here.

“We had better test it,” Darius said. “The moment the natives give us another moment by ourselves.”

“Which is right now,” Darius said. He brought out his icon of himself, invoked it, and lifted it slightly. He felt his body being tugged upward. His magic still worked.

Meanwhile a picture appeared on the wall, of the four of them. That meant that Stave’s power of illusion was functional. And a loose stone on the floor lifted, hovered, circled, and dropped. Nona’s levitation remained.

“Our powers remain,” Darius said. “So probably yours does too, Seqiro. After all, you have been mind-talking with us throughout. But the minds here are hard for you to get into. Once you fathom them, they may be as easy to read as ours are.”

There is something else, the horse thought grimly. I start to penetrate the minds, then lose my way. That has never happened before.

They walked on around the turn. There were the four rabble. The three human ones came to embrace, and the mare to sniff noses. There certainly was something odd; why did they always repeat these actions after such brief separations?

Now the tunnel opened out into a larger system. There was a broad center passage, with many intersecting tunnels. This might be the equivalent of a village.

Still the four who had introduced themselves disappeared and reappeared, just stepping momentarily out of sight as the group walked on. Finally Seqiro figured it out: They are changing creatures! Every few minutes we are in the company of four new ones who look, sound, and smell like the others.

“Now, that’s interesting,” Darius said. “That accounts for your inability to penetrate their minds: you’re continually working on new, unfamiliar minds. But what is the point?”

If I could focus on a single mind for a longer period, I should be able to discover that.

“Then we must help you to do that. How can we prevent one of them from changing?”

“By preventing her from stepping out of our sight,” Stave said. “I think I could do that, but I’m not sure how you would feel about it, Nona.”

“I am nervous about being ignorant in this place,” Nona said. “If you can hold yours, do it.”

So Stave proceeded to do that. When the next group came to embrace, he welcomed it, and did not let his yellow-haired-and-eyed woman Keli go. Instead he kissed her again. “Maybe you are right,” he told her carefully in her dialect. “Maybe we had better breed.”

Nona faced away, protecting her expression. Now she understood why he had thought she might object. Nevertheless, she made a running translation for Darius; she wrestled with the variants of words, and as she managed to grasp them, Seqiro relayed the meanings.

Keli was delighted. “Now!” she exclaimed, tugging at her tight tunic.

“Maybe not right now, for we of the surface have peculiar conventions. We like to be alone for such activity.”

“I will take you to a private chamber!” she said eagerly.

“But we also like to get to know each other first,” he continued. “We prefer to have an enduring relationship. That takes time.”

“But that is not needed for breeding!” she objected. “You cannot remain with me after breeding.”

“Now, this is interesting,” Nona murmured. “Women who prefer to breed and run?”

“That is not the way the women of my world feel,” Darius said.

But it is for my kind.

Both Darius and Nona smiled.

“It is the way it must be,” Keli said. “You must not stay with the one you have bred.”

“Why not?” Stave inquired. The other rabble folk were moving on ahead, but he held Keli, who seemed quite willing to remain. “I might want to do it again with you.”

“Oh!” She was shocked.

Meanwhile the others disappeared. But Keli, despite her distress, remained. She could not change with another who seemed exactly like her.

“I am from the surface, and ignorant of your ways,” Stave said patiently. “You will have to explain to me why I can not breed with you repeatedly, if I like you.”

“Because you must be shared,” she said.

“But I want to share only with you.”

“No! With a thousand women!”

This surprised them all. “What?” Stave asked.

“You must breed with a thousand women before you can settle with one,” she explained. “It is the Way.”

“It is not my way. I want only one.”

Their party, still walking, caught up with the other three. They had changed, but Keli had not.

I am getting into her mind, Seqiro thought. She is not trying to mask her thoughts.

“I think none of them are,” Darius said. “They merely keep changing, for what reason we hope to learn.”

Stave embraced Keli as the others embraced their own. “Maybe after the thousand,” she said. “Then you will be free.”

“I’m free now,” he said.

Now her look was sad. “You are not.”

“But I am. If I do not like it here, I will leave.”

“You can not. You must breed.”

She is speaking the truth. She believes we are captives.

Darius looked around. They were coming to a central garden spot, where many men were working. The plants were unlike those of the surface, which had a superficial resemblance to those of his reality and Colene’s. These didn’t bother; they were weirdly fractal, with branches radiating out into further branches, but no obvious roots or stems or leaves. Some seemed kaleidoscopic, and some like assorted fish eyes, and yet others like bunches of feathers. Some were squares piled on squares, or fragments of squares, becoming crystalline, reminding nun of the valleys of his home. There seemed to be an infinite variety, but he could not see how they grew or how they were used.

“That is not a thing that can be dictated by others,” Stave said. “It has to be by choice.”

“It’s nice when by choice,” she said. “But it must be, regardless.”

Truth.

Darius liked the smell of this no better than the others did. Why was there this imperative for mass breeding?

“I must learn more of this,” Stave said. “I am learning your dialect. Let us go somewhere private and talk, and come to a more perfect understanding.”

“Will you breed with me?” she asked eagerly.

He glanced again at Nona. “You’re a man,” Nona said, resigned. “Do what men do. We need the information.” It seemed that their normal dialect was indecipherable to the rabble; Seqiro’s help enabled them to understand Keli. Thus they could continue to talk among themselves, without giving away the fact of Seqiro’s mind-talk.

“I may breed with you if I come to understand the necessity,” Stave said.

“Yes! Here!” She drew him into a side passage, and thence into a private chamber.

Darius glanced at Nona. They had been left behind physically, but not mentally, for Stave remained within range. What were they to do while Stave worked on getting them what they needed to know?

Then Stave reappeared, holding Keli’s hand. This was not affection so much as making sure she was not switched for another Keli without his knowledge. “My companions,” he said. “They must be fed, and have a place to rest, while we talk.”

Immediately, the three other rabble folk, who had changed out several times during this dialogue, responded. They led Darius, Nona, and Seqiro to a table where objects of assorted shapes were piled. This was food?

Potia picked up a branching stick and proffered it to Darius. He gazed blankly at it. Then she put it to her mouth and bit at the fringe. It broke off, and she chewed on the fragment.

Darius took it from her and tried a bite himself. The stuff was brittle, but melted as soon as it touched his mouth. It had a sweet aroma and taste. This was indeed food.

There were also vessels of liquid: bubblelike shapes with projecting blisters, which in turn had projections. When a person bit off a small projection, he could then sip the liquid nectar within.

So they ate, and while they did so, they tuned in on Stave’s dialogue with Keli. She was feeding him a similar repast, but in a suggestive manner: she caressed him somewhere each time she gave him something. He was becoming interested, for she was a fine-looking woman. But the point of it was what they were saying to each other.

“I do not understand about breeding with a thousand women,” Stave said. “On the surface, a man breeds with one woman, and if he considers doing it with another, the first is upset.” As Nona would be, if he let this creature seduce him: his thought came through clearly. Darius understood the situation well enough. He glanced across at Nona, and she met his gaze briefly. Her thought came through: she and Stave were close, but not possessively close; it was Stave’s right to do as he chose. Had she wanted to reserve him for herself, she should have done it before, and she had not.

“We rabble want most of all to return to the surface world,” Keli replied. “But we can not, for we have no magic, not even illusion. But if we breed with those from the surface, our children may have magic, and be able to return. So we long instead for that, and do our utmost to breed with those who are fresh from there. It is our rule: any person from that realm must breed with a thousand of our folk before being free to do what he prefers. His only choice is with whom to breed. We will not let you go until you have done this.”

Stave was beginning to appreciate the enormity of this requirement. “But Nona—the woman of our party—she could never succeed in doing this!”

Darius felt Nona stiffen beside him. This was becoming uncomfortably personal.

“Yes, she could,” Keli answered. “She could breed with twenty men in a day, and finish in fifty days.”

Nona did not seem reassured by that estimate.

“But she would not have a thousand babies!”

“But she would have one, and have given a thousand men the chance to sire that one.”

So that was it: a fair chance for every one of the rabble. It was beginning to make sense.

“But a man could not do that,” Stave continued. “He—maybe several in a day, but not twenty, and not for long.”

“We know. So it will be one a day, for a thousand days. Starting with me, for you.”

“But you might not conceive!”

“But I will have my chance. Some will conceive. There will be some babies who can go to the surface. That is all we ask. A thousand attempts with a thousand folk. It is not so much, because we take good care of you.”

“Suppose I decide not to?” he demanded.

“I will try my best to persuade you,” she said. “Like this.” She drew off her tunic, to reveal a body that struck Darius as it did Stave. Stave’s mind was relaying a mental picture: perfection. It would be no chore to address that body.

But Stave, like Darius, knew caution. He knew that the other rabble folk had been changing every few minutes, though they looked the same. He wanted to know why, but hesitated to ask.

I have found it, Seqiro thought. These folk are form-changers. Each can assume any form, human or animal, though they can not change their body mass, so it is not true magic. Form does not matter much to them; it is a convenience of the moment. They are giving as many of their number as possible a chance to breed: each has a set time to make an impression, and then must give place to another. Keli is the name of that form, not the person; but the person in that form when Stave took an interest is allowed to continue, and to breed with him if she can.

Darius whistled soundlessly. Form-changing and the desire to breed with the newcomers: that accounted for everything. It also showed an extremely fine-tuned program. Surely these folk did know how to prevent their visitors from departing, and how to force them to breed if they did not do so voluntarily. This was a trap of an unanticipated nature.

Nona, receiving his thoughts, looked pale. How were they going to handle this?

“Could they even assume our forms?” Darius asked.

They could.

“Then we had better develop sufficient mental touch to know exactly with whom we are dealing,” Darius said.

I know the difference between your minds and theirs, the horse assured him. I will keep you informed. They are not aware of my ability, so are taking no precautions against it. My difficulty in reading their minds is purely because they are constantly changing folk, and new minds are hard to address.

They continued eating, while Stave continued to fend off Keli’s advances without actually rejecting her.

Then Nona stood. “Is there a private chamber for personal matters?” she inquired.

“Ah, you are ready to breed with me?” Long asked, pleased.

Oops. “Not yet,” she said. “I meant for—I have eaten and drunk, and—”

“I will show you,” he said quickly. Meanwhile Seqiro confirmed that such conventions were similar here to those of the surface realm.

Nona departed. But then things got interesting. They are trying it, Seqiro thought. The woman who returns to Darius will not be Nona, and the man Nona returns to will not be Darius. I can not be sure, because Keli is not thinking of this, but I suspect that they believe that Darius and Nona are interested in each other.

“A nice ploy,” Darius muttered.

After an interval, he saw Nona returning. “Oh, so they didn’t try it,” he said.

That is not Nona.

Darius looked again. It was Nona! She was identical, and she moved the same way. She had been a perfectly beautiful young woman, and she remained so. In fact she came to sit beside him, and she kissed him on the side of the face, then caught his head to turn his face to hers for a full kiss.

But Seqiro relayed her thoughts to him, and they were impenetrable. They were not the thoughts of the woman he knew, but of an alien. He had been misled by her appearance despite the horse’s warning; without that warning he would have been entirely fooled. Except for his surprise that Nona should act this way. She had kissed him once, when confused after a conjuration, but otherwise been more reserved. Romantic aggression was not her way. In that respect she was quite different from Colene.

Potia got up and left. Would that have tipped him off? He wasn’t sure.

Then Nona’s thoughts came, Darius? But I was about to return to the table. Why are you—oh!

“He’s not Darius,” Darius muttered.

Darius? This isn’t you? It looks exactly like you, but you never tried to touch me like this.

“I’m not your man,” he said without moving his lips. “There’s a woman who looks just like you here with me, and she’s kissing me. What’s he doing with you?”

He must think we are lovers! she thought indignantly. That seemed to be sufficient answer.

“Do we reveal that we know their ploy?” he asked soundlessly. The Nona emulation was now pressing his captured hand against her full bosom. “If we do, they may proceed to something we like less.”

If we don’t, we are going to be lovers by proxy, she responded. I would prefer to be with the real you. She meant because she trusted him, but her thought did not exclude the aspect of love. That startled him for another reason. Her thought carried an added nuance: the legendary Earle, in the story told on Jupiter, had looked like a cross between Angus and Darius. She had recognized this, and suppressed the realization.

“We had better get together,” he said. “But let’s not reveal what we know. Seqiro, guide us.”

Follow my thought. A picture showed a hall leading away.

He disengaged far enough to stand. The emulation stood with him. She did something to her red tunic that enabled him to see down inside its front. He knew she wasn’t the real Nona, and knew that every action of hers was calculated to damp down his logic and fire up his passion, but it remained an effective view. The more so because she did not wear the halter undergarment Colene had arranged for the real Nona.

“A private chamber,” he said aloud. “Maybe we can find one.” He looked around.

Null-Nona looked also, evidently understanding him well enough. She spied the entrance to a chamber, and urged him there.

“Where are you, Nona?” he asked silently.

“Down the passage.” Seqiro renewed the mental map, so that the two of them knew where they were with respect to each other.

“I don’t like this one,” he said aloud. “Let’s find a better one.” He headed down the passage toward the real Nona.

Null-Nona caught his arm, almost turning him into another chamber, but he persisted. “Not good enough. But down here, maybe—” He moved on despite her.

Desperate, Null-Nona pulled off her tunic to reveal her naked body. It was a shock; in Darius’ culture women wore bulky diapers under their exterior clothing to conceal their alluring contours, lest any male who spied them be overcome by lust. Even his encounter with Colene’s quite different attitude had not been enough to reverse a lifetime’s conditioning. Occasional glances down necklines or up skirts were one thing, for they never showed as much as they seemed to; the complete array, without warning, was another. He experienced instant desire.

She embraced him ardently, and sought to draw him into another chamber. The irony was that her passion was surely genuine; she wanted more than anything else to breed with him.

But she was not the woman she seemed to be, and he would be in trouble if he bred with either the emulation or the real one. So he resisted, though in other circumstances he would have been glad to cooperate. It was a considerable challenge.

Meanwhile Nona’s thoughts were coming to him. He is trying to get me into a chamber. I can not resist further without revealing what I know. Yet if I enter that chamber—

“Enter it,” he replied. “But guide me in. Then we shall see what we shall see.”

Don’t take long, she thought urgently.

Now you know what I am experiencing. Stave’s thought came. I, too, would rather be with you, Nona.

Then have your paramour assume my form! she snapped mentally. Darius, you must get here immediately, or I must use my magic on your image.

Which would mean that the rabble would know her power. Darius put aside the irony of her two thoughts involving Stave and himself—in concert they implied that Darius was her lover—and hauled her distractingly exposed image along the hall to that chamber. “This one,” he said. “This one seems right.”

Null-Nona forgot herself to the extent of speaking. “No! No!” Her sentiment would have been evident in any language. She wrapped herself around him, trying to bear him down right in the passage. Anything to gain the breeding before he discovered the truth.

They stumbled into the chamber. There was the real Nona, in a similar state of dishabille except for her underclothing, almost exactly as exciting, with Null-Darius climbing on her.

“Ha!” Darius cried with righteous anger. He threw Null-Nona away from him and clapped a hand on Null-Darius. “Who are you?”

Nona stared at Null-Nona with feigned astonishment. “Who are you?” she echoed.

Darius took a closer look at Null-Darius. He let his mouth drop open, as if just realizing the man’s similarity to himself.

“He looks just like you!” Nona said.

“There are two of you!” Darius said. He hoped that his interest in their deliciously exposed bodies would be taken for surprise. They were like identical twins, one half undressed and the other completely so, and he would have loved to dream of a situation like this. Provided either were truly his to dream of.

The two emulations were not stupid. They affected the same surprise as the real ones, trying to confuse the real ones. But Darius cut through that. “Say something in your own language,” he told the two Nonas.

That separated them more surely than the partial clothing. Only one even understood his words—though it was the mental translation she grasped—and so only she could answer appropriately. “I am Nona,” she declared. Then: “And you must be Darius, because you spoke correctly.” The rabble could not distinguish one language from the other well enough to realize that they were being partly deceived.

Darius and Nona embraced. They were now confirming for the two emulations that they were indeed associating with each other, for this was better than being subject to the breeding program of this realm. Darius felt guilty, knowing how Colene would resent this particular byplay.

Then they turned to face the other two, who were embracing each other, still trying to pretend. But their game was lost; they could breed with each other if they wished, gaining nothing. It was clear that they understood that the visitors had stumbled on part of the truth, and needed an explanation.

“Tell us what this means,” Nona said to them. “Why did you try to deceive us? Had we not happened to see you together, we might have been fooled.” Thus protecting Seqiro’s secret.

“You must breed,” the man said. “But you may choose with whom to breed. We wanted to be first.”

“You can change form!” Nona said as if just realizing it. “You can imitate us!”

“We thought it would make it easier for you,” the woman said.

I have stalled as long as I can. Stave’s thought came. Either join me, or let me have her.

“It is better to maintain a united front,” Darius said. “We must protect him too.”

“We must unify our party,” Nona said, so that the rabble could understand. “We must be together, so that no one can fool us again. Where is Stave? Where is the horse?”

“We must find them,” Darius said.

They marched out, followed somewhat helplessly by the emulations. Apparently it was bad form to change appearance in the sight of others, so they were locked in.

They walked down the passage, peeking into chambers as if searching each for their lost companions. It would have been a hopeless quest, for there were many chambers, had they not been guided by Seqiro.

They found the horse still at the table, with Bel the yellow-maned mare. I have no objection to breeding, he thought.

“Hold off for a while,” Darius muttered. “We may need your full attention.” He put his hand on the horse’s back, as if giving a command, and Seqiro obliged by leaving the mare and following him.

They continued to explore chambers, trying to make it seem as if they were about to find the right one by chance. I have learned that the creatures here are not completely human, Seqiro thought. Neither are they animal. They may be reckoned as animal with human intelligence, and the ability to assume the forms they desire. By my definition they are the equivalent of the folk on the surface, and not inferior.

“Then why are they so eager to breed with us?” Darius asked.

They believe they are inferior, because they lack magic. They do not consider form-changing to be proper magic.

“This is foolishness!” Darius said. “They should be satisfied with what they are.”

To a horse, many human conventions seem similarly foolish.

Darius knew better than to argue, but Nona didn’t. “What conventions?” she asked, as if addressing Darius.

Confining your breeding to a single stallion or mare. You should breed with the nearest feasible creature of your species, when in season.

“That does seem to be what the rabble want,” she admitted. “So it seems that they are as much animal as human in attitude as well as body.”

Here is the chamber.

Nona entered it. “Why, Stave!” she exclaimed. “What are you doing?” As if there could be any confusion on that score.

Keli was chagrined, but not because she was naked. “He is breeding with me,” she said. Her words were now clear to them all, because Seqiro had penetrated her mind and was translating freely. “Can’t your business wait another minute until we are done?”

But Stave, abashed despite his knowledge that this interruption was incipient, was hastily straightening out his blue tunic. In any other circumstance he would have been mortified to have Nona discover him in such state with another woman. In this case he had begged her to do just that. Still, his embarrassment was striking all of them, mentally.

Darius did what he could to restore equilibrium. “We have learned that these folk are able to change form. One assumed the likeness of Nona, and another the likeness of me, so that we were almost fooled.” He indicated the two figures behind him, who still looked exactly like himself and Nona. “We decided that we need to remain together as a group, so that we can no longer be fooled this way. Otherwise we might be hopelessly divided, and never be able to leave this place.”

Stave looked at the emulated Darius and Nona. He was impressed. “You are right. I might never have found you, if you had not found me.”

“Then stay together,” Keli said. “But breed me now.”

“Much as I would like to, I must go with my friends,” Stave told her with real regret. His feelings were still coming through: he very much wanted a relationship with Nona, but knew that this was probably doomed for reasons not related to whatever feeling she had for him. Thus the offer of a beautiful creature like Keli, or of a creature in the exact likeness of Nona, had considerable appeal.

“But they too must breed,” Keli reminded him. “A thousand times, each one.”

“What?” Nona demanded. This was information they had had only via Seqiro, so it was necessary to establish this independent source of information.

“The rabble has this requirement for visitors from the surface,” Stave explained. “Each must breed with a thousand rabble, before being free. This is to enable more children to have magic that will allow them to return to the surface.”

The rabble are gathering.

“We had better get out of here,” Darius said tersely. Then, to Stave: “We do not accept any such requirement. They can not hold us to it.”

“We do not accept this,” Nona translated for Keli, with Seqiro making sure the woman understood.

They stepped out of the chamber, and paused.

The passage was now filled with people and creatures. It was apparent that their small group of four was not going to be able to go anywhere unless the rabble allowed it.