Pre-text author's note: There will be some spoken D'ni in this (and the following) chapters. Because Gehn knows some rudimentary English picked up from Anna in his early, pre-fanatic years, the majority of his conversations with English-speaking people will be in a stilted, but recognizable, form of English. It is not vital to the story for the reader to understand the few words in D'ni, but for one's convenience (and because I'm a D'ni language freak), you can reference them at the bottom of the page for the meaning and a complete grammatical breakdown.

Also, B'Fahsee is set after Path of the Shell. The DRC, however, is again alive and kicking, thanks to a large research donation by some rich person.

--Largo--

considered to be chapter one

The D'ni city was dark inside the earth. It had been dark since the fall of the great empire that had called the craggy walls and islands its home, a darkness that had been absolute for over 200 years. Until, that is, an intrepid group of explorers rediscovered the cavern and the books containing countless Ages. The cavern, though, was still quiet. Perhaps 700 explorers a week descended to a few restored neighborhoods, notably Bevin, and the island of Ae'gura. When they departed for the night for their feather beds on the surface, the city was silent.

Only a few lights burnt around the cavern. Bevin and other neighborhoods that dotted the cave's walls shone with a feeble light that didn't even reach to the surface of the murky orange water filled with dead bacteria. The island of K'veer, with the great mansion built around the rock's spiral, contained thousands of windows. A few windows were lit in the dead darkness, evidence of the work of the D'ni Restoration Council. The great library on Ae'gura, once filled with books but now plundered, emitted a faint yellow light from behind the large stained glass windows that depicted a marriage whose details are lost in time.

The cavern was quiet at night. Only the Maker looked upon it, and he wept.

It was a bright spring morning when the dean of the University of Istanbul poked his head out his window onto the Court of the Kings that opened onto the Street of the Goldsmiths for a breath of air. The courtyard was closed to pedestrian traffic now, and weeds and ivy had overrun much of it. He gazed about the tree lined plaza and looked lovingly down at the worn cobblestones that had borne the brunt of millions of footsteps. After watching a pair of birds attempt to make a nest in a nearby tree he was about to withdraw to the dingy world of his office when movement below caught his eye. He was about to yell out to the offending student that the courtyard was off limits but stopped when he noticed that it was not, in fact, a student.

A hunched old man was slowly making his way, with the aid of what looked like the leg of a desk, to the gate that led to the street. He was clothed in ripped robes, similar to that which the dean had seen some orthodox Islamic sects wear. This man, however, was definitely not a Muslim. Even from three stories up he could hear the man's intelligible mumbling. Perhaps he was drunk? Before the dean could do anything, though, the man had hobbled out the gate and into Greater Istanbul, seemingly just another drunk that prowled the streets.

The dean turned back to his work and promptly forgot about the experience. After all, he had to deal with the grumblings of professors over their low pay and a brewing strike among the mathematics department. Nothing could be more important than that.

The old man made his way down the Street of the Goldsmiths and stopped by the door of a rare books store. Hidden beneath his robes he held an innocuous looking book bound in leather with gold lettering on the front. The man peered at the sign on the door and attempted to push it open. The few passersby on the street raised their eyebrows at such strange behavior, for the sign obviously said closed and, if that wasn't bad enough, there was a doorknob in plain sight. Slightly scandalized but enjoying it, the people continued with their activities, occasionally sneaking glances at the strange ancient. After a few minutes, though, they gave this activity up, for it was obvious to them that it was going nowhere. They turned back to their haggling and trading, oblivious to the fact that when their gazes had turned away from him the old man had forced the door and entered the shop.

The bell above the door jingled as the proprietor was just finishing his somewhat sparse lunch packed by his wife two days ago. Discarding the strange tasting ham, he hurried as well as his arthritis allowed to see why someone had entered when the sign had clearly stated that the shop was closed. As he entered the room his eyes met a strange sight: an old man standing among piles of toppled books. The stacks that had taken so long to accumulate had fallen, leaving the shop noticeably brighter now that the window was no longer blocked.

"Ah." The owner paused, not sure of what to say. "Perhaps you want a book?"

The venerable ancient stepped on countless books to arrive before the owner. "Yes." He pronounced in a scratchy voice it as if the monosyllabic word held a special meaning. "You have… more of this?" He held up the book that had been hidden under his robes.

"The book of faces… you are a friend of Professor Nottingham? He bought that yesterday."

"Pofresser?" The man seemed confused and he wrinkled his brow as he let of a string of what the owner could imagine to be curses in a flowing language. "No. I no know pofresser. You have more books?"

The owner frowned, his face turning into a mass of wrinkles. It was back in '88, yes, all those years ago when his arthritis hadn't been so bad. There was that shipment of books from a desert in the United States and he had picked the book of faces up from the top of it to display as a curiosity.

"Yes, I think we have some more of these. Let me go look." The owner stepped through the fallen books, attempting not to step on any. He entered the back room through the rotten velvet curtain and looked around as his eyes adjusted to the dark. The box was somewhere—oh, yes, back in the corner. He grabbed some books from the top and stumbled back to the customer who had sat down on a rickety chair.

"Here are the books, sir." He presented them to the old man, whose eyes had lit up at the sight of them. The owner laid the books on the counter to let the ancient peruse them.

"Eh!" The old man let out a hoarse cry of triumph. "Lehhoor tah! D'nee!"

The owner leaned over the old man's shoulder and for a moment recoiled at the smell. In a few seconds he had collected himself and was also staring at the book. Another picture book, but this picture showed a small circular room lined with some sort of rotating belt. Pillars supported the ceiling, and the one in the center held a light and some sort of machinery.

"5 million lire." A low price for the book, thought the owner, and a good one too.

The old man reached into his robes, and for a moment the owner thought that he would get the money as he should. Instead, though, the man pulled out something that looked like a worn watch and slipped it over his right hand so that it rested on his palm. He then picked up the book of faces and tucked it into the folds of his robes.

"Sir, the money?"

"Chehv shehm." The man whispered this last sentence and placed his hand on the picture of the small room. He started to shimmer—and then he was gone.

The owner blinked. He peered at the book that was lying open on the counter. He thought for a moment, then decisively closed the cover and threw the book into the constantly burning stove in the corner. "Maybe," he spoke aloud to an empty shop, "maybe I have been drinking too much."

Books slowly whirled around the Nexus; every book to every Age that had been linked to by the D'ni rotated around and around. The firemarble in the light still burnt as it had for the past 200 years and the imager control panel sat black and silent as it had until a group of explorers had stumbled upon the entrance to a great tunnel. The strong pillars supported the roof, not a crack to be found in them, for there was no earthquake to sully the beauty of the D'ni construction here. The Nexus design, inlaid in metal among the stones that comprised the floor, the stylized gear decorations on the wall. More than a million D'ni had used the Nexus before the Fall… but not one since.

A shimmering in the air disrupted the serenity as an old man linked into the room. He slowly turned his head adorned with stray white hairs to take in his surroundings and then blinked heavily as though trying to hold back tears. He guided a gnarly finger to his KI to press a button. Reacquainted with the device, which now worked, he walked over to the Nexus machine. His footsteps sounded flat in the small space.

His hand was trembling. Partly from excitement, partly from anticipation. Partly, of course, from the joy of being free.

His hand entered the KI receiver, which glowed blue. The imager popped up, but the words were in English instead of D'ni. The old man cursed as he randomly picked a line of letters that would bring him a book. The Nexus whirled and a book was placed before him. The cover fell open and the man could see an imposing building built on a small outcropping of rock. Katha Island, the home of Faresh, that contained puzzles beyond comprehension.

The old man grumbled and pressed a raised button, closing the book. His fingers landed on another line of letters and the Nexus delivered the book. It opened automatically and showed a welcome sight: the Great Zero Courtyard. He peered down owlishly, if only because his eyes had degenerated, and traced the machine with his eyes. A tear (although, if asked, he would have denied it) made its way down his wrinkled face, tracing a path through the accumulated grime of many years. An affirmation came.

"Kehn Gehn."

His hand descended over the panel, and he shimmered away, his form melting into the air.

The book closed and slid back into the moving line of thick tomes, and the Nexus was quiet once again. It seemed, though, that perhaps a different air had entered it. That the cobblestones seemed cleaner, that the light shone brighter, that the room seemed a bit bigger. A D'ni, descended from the line of guildsmen, had returned to his home.

Gehn appeared with his hand stretched out in the air, white robes slightly moving in the almost nonexistent breeze coming from far away tunnels and fans. His pale eyes turned towards the Great Zero. Surprisingly, he found it smoothly moving, lightning crackling from the center to the edges. He brought up his KI screen in front of him and it showed the three numbers that corresponded to altitude, elevation, and torans. They were almost all close to zero, and he closed his KI with satisfaction and started to hobble down the steps that led to the inner part of the Great Zero where he could reconfigure the Nexus to display the D'ni language.

After a few long and pain-ridden minutes Gehn arrived at the right side door to the Calibration Center. The KI symbol glowed blue and the door slid quietly open to admit him. He continued down the pinkish marble path for a few steps and then turned around to look at the Calibration Imager. On his previous trips to the Great Zero after the Fall he recalled it being very fuzzy and he had always wondered what it actually was. It now showed a picture of Tokotah Alley before the fall. Some sort of stylized shell, however, glowed in blue above it. The old man wrinkled his eyebrows, but, discerning that the Great Zero was functioning, he continued to the back leftmost of the machines that lined the pool in the inner sanctum.

Gehn inserted his KI hand into the receiver and realized he would have to bend down to look into the small screen. He silently cursed and slowly lowered his head, hearing what seemed to be all the bones in his back popping. When his face was on a level with the small imager he looked at the screen. He reset the Nexus to its original state by pressing a button and then withdrew his hand.

He walked back to the Nexus book at the opposite end of the Great Zero, thinking of its history that had been drilled into his head when he was young, but he figured that it would be a miracle if he remembered any of it. Slowly, though, as his feet padded on cold marble tiles, he recalled that it had been built around the founding of D'ni, that Ri'neref had designated its line as sacred and restricted buildings on it to temples.

He had reached the Nexus station before he realized it, and Gehn started as he bumped into it. In a considerably better mood he placed his hand on the panel and linked back to the Nexus, leaving the Great Zero behind him.

The small DRC office on the surface was located in the middle of the desert. It was, in a sense, a very convenient location for a base of operations, because the only entrance to D'ni was a few miles away by the volcano. It was also not a very convenient location, if only because it was in the middle of a desert and the temperature tended to rise very quickly. It was July, and the small generator-powered air conditioner was broken. The air was stifling, and all three of the employees currently there wished to be somewhere else.

The door opened and banged shut, creating a rush of moving air that was eagerly welcomed. "Ikuro!" Marie Sutherland's voice rang out. A debonair looking man poked his head out of a cubicle. "Some explorer came by about fifteen minutes ago and said that Nexus was displaying all in D'ni. I went there myself and tried it and… well, it's all displaying in D'ni. I can't read a thing!" Her hair, after only a minute in the office, had plastered itself to her neck.

"Oh? Lemme go check the language pack in the main lattice system. I can get it from right here because my KI is connected to the system…" He wheeled out of the cubicle in his chair towards the irate woman and pressed the large purple button on his KI. Marie, interested, leaned over to look.

"Hmm… seems like… wait, what? It says that it was totally reset to the conditions we found it in during that second expedition in '93! All that work! Maybe I can get it back up and running… you'd better alert Watson. He's going to be pretty angry." Kodama leaned back and prodded the KI and the imager blinked off. "I'll be going to D'ni to send a message through the D'ni lattice about the Nexus malfunctioning. What are you waiting for? Go!"

"Sheesh, I'm going." Marie walked out to go phone Dr. Watson about the most recent failure. It was, she reflected, a miracle that they had gotten the grant. If not… well, she'd be back teaching Anthro at Southern Illinois.

"Marie? What's this I'm hearing about the Nexus?" Dr. Watson did not sound too happy, a departure from his normal geniality. "It's broken? We spent years fixing it up to work with English, and now it's just whisked away?" His voice shook. It was his great dream to restore D'ni and open it up to explorers, and Marie could understand his anxiety over the loss of the Nexus system.

"Don't worry. Kodama will get it working again. You know he's a genius." Behind her front of confidence, though, she was privately worried. But every problem, from the linking sickness to the blacking out, they had been able to fix. Surely this one would be the same, only bigger. Right?

"I hope so. I'm off to dinner with Elaine tonight, so if you need to reach me use my cell. Bye."

Marie clicked her phone shut and trudged back to Kodama. "You'd better get going, because if this isn't fixed Watson will come fly over to personally roast you on a pole over the cleft."

"Yeah, yeah. Make sure, would you, that I don't get barbequed?"

The Maker looked, and if one looked closely in the great celestial visage, one could see the corners of his mouth twitch.

Lehhoor tah! D'nee! Here Gehn slips into D'ni because of his excitement (and because his grasp of English isn't that good). Translation: I have found it! D'ni! Breakdown: leh- perfect tense prefix; hoor- first person singular present tense 'to find'; tah- tentatively means 'it' not confirmed.

Chehv shehm Translation: I thank you. Breakdown: chehv: first person singular present tense 'to thank'; shehm: second person object pronoun.

Kehn Gehn Translation: I am Gehn. Breakdown: kehn: first person singular present tense 'to be'

A big thanks to my first two reviewers: Miveen and possumgirl.