But this time they came close enough to see his black robe and veered off, speeding back the way they had come. Having no time to wait for them to send out an expendable emissary, Pug followed in a series of magic jumps, staying just far enough behind them not to provoke an attack.
In less than an hour a village came into view and Pug could see more than a score of massive sod huts with ramps leading down towards doors, so he deduced that the houses must be half underground. Smoke rose through vent holes, and Thūn children and females moved among the buildings.
An alarm was sounded and instantly the young scurried for the safety of the huts. The females took up positions in the doorways, obviously ready to defend their young if the males were defeated. Pug realized that all the Thūn’s encounters with humans in black robes had been punitive, save one, the last time he had spoken to them. As part of their nature, the Thūn attempted to range south of the mountains in winter, and for a thousand years they had been repulsed by the Tsurani.
Pug was about to seek to convince them to leave lands that had been their home since the dawn of time.
He erected a shield around himself, and approached slowly. A few used slings to hurl rocks at him and one shot at him with a bow, but when the missiles bounced harmlessly off the shield, they stopped. A few feigned charges and drew up short of slamming into him, but they all hooted and challenged him.
Pug stopped just outside the village boundary and said in a loud, calm voice, ‘I seek a parlay with the Lasura.’ He used their own word for themselves, like so many others meaning ‘the people’. Thūn was a Tsurani word.
For almost ten minutes nothing happened while Pug stood motionless and the Thūn warriors shouted what he took to be insults and challenges to single combat. He knew it was ritualized and expected of braves, but he and the Thūn also knew that the average Tsurani Great One could rain fire down on this village and Pug was far from average.
Finally an older male approached and in heavily-accented Tsurani said, ‘Speak, Black One, if you must.’
‘I speak of a great danger, not only to the Lasura, or Tsurani, or the Cho-ja, but to this whole world. Listen and heed me, for I come to you as a friend, and offer you escape.’
Pug spoke as well as he could, for nearly an hour, and tried to keep the concepts focused and plausible, for he knew there would be serious doubt that this was anything but some Tsurani ploy to lure the Thūn south to destruction. At the end he said, ‘I must leave, and I have only this to say. Send fast runners to your other villages and tell them of what I have spoken.
‘If you stay here you will perish in less than eight sunrises. But if you wish to live, go to the place on the plains where the seven fingers of rock rise up from the mountains to the south. There I will leave a magic doorway. Step through it and you will find yourself on a grassy plain, with lush trees and warm breezes.’
‘Why would a Tsurani for the Lasura do this?’ asked the old male. ‘Enemies are we, and always have been.’
Pug avoided explaining he was not Tsurani born – it was a needless complication – but said, ‘This land was your land before the Tsurani came, and I would make this much right: come to where the Tsurani flee, to the new world, and I will make a home for you. You will have the oath of the Emperor of the Tsurani, and this entire land I speak of will be yours alone. No Tsurani will trouble you, for it is across a vast sea and you will share it with no others. This is my bond as a Great One of the Empire, and so is the bond of the Tsurani Light of Heaven.
‘Heed my words, for I must leave now,’ he said, and then he willed himself back to the Assembly.
Alone in the room set aside for Miranda and himself when they resided with the Tsurani, Pug closed his eyes for a moment, hoping that the Thūn would listen. But he was almost certain they would not.
Miranda approached the hive entrance with an escort of Imperial Guards. Cho-ja hive workers scurried about the Acoma estates as they had for centuries. Miranda knew that there had been some kind of special relationship between the Emperor’s great-grandmother, Mara of the Acoma, and the hive queen and later the Cho-ja magicians in far-off Chakaha, the crystal-spired Cho-ja city far beyond the eastern border of the Empire. She did not know exactly what that relationship had been, but she understood that since then the Cho-ja had enjoyed the status of an autonomous people within the borders of the Empire.
At the entrance Miranda realized she had never been this close to a Cho-ja before. They were insects, as far as she was concerned, giant ants from her point of view, yet their upper torso rose like that of a human’s, with similar musculature in the chest, shoulders and arms. Their faces were like those of a mantis, with eyes that looked like faceted metal spheres, but in the place of mandibles, the Cho-ja had mouths that were very human-like. Their colour in the sun was an iridescent blue-green. ‘May we address your queen?’ asked Miranda.