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This is the second part of the Legends of Pokemon trilogy. Please read Pokemon Special: Sword and Shield (the final book) after this. For the first volume, read Pokemon Special: Legends of Arceus. It has these additions but can be read on its own
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Although not necessary for an enjoyable experience, some basic knowledge of the Pokemon Special/Adventures manga may be helpful. Any questions about the manga can be resolved by a short trip to Bulbapedia.
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The dedication of this book is split in many ways,
But he who speaks without an attentive ear is mute.
Therefore, Reader, this book is dedicated to you.
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The Tale Of Brick Bronze
The Great War
And the Return of the King
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Prologue
At The Precipice
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The wise also must take delicate care at the beginning to make sure that the rest of the story is told aright. This is the story of the Emperor Bronze Tercano and therefore this book is forever his place. So how do we approach the beginning with a meeting of Bronze Tercano's father? A man of surpassing warmth and surprising coldness was Robert Tercano of Logaria. Yet, many facts open the way to this man: his abiding love for his lady; the dreams he held for his son; the devotion with which men served him. We see him from the future: a man snared by Destiny, a lonely figure with his light dimmed behind the glory of his son. Still, one must ask: What is the son but an extension of the father?
-from "Studies of the Emperor" by Emerald of the Southern Priesthood
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Robert Tercano looked down to the left at the broken landscape of the sinkhole tunnel. Illuminated by suspensor globes in the dark were chasms of tortured rock, patches of yellow-brown crossed by black lines of fault shattering. It was as though someone had dropped this cave from space and left it where it smashed. Somewhere below a spout of sulfur-colored fire spurted up from a crack that led to a repository of flammable gasses. That, or the Heatmor were getting riled up again.
Robert's companion, Adam Kynes, stood passively by while his partner inspected the tunnel. Adam pushed in the filter plugs in his nose as a draft of cave dust came from ahead. Behind them was a tunnel lit by suspensor globes that led back to the surface. Two Excadrill and their handlers waited behind Robert on a small rock flat that was surrounded by many branching tunnels, each plunging into unguessed distances. Adam glanced at them, and smelled the perspiration of their fear and the light musk of the Pokemon. Their neck flaps were loose, allowing dust to get into their mining suits. They would have to be reminded; men got sloppy about such things if rules weren't enforced.
"Is it seismic?" asked Adam. "Or did the water finally eat away at the bedrock?"
Robert studied the tunnel that had suddenly appeared in the mines only two hours ago. He had gotten a call to be at the dig site by six in the morning, which of course meant getting up earlier than God. He hadn't woken up Lily to join him, but was now coming close to regretting it. He needed to review what he was seeing through her wisdom, discuss how to go on.
I would have my wife and son with me.
"Not water," said Robert, pointing at the fissures that were belching out spurts of fire. "Reclaimed rainwater usually circulates into the gas pockets that those flames are coming from. And we don't have earthquakes in southern Roria. There's a reason this site was built where it was."
"There was plenty of reason," said Adam.
Reasons that were still held in fugue. The dig had been tunneled out two months ago. A few Miltank and Mareep herders on the borders of the county grounds had found gold armor in a cave, and that caught the Association's attentive eye. The most controversial business about the whole dig was whether it would run out of profit for such an expense. The purchaser was the government; they wanted a site for the cavern which would worthily house many remarkable discoveries.
The dig was, according to the Association emissary that came to Robert, "the first-fruit, it is said of that constructive fusion between the state and the laboratory on which so many thoughtful people base their hopes of a better world." It was to be free from almost all the tiresome restraints; "red tape" was the word its supporters used, which have hitherto hampered research in this world. It was also largely free from the restraints of economy, for, as it was argued, a government that can spend so many millions a day on war can surely afford a few millions a month on productive research in peacetime. The depth of the cavern proposed for the dig would make a quite noticeable addition to the skyline of Castelia City, if the equivalent distance was inverted.
The staff was to be enormous, and their salaries princely. Persistent pressure and endless diplomacy on the part of the Association Chairman had lured the new dig site away from the attention of Samuel Oak, Professor Rowan of Sinnoh, and others. And once it was full-built, then, as everyone felt, things would at last begin to move.
Until the cave-in, at least. It had disrupted their plans to join tunnels North Central and Sombra (the names taken from the manufacturers of two shrewish geology drones that operated in the branches, also called the Goddamn Clankers or the Ex-Wives) and Robert could be damned if he knew a cause for it, and the whole business gave him gooseflesh. Lily had been getting strange dreams.
Robert's eyes glinted in the semidarkness of the hovering lamps, and Adam took in the man again, from the brimmed hat he wore to the dirty trousers that covered his boots. He was olive-skinned and handsome in a brawny, blue-jawed sort of way, though he was coarsened noticeably by now, in the springtime of his fifth decade. The face was only warmed by deep grey eyes that reminded Adam of Robert's son.
(of course he does, they're related)
"I'm going in with a suspension belt," said Robert, marking the places in the cave where he could climb up or down. "Get the Durant ready with lasers and a few telemetry probes and we'll be good for a first look."
There was a soft scuttling as the two miners released a couple of Durant from their poke balls and began fitting them with laser harnesses and cave flashlights. Robert walked from the mouth of the passage and knelt before a dusty old crate. He disengaged the palm lock and fished out a black girdle with a silver circle streaked with the patina of much use attached to its buckle. Robert tied the crinkling, oil-slick belt around his waist and fit a breather plug over his mouth, then fixed a neoprene visor. He passed another belt to Adam and fit it for him; though Adam was their best climber and could find his way over a ravine in blind cave-darkness, he somehow remained ignorant about how to work the claps of the heavy belt when they were on his back.
"All secure, sir," one of the miners called.
Robert took a final breath of clean air and looked around him. Adam always felt unsettled when Robert was in this mood; it was as if he saw hidden things that others missed with a mysterious surety.
Waiting for the Durant to crawl down the cave slope to lead the way before him, Robert heard the portable fan in the room rattling busily (though it only served to move the dust around). In the primitive bathroom buried in a wall to the right, a rusty shower head dripped, and there seemed to be no way to stop it. (Adam finally put a towel under it to muffle the clockwork sound.) The glowglobe lamps flickered in a couple of places. The room's one picture—an unsettling composition depicting a sailing ship crewed entirely by grinning and possibly homicidal Rorian men—hung crooked. Every day Robert tried to straighten it, but it just fell slanted again.
"What's down there, can ya guess?" asked another miner.
"Something that will put a jam in this sorry business," said Robert, before jumping into the gloom.
He tapped the silver circle on the belt when he reached the peak of his leap, and felt the soft eeriness of the suspensor field anchoring him into a controlled fall, spreading from his center of mass and leaving his limbs free to work or grasp. He floated down like a falling leaf, the Durant moving around below, clacking their prehensile iron jaws as they embedded glowsticks into piles of loose rocks. Robert landed twenty feet below and deactivated the suspensor field with another tap at the girdle.
He looked twenty feet up to a portal of light where Adam stood silhouetted. A rope was thrown down, and Adam hovered down to the cave floor, his breath coming out as a rhythmic hiss through his mask and visor.
"We never work alone," he intoned. "Unless you want to get stuck down in the plug forever."
"Never so," answered Robert, reminding himself that Adam had the best cavern discipline of them all.
The light of the spotlights mounted on the Durant's back, the yellow luminance of suspensor lamps, and the lights shining from the brows of their neoprene helmets showed a bowl-shaped cave strewed with rubble. The northern end of the cave was obscured with a mound of pea-sized gravel that had settled between larger chunks of limestone. There was a faint popping sound as tongues of fire pulsed from their openings on the walls and floor.
"Clear out the north end," Robert said the Durant, speaking in a tone of command. The Durant turned to the north, and two thin streaks of bluish light strafed through the rocks with precise cuts, melting away stone and gravel as if some painter was brushing the limestone heap away.
"Anything now?" said Adam.
Robert brushed his gloved hand over a dry spiderweb of sandstone outlined against the darker rock. He felt tired, filled with the ache of not showing his fatigue. "I'm thinking it's something to do with the gas, but I can't imagine any natural blast making the rock collapse like it has. I've only seen this kind of wreckage with the demolition crews."
Adam grasped what he thought to be the hidden importance in Robert's words. "Was an explosive set off?"
"By who?" said Robert. "Not sabotage, or they would have blown out the whole network. Nor any of ours, for we hadn't dug any tunnels that way, by hell, not even boreholes."
"Perchance an Onix dug through close to the ground and the gas filled the tunnel left behind. It lit, and with a little extra space it made a bigger bang."
"There aren't Onix in these parts," said Robert quietly.
"No, there aren't."
Adam shuddered. The whole damn thing suddenly made him catch the willies.
Robert looked down at the blockage. The Durant had cut away a good chunk of it, exposing a small gap in the rock behind, a little lower than man-high, that led into black. The Durant entered, trailed by a series of hoverlamps.
"If we go in there, can we say that we acted cautiously?" asked Adam. Momentary tension showed itself in a tightening of his jaw.
"Of course," said Robert, "provided that all our equipment is in good working order. And Adam?"
"What?"
Robert laid a hand on Adam's shoulder. He forced himself to the casual gesture as his face twisted into a smile. A whole pattern of conversation welled up in his mind—the kind of thing he might use to dispel the vapors in his Pokemon before a battle. The pattern froze before it could be vocalized, confronted by the single thought that Adam needed to know. Robert then said a terrible thing.
"Guard your mind."
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He jumped over a smoldering fire and ducked to enter the hidden cave. It was a far smaller outcropping of the cave-in than the last one, filled mostly with a heavy clutter of dusty rocks. It was illuminated by their lights almost totally, yet a queer darkness seemed to creep along the corners and in the shadows. And faint but unmistakable, sending an impulse to freeze in place through Robert's nerves, was a muffled jangling that sounded like a madman rapping on an iron door.
Adam glanced at the Durant, hoping that the noise he heard above the noise of their breathing filters was only their legs and mandibles clicking together, but they were huddling together near the chamber's exit, shivering in what he took at first for cold and then for fear. Didn't Pokemon sense things that humans couldn't, know when there was some fundamental wrongness?
The frantic humming seemed to be coming from a large heap of rocks buried in a corner of the box-shaped chamber. As he bent over the pile with flashlight brandished, Robert found himself exerting all the force of his will—which was considerable—just to keep from fleeing. That sickening rapping and the occasional jangling chimes beneath it offended his ears and mind and heart. How slick the thing must be, he thought. A childish, whining though occurred to him. Surely it would look at him, whatever it was, and all the malevolent madness of the universe would be in in that disembodied, leering gaze.
I will not run. I will not. If Pokemon can stay, I can stay. Man must not be replaced.
(the mind of man is supreme)
He and Adam picked away at the rocks, giving each stone a wary glance before setting it aside. Robert paused to wipe a growing fog from his visor and failed. It was his own evaporating sweat. The droning song and the contrapuntal jangle of the chimes both increased. The sounds were like chilly fingers prying around in their heads.
"This isn't natural," gasped Adam, backing off from his work when the chimes seemed to reach a new threshold. "Leave it and we'll come back in the daytime."
"If I can stay, you can," said Robert, looking up at the other man. He must not push Adam too far, but a growing frustration with his own terror was souring his mood. "By the Original One and His Son, I'm as pale as you are. Get back here and dig. Do it till your fingers are nubbins."
"What if it wants to be found?"
"What wants to be found?"
Adam hissed in air and stared out the room's doorlike entrance, unable to answer. After ten seconds he tried to turn back but found himself unable. A curious thought arose: Robert might be crouching behind him. Perhaps he would leap on Adam when he turned. Perhaps he would jump on Adam from behind. Perhaps he should see a figure that looked like Robert standing with its back to him and when he spoke to it, it would turn round and show a face that was not human at all...
He finally turned around and eased back to clearing away the rocks. Robert knelt before the dwindling heap like a worshipper at an altar. Adam felt a suddenly compulsion to stop him, and reached out with an arm suddenly cumbersome and heavy.
It doesn't matter if you do or don't, a voice whispered in his mind. It was sleep-inducing, that voice, and incredibly persuasive. Nonetheless, Adam kept reaching. He grasped Robert's suit collar with fingers from which all feeling seemed to have departed.
"No," he said. "Don't." His voice sounded draggy, dispirited, depressed. When he pulled Robert to one side, the man seemed to go as if in slow motion, or underwater. The room now seemed lit by the glowglobe's sick yellow light that sometimes falls over a landscape before a ruinous storm. As Adam fell onto his own knees before the object Robert had uncovered (he seemed to descend through the air for at least a full minute before touching down), he heard the voice, louder than ever. It was telling him to kill Robert, to open the man's throat and give the object a refreshing drink of his warm life's blood. Then Adam himself would be allowed to end his own life.
All the way down to the House Below you will praise me, the voice assured him in a voice both sane and lucid.
"Do it," a voice inside him said, the voice that wise men call the voluble self. "Oh yes, do it, who gives a damn."
While you die, I'll let you whisper my name, the voice whispered. The Great Djinn.
Robert could never recall how he covered up the object with a burlap bag he used to store samples. Somehow or other, despite the loathing and dismay that pulled him back and a sort of invisible wall of resistance that met him in the face, fighting for each movement, he managed it. He could not even remember what it was. The glowglobes flickered. The thing under the bag raised the volume of its idiot's song, and the tips of his fingers twitched in response. Then they stilled again. That was a small victory, but he knew that it was trying to get him to uncover it.
Hopeless, the voice said. Even the Durant were giving in, their red eyes glazing to a blue-color like liquid oxygen, a total saturation with no white or crimson.
As he had struggled to still his hands, so Robert Tercano of the line of Logaria now struggled to pray.
Arceus, not my will but Thine. Not the potter but the potter's clay. If I can't do anything else, help me to take it in my arms and squeeze and destroy the gods-damned thing once and for all. But if it be Your will to help me make it still, instead—to make it go back to sleep—then send me Your strength.
Drugged by the demonic relic, he might have been, but Adam still hadn't lost his touch. Now he plucked the rest of the prayer out of Robert's mind and spoke it aloud also.
"I stand," said Adam, "I stand with thee. I stand, and I need no other."
"Arceus," said Robert. The word was as heavy as a stone, but once it was out of his mouth, the rest of them came easier. "Arceus, if You're still there, if You still hear me, this is Robert of the line of Logaria. Please still this thing, Lord. Please send it back to sleep. I ask it in the name of the Original One the Father, Arceus the Son, and the Third One. I ask in the name of the White."
"Amen," said Adam in a sluggish, bemused voice.
For a moment the droning idiot's song from under the bag rose another notch, and Robert understood it was hopeless, that not even Arceus Almighty could stand against the ancient evil he had uncovered.
Then it fell silent.
"God be thanked," he whispered, and realized his entire body was drenched with sweat.
"Will it stay asleep?" asked Adam. "Say it's so! That was too close for comfort."
"I guess it will," said Robert. He took off his gloves to tie a knot of twine over the bag's opening, then picked it up and peeked through a small hole in the lining, seeing only the glint of glowglobe light reflecting off the surface of a concealed object. Its color was a leperous white. The sack was heavy, and he systematically probed with his fingers around the item within till he guessed it was made of some kind of porcelain, though colder than any porcelain he had felt. There was a jagged dissonance buried in the quiet hum, like bits of broken glass. There was a nasty flickering purple glare in its hot heart, some cold light that did not belong there. A strong chill moved from the outer surface of the artifact and into his fingers, piercing the burlap lining and going straight into his finger's bones. He put on his gloves.
"What'll we do with it?" asked Adam.
"It wants to be found, you guessed true," said Robert. "And it will be found if we don't take it. Better it stays with a praying man. I'll keep it locked somewhere and pray to Arceus that it stays sleeping, though all our walking or climbing might wake it up again." Robert darted a hard stare at Adam. "You tell no one about this, not to your wife or children or Pokemon or potted houseplants. We don't want to start a panic."
"I won't say a word, Robert."
"Swear on it."
"By my watch and warrant and all the saints."
Robert nodded and read Adam's person with his usual hyperawareness. He had observed everything about Adam over the months—his tone of voice, set of facial muscles, his culture and psychic weaknesses. In time his son Bronze would learn the art, and Lily was a better teacher at the mental arts than he. Adam's signs were obvious enough to show that he wasn't lying; perhaps he was scared into silence, or could be bought. The secret was safe.
"Then we leave and make our peace."
(look again)
Obeying this prompting that came from a sense beyond even his primitive herd instinct, Robert turned back to the mound of scattered rocks and caught a glimpse of sudden shine. When he bent down to look again, he saw everything that mattered.
"Oh my Lord," Adam sighed from beside him, but he might have been a thousand miles away.
In the glint of the light Robert saw the vast, accretive weight of smallness, from planes which hadn't crashed to men and women who had come to the correct place at the perfect time and thus founded generations. He saw kisses exchanged in doorways and wallets returned and men who had come to a splitting of the way and chosen the right fork. He saw a thousand random meetings that were not random, ten thousand right decisions, a hundred thousand right answers, a million acts of unacknowledged kindness.
He saw a man kneeling before a party of robed figures on a seashore, thanking them for their kindness; he saw the figures giving it back freely. He saw Arceus Himself in the burning folds of the refracted light and for a moment understood its purpose: how it distributed its lines of force to all the worlds that were and held them steady in time's great helix. And the quiet, singing voice of the shining talisman. The song that promised all might be well, all might be well, that all manner of things might be well.
Robert picked the shining object up and held it in the palm of his glove. It was a boxy rectangle the length of his little finger, perfectly plain and featureless, made from bronze or alchemical brass. He put it in one of his pockets and stowed the burlap sack under his arm, knowing that he was chosen, that God was speaking to him, that Arceus was moving in his life. This manifested in a breathless thrill that kept his tongue locked.
"I'll keep this safe," said Robert. "Keep it and then protect it. This relic, this brick, this is what holds everything together. It's what will help us. Do you feel it?"
(keep it secret keep it safe)
"I feel it," said Adam. "Feel it well."
Robert closed his fist on the brick, and the feeling of its sharp edges against his hands was oddly comforting, as if he was touching something precious, very precious.
This is your promise that things may be different, Robert Tercano, chief of the line of Logaria—that there may yet be the return of the king. Even of the old empire.
A pause, and then:
If your son stands. If he stands true.
Robert shook his head to clear it, thought of taking a sip of water from the mouthtube inside his visor, and dismissed the idea. He was not thirsty enough to use up his water ration: cave discipline. He would drink later. As for now, he would return to the others. They would ask him questions, and when they did, he would tell a tale; he would be asked and he would talk. Sometimes we must speak other than we think.
Time to get moving.
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Three months later
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Part I
The Hearth and the Tinder
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"The shadow of that hideous strength,
waxes long and more it is of length"
(Sir David Lyndsay: from Ane Dialog, describing the Tower of Babel)
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The sun rose, having no alternative, onto nothing new. However, the world was currently in the grip of several processes, which afterwards came to seem important, and that were all steadily going on. The majority of these processes involved a sleeping boy.
He woke when he heard the loud ungentle clamor of the clock alarm. The boy silenced it and got up, changing into his clothes. He wore a pair of tan pants that were so tersely adorned they would have been allowed in the military. He put on a jacket and went downstairs. His mother had just left the kitchen and he knew how tidy it was. The breakfast things were put out or washed up, the tea towels were hanging above the stove, and the floor was mopped. She had gone out on the only real work she needed to do that particular day, and it was only eight.
"Here I am, standing about, starting to waste another morning," said Bronze to himself sharply. "I must do some work before I leave." By work he meant his paper on the Rorian Chairman's new bill on decreasing term limits. Bronze had always intended to pursue a career as a politician or scholar after he married rich: that was one of the reasons why he was to have no close human partner, at any rate for a long time yet. The Pokemon were another matter. He was frustrated because the paper was not very original and continually emphasized the Rorian people's general dislike for the Chairman. He still believed that if he got out all his notebooks and editions and really sat down to the job, he could force himself back into his lost enthusiasm for the subject and finish it before he had to leave at nine. The paper itself was not even very important: he would not need to write many papers after he had his way with the world.
But before he did so, perhaps in order to put off the moment of beginning, he turned over a newspaper that was lying on the table and glanced at a picture on the back page. The moment he saw the picture, he remembered his dream. He remembered not only the dream but the measureless time after he had awoken in the middle of the night and kept very still. He was an excellent sleeper. Only a few things ever seemed able to keep him awake after he had gone to bed, and even that did not keep him awake for long.
The terror of this dream, like the terror of most dreams, evaporates in the telling, but it must be set down for the sake of what came afterwards.
He had begun by dreaming simply of a face. It was a feminine-looking face, clean-shaven and rather pale, with a sharp nose. The face had very straight and black hair that flowed over its back and shoulders like little dark waterfalls. Its expression was frightening because it was cruel. The mouth sagged open and the eyes stared as he had seen other men's eyes stare for a second or two when some sudden shock had occurred. But this face seemed to be meeting a shock that lasted for hours. Then gradually Bronze became aware of more. The face belonged to a man who was sitting ramrod straight in one corner of a little square room with white-washed walls; waiting, Bronze thought, for those under his power, so that he could do something horrible to them. At last the door was opened and a rather good-looking man with a cloak on came in. The first man seemed to recognize him as an old acquaintance and they sat down together, smiling, and began to talk.
In all the dreams which Bronze had hitherto dreamed, one either understood what the dream-people were saying or else one did not hear it. But in this dream, and that helped to make its extraordinary realism, the conversation was in Old Logarian, a dead language, and Bronze understood bits of it, but by no means all, just as he would have done in real life. The visitor was telling the man something which he apparently intended him to regard as good news. And the cruel man at first looked up with a gleam of hope in his eye and said something unintelligible, but then he wavered and changed his mind. The visitor continued in a low, fluent voice to press his point. He was a good-looking man in his rather cold way, but he wore a strange hood and the upper folds kept on going over his eyebrows so as to make his eyes and parts of his face invisible. This, combined with the almost unnatural perfection of his teeth, somehow gave Bronze a disagreeable impression.
And this was increased by the growing distress, and finally anger, of the first man. Bronze could not make out what it was that the visitor was proposing to him, but he soon figured out that the bid agreed on before the new scheme was the hijacking of some vehicle. Whatever the visitor was offering him was something that angered him more than that. At this point the dream abandoned all pretence to realism and became an ordinary nightmare. The visitor, adjusting his hood and still smiling his cold smile, seized the other man's head between his two hands. He gave it a sharp turn; just as Bronze had last summer seen a Rowlet turn its head all the way around. The visitor unscrewed the first man's head and took it away. Then all became confused.
A strange man was still the center of the dream but it was quite a different head now: a handsome face all covered with earth. It belonged to a young man whom some people were digging up in a kind of churchyard. Bronze recognized it as an ancient Hisuian-looking man, with Hisuian clothes and a dagger in a sheath tied to his side. Bronze didn't mind this much at first because he thought it was a corpse. Then suddenly he noticed that this ancient thing was coming to life. "Look out!" he cried in his dream. "He's alive. Stop! Stop! You're waking him." But they did not stop. The young man sat up and began talking in something that sounded vaguely like Old Hisuian. He locked eyes with Bronze and pointed at him, now shouting louder and louder.
"Hide the Brick, you fool!" the undead man cried. "Hide the Brick! The Enemy wants it, but he must not get it! Hide the Brick!" And this for some reason frightened Bronze so badly that he woke up.
That was the dream, no worse, if also no better, than many another nightmare. But it was not the mere memory of a nightmare that made the kitchen seem suddenly grim to Bronze's eyes. The trouble was elsewhere. There, on the back page of the newspaper, was the man he had seen in the nightmare: the first man (if there had been three of them), the head of the one with the long black hair. He took up the paper. Rally at Silvent City in Five Days! was the headline, under which was Eclipse Spokesman Announces Visit to Southern Roria. Bronze remembered vaguely at having followed the proceedings. The man was named Emrett, of Hisuian descent, and he was a wonder-worker of sorts, going about and getting people to join his organization. Bronze had never heard him speak and was curious about what he had to say. So that was the origin of his dream. He must have looked at this photo in the paper (the man certainly had a very sharp and fierce face) before going to bed.
Five minutes later Bronze was done. He swept up his coat, wallet, put on some old boots, and went out to find his friend Jake Albans.
...
Bronze was walking down to Jake's house, and thinking of many different matters. He did not notice at all the morning beauty of the little street that led him from the woody hillside suburb where he lived down into the central and lightly populated part of Mitis Town.
Though my present conditions as I write this far surpass it, and Jubilife City is also splendid, I think Mitis Town where I was reared is the most beautiful place on Earth. For one thing it is so small. No maker of cars or Poke Balls or marmalades has yet come to industrialize the country town which is the setting of the Professor's laboratory, and the laboratory is also tiny. It was founded by a fellowship of Rorians to research things like the sociology of Pokemon and to pray for the soul of the town. Now it was the official laboratory of Jonathan Rowell Cypress, the Rorian Professor of Pokemon, and he had perhaps forty attendants, few of which, if any, prayed anymore.
Bronze himself knew Cypress. The new professor was just beginning to find his feet in the town, though he never got out much. He was a forty-year-old fellow who looked half his age. Men whispered of life-extension treatments or sorcery. Bronze did not believe that either was the cause for Cypress's seemingly perpetual youth, though he was beginning to wonder. The man's raven locks and cold face had not changed in over two decades, if pictures were anything to go by. He and Bronze had become acquaintances over the past several months; not friends, certainly, though they sometimes came close to kinship in their talks. Cypress treated Bronze with all the respect the boy thought he deserved, and so they enjoyed each other's company whenever they talked about whatever was on their minds.
Cypress had caused a minor stir in the scientific world when he was appointed Rorian Professor. He had been a sub-warden of some nameless college in Kanto before catching the eye of Samuel Oak. The Rorian Chairman favored Cypress as well, the blighter. They were both part of the "progressive element" in Rorian politics. Yanase Berlitz and one Professor Rowan of Sinnoh had protested, but Oak had stood by his decision. "He'll be a hell of an administrator," Oak told the Chairman. "He works all day long, even during dinner. We shall have all the obstructionists wasting time as hard as they can. But luckily that's the worst they can do."
Bronze was going down his favorite walk, or he took it often so he must have favored it. The official start, official for him, was a short and for some reason permanently muddy lane leading down from the back of a sweet-store, passing through a gateway and straggling off to a small stand of oaks and beyond that to the unfettered countryside. The five-barred gate itself, worn by wind and rain to a delicate filigree, the rust seeming of a dusting of roughly ground cinnamon. It does open, but he preferred to climb it, enjoying the way it wobbled under him in panic, clanging and chattering. The action of throwing his leg over the topmost bar caused him to rotate a smart half-turn. Perched there, he imagined himself a dauntless sailor breezily aloft in the swaying crow's nest of a square-rigged carrack out on the bounding main. A boy will be a boy, you see, even this one. But try to see a snot-nose scallywag in Bronze. You cannot.
Immediately beyond the gate was a slanted field traversed by a broad, flat grassy bank, man-made but to no known purpose. On it stood three noble beeches, beeches, set in a line and spaced an equal distance from each other, evidence again of human agency, and not the random plantings of some Phantump forest spirit. Perhaps it was the site of some rustic ritual of yore, recalled from years long ago in the darkness before the Association came, featuring bards and music, and maidens and blossoms, and bearded moot-chieftains with their weed hats capering the clumsy steps of an old-time dance and shaking aloft his long wooden stick that bristled with talismans. Or, less fancifully, they may have been planted there by some long-forgotten tribe to establish a boundary or to honor some woodland-Pokemon.
He reached Jake's house by nine. There were two means of ingress. The main gate opened onto a short drive that ran between two rows of full-grown lime trees straight up to the house. This he avoided, and instead turned and drove on along the road that follows the curve of an old demesne wall. After a distance of a couple of leagues or so came to a right-hand bend, in the angle of which, to the left, was a leafy nook where stood a narrow grey-stone arch enclosing something like lychgate, hidden from the road in a tangle of brambles and overlapped by a gnarled hawthorn bush. Here he walked up. A breeze drowsily tousled the spiked and shinily dark leaves of the hawthorn. The sunlight here seemed vaguer, hazier. No bird sang.
This place was deeply familiar. How, he wondered, did the prodigal son feel when the feast was over, the fatted calf picked clean and the guests gone home, the tears his fond old dad had shed on the shoulder of his long-lost boy all dried and life started up again? Did everything seem much like before and every bit as dreary, or was it all lit along the edges with a cold, mercurial flame, the brightness of the new, the renewed?
He found himself meeting Jake just outside the lychgate. It seemed natural to Bronze that they should walk together and discuss the agenda for the meeting later that day. Jake was the same age as Bronze, a little shorter and broader, and, some might say, less tanned. That was because Jake was also less Logarian, had less of the blood of Southernesse in his veins. There was an innocence in his face that Bronze did not have nor ever really possessed. Bronze was of a time that had long outstayed itself, and Jake was not.
Bronze was as Logarian as could be in those later days. That meant his family was fortuitous in enduring hardships and sorrows, slow to weep and swift to laugh. They were enduring in cold and in distances, quick in body, noble and generous, ready in thought and quick to anger; they were availing in counsel and fierce in battle. Now this odd boy is, perhaps, more special on one ground or another than he would seem. More special, at least, on the merits that Arceus accounts for.
"You still think we'll go through with it?" Jake said as they went further east on the road that led that way from the main gate. They were heading toward a place where they could fetch Bronze's parents. It had been arranged, or silently agreed upon, that only Bronze need come to the laboratory sometime at noon. "Or at least, they'll go through with it? But it's the only way, right?"
"Sure it is," said Bronze. "And sure they will. It's always been needed. Once I have the Pokedex I've got the Professor, the bursar of the laboratory, and all the chemical and bio-chemical people on my side for a start. I've tackled your parents and mine and they're sound on the big picture. I've made Nefud believe that he sees the point in my plan and that he's in favor of it; your grandfather will probably do something pretty devastating but he's bound to side with us if it comes to a vote on anything. Besides, I haven't yet told you. We're going to be getting some new Pokemon. Cypress came down to get something at the post office after lunch yesterday, brought some Poke Balls to the laboratory, and got busy at once."
There had been talks between the Professors considering the possible Pokedex Holder of Roria, among other things, and Bronze was Cypress's choice. The Chairman had been looking hither and thither for some way to increase his poll ratings, and found a safe, concealable way of doing so. Bronze's Pokedex was made in some obscure manufactury in the northern country, and it happened that this was the day he was to go and receive it. The whole ceremony would be between Bronze's family and Cypress, hush-hush, no cameras or mention of it on the nightly news, though it certainly would be known among the Association brass, the other Pokedex Holders, and a few prominent Rorian politicians and their aficionados.
The "plan", as has been whispered, is glorious. It is remarkable that all of it turned out the way that Bronze intended for it, and a little more. It needed blood to breed blood, it rendered life and youth: catspaw of prophecy, the Doom of Arceus, and terribly and inexorably necessary.
"I should like to see it very much," said Jake quite truly. And then, after a pause, "By the way, I suppose Cypress's own position is secure?"
"What do you mean?" said Bronze.
"Well, there was some talk, if you remember, as to whether someone who was of such disrepute in all the circles he entered formally could go holding the title of Rorian Pokemon Professor very long."
"Nothing will come of that. Cypress is too handy for the higher-ups to get sacked this early."
"As between ourselves, yes," said Jake. "But I confess if I were put up to explain in public exactly why a man who is nearly always away from his laboratory, going on some errand who-knows-where, should go on being a Regional Professor of Pokemon, I shouldn't find it altogether easy. The real reasons are the sort that you would call imponderables."
"I don't agree. I shouldn't have the least objection to explaining the real reasons in public. Isn't it important for a man like him to have influential connections with the outer world?"
"Yes. Of course, that's the real point. It would be a little difficult to put in that form at an Association meeting, though!"
"Yes," said Bronze. "I owe Cypress for this opportunity. Some boy named Gladion was actually my chief rival in the selection, my father tells me. Between ourselves, a good many people liked his attributes better than mine. It was Cypress who insisted all through that I was the sort of boy they really wanted. He went around to my parents and ferreted out all about me and you. He took the line that the one thing to consider is the type of boy we need, and be damned to paper qualifications. And I must say he turned out to be right." He made a mock little bow.
Jake was so accustomed to the position that Bronze was the obvious choice for virtually any venture by now that this thought gave him the same curious sensation that a man has when he discovers that his father once very nearly married a different woman.
Then followed some minutes of conversation which was strictly masculine in the old-fashioned sense. Bronze, while preserving a certain sense of superiority, found it indefinably comforting; and though Jake had really the wrong point of view about such things, whatever they talked about, he thought; there was no denying that the one small alteration that Jake occasionally suggested did go to the root of the matter every so often.
Soon they emerged from the shadow of the line of trees that were around them and stepped into a remembered narrow lane overhung on both sides by jostling hedges of hawthorn, and wild woodbine, trembling fuchsia, and many other bushes and shrubs and so on. Jake felt that he should know the names of them but didn't, all in blossom and bursting to be. This rear entrance to the archeological digs was known as Lady's Way, no one at this place could remember why. As a boy coming home from his studies at the library Bronze would sometimes take this route to see his father, if he was working late, daring himself to it, in spite or because of the fact of never feeling quite at ease here, nervous as he was of the straitness of the way and the menacing look of the foliage that crowded above him.
In a spirit of irresponsibility resurgent from the old days Bronze climbed up an old palisade that blocked the road, beyond which was a single hill, squat like a barrow but wider. The gate was locked, but what did he care? The workers knew him. He saw machines ahead on the muddy space of land before the dark mouth of a cave. One was a hoverdrlll-model, resting still and deactivated beside a deep borehole. It was named, in garish paint on the driver's door, the Burmy. Bronze saw that it was unlocked. What did the operator care? He didn't own the thing, Bronze thought. Maybe, when let alone, it would live up to its name and trip away into the woods and by some rude mechanical magic transform itself into a very real Burmy, a leaf-bodied dryad, and be happy there, haunting the vernal oaks.
To the mouth of the cave they accordingly went. I suppose the mere fact of being walled in gave the cavern part of its peculiar quality, for when a thing is enclosed, the mind does not willingly regard it as common. As Bronze went forward over the quiet turf he had the sense of being received. Where he was looking was surrounded by a world of shadows, while he walked in mild sunshine. There were no living things out on the plain, except the Mareep that kept the grass around the high flat short with their nibbling and who sometimes raised their blue foolish faces to stare at Bronze. He was quite alone; and it felt more like the loneliness of a very large room in a deserted house, than like any ordinary solitude out of doors.
Right away the two ran into Robert and Lily Tercano. Lily's clothes were rather severe and in colors that were really good on serious aesthetic grounds, clothes that would make it plain to everyone that she was an intelligent adult and not a woman of the chocolate-box variety. Or at least that was an impression that some felt, though really they were old raggedy purchases that did well in cave dust. Because of this preference for practicality, Lily did not know that she was interested in clothes at all.
She was more Logarian than anything else, but there was a strangeness to her. She was tall and fair and flint-eyed, and was said to have descent from the Hisuians of the North, sad and proud, of which rumors have been told in Roria. Indeed of the old blood she was, the modern sire of those Logarian warriors with Hisuian wives that they took, fathering children with them along the coasts as they campaigned in galleries and battlefields and campaigns long ago, driving, driving, driving, with bright swords forged by skilled smiths that dwelt in the mountains, across the sea and forest, thrusting before them the ancient dwellers of the lands. Those days were long forgot, but a few knew some measure of their tales.
"Grand day, Bronze," said Robert, who had been waiting beside Lily. He and his son clasped hand in hand. "You're looking ready for Cypress. He's one of the villains of this whole piece, I'm afraid. At least you've gotten on good terms with him."
"You'll have to take a good look at that man sooner or later, Robert," said Lily. "Here I've been imagining that you would use all your influence with him to try and make the Plan work, getting Bronze his Pokedex, whereas in reality it was Cypress moving the chessboard all along. I wonder what he wants, from the dig site no less. Sometimes he comes over to have a look around."
"Bronze hardly talks to me about archeological business," said Jake abruptly.
"Most good friends never should," said Bronze. "At least, only about the business of this one." He remembered that in his haste he had eaten no breakfast. "We ought to get going. Perhaps Cypress will have some lunch."
"Bread and water," said Robert with a smile. "That's all I've seen him eat, and some foul green mixture. You'll have to wait for your mother to make something. For you, Bronze, we were going to give you a gift of sorts. It'll come after the meeting, of course, but I would have you know now."
...
They walked over the path to the north of the dig site and then south along the bank of the Windy River, past some cottages, then left and eastward at the Arcean church and down the straight road with poplars on one side and the wall of a tangled wood on the other, and so finally down to the gravel drive that led to Cypress's laboratory.
During the whole walk Mr. Tercano talked about the old Hisuian and Logarian legends to Jake. "It's really wonderful," he said, "how the whole thing hangs together, even in a late version like the one we have now. You've noticed how there are two sets of characters in the old myths? There's Rei Berlitz and Adaman the Great and all those people in the center: all very courtly and nothing particularly rough-and-tumble, well, Rorian about them. But then in the background, on the other side of the Hisuians, so to speak, there are all those Logarian people like Berothrim and Targon, who are very Rorian indeed and usually more or less hostile at all times to some creature or person. Mixed up with magic. You remember that odd moment, how the Emperor Adunakor set his mind ablaze with visions from the Red and Blue Orbs? It feels all very ancient but mixed."
"What do you mean, sir?" Jake asked.
"Well, wouldn't there have been one section of society that was almost purely Hisuian? People wearing old robes and talking a sort of Hisuian, buried wearing daggers at their sides, something that would sound to us rather like Sinnoian: and fully Arceus-worshipping. But further down country, in the out-of-the-way places, cut off by the forests, there would have been little courts ruled by real old primitive Rorian under-kings, speaking something like what we have now, and practicing a certain amount of Pokemon-worshipping religion, removed from the beneficial influence of the Logarians."
"Then I wonder what we are," said Bronze. It was shameful to him that his heart should have missed a beat at the words "buried wearing daggers at their sides."
"That's funny," said Lily. "Remember when I woke you up last night, Robert? I had some odd dreams. There was some Hisuian man that I thought I had seen before, in a painting or picture. He was wearing a dagger, like you said. This young man was very insistent. He kept pointing at me, saying that I had to hide it, or—" She looked at Bronze. "He said that I should give it to you."
"Magic indeed!" said Bronze involuntarily. "I had a similar dream. Hide the Brick, he said. I wonder what this all means. Have you two found some old piece of sacred mortar?" He was speaking with a little relish. "Are the patron spirits of construction materials up in arms because your equipment has disturbed their ancient fane?"
Robert looked in amazement at Bronze's face. "It's not right for mother and son to go around sharing dreams at this hour. I hate to shoulder this aside, but we are nearly there. We can psychoanalyze this later."
Cypress managed his business really very well in the space that was given to him. Most of his assistants did not know when they came into the laboratory that there was any question of Cypress's sacking when they saw his output. They saw, of course, from their agenda paper that item Fifteen was "Employer/Employee Competency Overview" but as that appeared at almost every Association meeting, they were not very interested. On the other hand, they did see that item One was, "Questions about the Professor." These were not concerned with the proposed sacking but rather Cypress's beliefs.
It is good enough evidence that the clergy uncovered most of Cypress's occult murmurings, putting out a paper that said, closely enough, that the Professor should be sacked and the laboratory redone, "for the taking away of all profane and heathenish superstitions and the deterring of the vulgar sort from all wakes, may games, dancings, mummings, and thoughts of Pokemon-worship, heretofore used about the man called Jonathan Rowell Cypress, and utterly to be renounced and abominated as a gallimaufry of shamanism, gentilism, lewdness, and paganistic folly." Not that the Association had by this action renounced its own interest in the place. They hardly heeded the Arcean church, putting down their protests to destroy "progressive and occultist" thoughts among the "the groves and the high places." Bronze remembered that they even sent a few troopers with power to impress the country people and protect Cypress's stately work from the mobs of religious.
The scheme among the church leaders came to nothing in the end; but there had been a bicker between the Rorians and the troops in the very heart of Mitis Town a month ago, and the fabulously learned and saintly Mr. Crow had been escorted away by armed forces, and another Jacobson had been scraped by a Skarmory's steel feather. Bronze knew it would take a brave man who could accuse Cypress either of shamanism or "gentilism" (though he understood the man's fascination with spiritual mysticism); yet the story is that Crow's last words before being shackled and spending a night in jail were "Good sirs, if Cypress who is the Evil Djinn's son is verily a true Chairman's man as ever ate bread, is it not a shame that you, being but the brutes of the government, should be far worse?"
Very few people were allowed into the laboratory. The gate was by and large the only entry: a high wall enclosed the place, the property of which was perhaps a quarter of a mile broad and a mile from east to west. If you came in from the street and went through the town to reach it, the sense of gradual penetration into a holy of holies was very strong. First you went through the road which is dry and gravelly; the forest, florid, but beautiful; Logarian buildings look down on it. Next you must enter a cool tunnel-like passage under the trees, nearly dark at midday.
When you emerged from this tunnel you would find yourself in the property proper: in the midst of the much larger rectangle of the Association-owned land. The grass here looks very green after the aridity of the tunnel and the very white stone of the laboratory's exterior baseboards that rise from the part of it that borders the ground gives the impression of being soft and alive. The Arcean church is not far off: the hoarse, heavy noise of the works of a great and old clock comes to you from somewhere overhead in the south. You went along this path from the gate to the sliding doors, past slabs and urns and busts that Cypress had installed in the front yard to commemorate dead scientists, and then up shallow steps into the full air-conditioned paradise called the laboratory.
The consoles to your front and right were last-century work: humble, almost domestic in character, with plastiglass windows, almost mossy and grey-covered. You were in a sweet, scientific, sterile world. You found yourself, perhaps, thinking of nanotech or bots. There were no windows straight ahead on the far side of the laboratory; only a row of elms and a blue-painted wall: and here first one became aware of the sound of running water and the cooing of Spearow from some other conservatory entered by a door from the left wall. The street was so far off by now that there were no other noises. As I have said, in the left wall there was a door. It led you into a covered gallery pierced with wide plasteel windows on either side. Looking out through these, you discovered that you were crossing a wide bridge and that a dark brown, dimpled, artificial, and wholly indoor river was flowing under you. Now you were very near your goal of reaching Cypress's office. A wicket at the far end of the bridge brought you out into the archival room, and across from you saw through a few windows the glimpse of green leaves and dark shadows.
Behind a single door with a camera hidden where the peep-hole should have been Cypress was busy following up on articles and writing some nameless treatise on the potential dangers of commercial life-force extraction or the groundbreaking aetheric evolutionary energy or other pseudoscientific humdrum. The whole office was oddly sparse. It had one oak desk, a leather swivel chair, a lamp and some chairs beside the desk, and spruce-paneled walls. Whenever Cypress needed to fetch some paper he yelled for a beleaguered receptionist or stood to find it himself if the woman was being especially touchy. As the four walked in Cypress looked up from his labors with an expressionless face. He was wearing glasses, though Bronze had seen him read just fine without them. Cypress would have looked dandy in pince-nez, if he had any stored away.
The outer office was full of what Bronze had already learned to call Waips, the girls working on Cypress's research team. The men of the force, though very much more numerous, were not so often met with indoors, but Waips were constantly seen flitting to and from wherever Cypress appeared. Far from sharing the masculine characteristics of their chief, they were (as Bronze once said) "feminine to the point of imbecility"; small and slight and fluffy and full of giggles. Lily behaved to them as if she were a man, and Cypress addressed them in tones of half-breezy, half-ferocious, gallantry. "Cocktails, Dolly," he would bawl as they entered the outer archives. Bronze knew that Cypress had an oddly copious appetite for women, though the professor never seemed to care for them much outside of the pleasure they could give him. This was at times a hot point of resentment between Robert and Cypress: with what indignities the professor treated his subordinates.
Bronze sat down with Jake, but Cypress remained aloof. Robert was grumbling some grievance.
"I see that you came along to have a talk with me," said Cypress, looking up. "And Robert, I've told you that you need not worry about all those little nymphs I have on this floor. But I won't go on with you here if you keep complaining."
"That might be very good advice, Jonathan," said Robert, "if I were committed to staying here at all. But I'm not. And from what I've seen I don't like how you run this place, and you know that. I've very nearly made up my mind to go home after the whole ceremony is over. Only I thought I'd just have a talk with Bronze first, to make everything clear."
"Making things clear is the one thing the Association can't stand," replied Cypress. "That's not how they want to run the place. And mind you, the Chairman knows what he's about. It works. You've no idea yet how well it works. As for leaving, you're not superstitious, are you? I am. I don't think it's lucky to leave your son while he's getting his Pokedex. You needn't bother your head about all the women and the duties I perform here. That's not part of your job. You're being put through it at the moment, yes, but if you hold on you'll come out above them, once I've packed up and left in a year or two. All you've got to do is to sit tight. Not one of them is going to be left when we get going, and you'll be spared the annoyance."
"That's just the same line you told me when I asked about your tastes," said Bronze. "But it never seems to do me much good when coming to the point."
"Do you know, Tercano," said Cypress, "I've taken a fancy to you. And it's just as well I have. Because if I hadn't, I'd be disposed to resent that last remark. Perhaps you will find some difficulties on your trip if I get any more cross."
"But what for?"
"There you go again, Bronze!" said Cypress. "You've grumbled about being given nothing to do, and as soon as I suggest a bit of real work in this Pokedex Holding assignment you expect to have the whole plan of campaign told to you before you do it. It doesn't make sense. That's not the way to get on here. The great thing is to do what you're told. If you turn out to be any good you'll soon understand what's going on. But you've got to begin by doing the work of catching the damn Pokemon. You don't seem to realize what we are. We're an army. The sooner you drop all that talk about what you came here to do, the better you'll get on. I'm speaking for your own good, boy. You can write. That's one of the things you're wanted for."
"I've no notion of spending my life writing newspaper articles or Pokemon studies," Bronze said. "And if I had, I'd want to know a good deal more about the politics of the research branch of the Association before I went in for that sort of thing. I've only focused on the electoral."
"Well, my work is strictly non-political," said Cypress, "and so will yours. Don't you understand anything? Isn't it absolutely essential to keep a fierce Left and a fierce Right, both on their toes and each terrified of the other? That's how we get things done. Any opposition to the Science Program is represented as a Left racket in the Right papers and a Right racket in the Left papers. If it's properly done, you get each side outbidding the other in support of us: to refute the enemy slanders. Of course we're non-political. The real power always is."
"I don't believe you can do that," said Jake. "Not with the papers that are read by educated people."
"That shows you're still in the nursery," said Cypress. "Haven't you yet realized that it's the other way round? Why you fool, it's the educated reader who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believed the papers? He takes it for granted that they're all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Pokemon farms to be used as fertilizer. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, don't need reconditioning. They're all right already. They'll believe anything. Of course, there's a minority of educated like Bronze that actually look a little deeper. You usually don't get them from the public schools. That's what he has going for him."
"As one of the class you mention," said Lily with a smile, "I just don't believe it."
"Good Lord!" said Cypress. "Where are your eyes? Look at what the weeklies have got away with! Look at the Southern Herald. There's a paper for you. They report on everything the way the wind swings. Remember that for ten years the old Arcean tradition was an anti-progress institution? Now since the Arceus-worshippers got control of the publishing company, they went all conservative in about a fortnight. Did they lose a single reader? Don't you see that the educated reader can't stop reading the high-brow weeklies whatever they do? He can't. He's been conditioned."
"Well, all that does is help ruin the region, and the whole human race," said Lily. "And I'm Arcean myself, which is unfortunate when I agree with a bit of what you're saying. But talking about the Association's own propaganda will tank your career."
"No, it won't," said Cypress. "I am not talking in much degree about the Association, emphasis on much. I am speaking of other power groups. You could say that I'm even being a proper citizen, an honest citizen, and a public servant, by spreading the word about these dangerous psychological tactics. They are remarkably effective." He smiled, and Bronze had a good feeling that Cypress had used them himself from time to time. Then the confidential tone in which he had been speaking up till now had disappeared and there was a threatening whisper in his voice. Cypress was speaking indistinctly, as if not to the four standing and sitting before him. Bronze heard him growl "Used by you? Did the Lord use Cyrus of Persia?" Bronze wondered what he meant.
Breaking off from his whisperings Cypress reached into a desk cabinet for a chromium box, about the size of a human hand. "Get up, Bronze! We've got to get going. I have lines to say, the tired old guarantees of responsibility and chivalry and cooperation with your Pokemon partner and all that grade-school garbage."
Robert made an attempt to prolong the interview but the professor did not permit this and in a few seconds he was outside the door. "It's about time," said Bronze. "I've never really owned a Pokemon before. Is it any different than rentals?"
"A bit," said Robert. "I cannot, could not explain it to you until the time comes. I could try. But if I was wise, then how should I expect you to know the feeling, until the time comes?"
"Take as long as you need," said Lily, giving Robert a chaste kiss. "We'll be waiting by the lawn green with that 'brick.' You better run along now. Have a nice talk with Cypress. Be careful not to annoy the man. He does so love giving speeches and hates interruptions."