“Sometimes you’re so clever you make me sick, Zelana,” he said sourly.

“He’s brighter than I thought he was,” Veltan told his sisters. “If we awaken the others before the end of our cycle, we can raise them as if they were our children and prepare them for anything that might happen after we’ve gone to our rest.”

“And then we can return the favor at the end of their cycle,” Zelana added. “I get to mother Eleria this time, and then she mothers me next time.”

“It sounds fair to me,” Veltan said. Then he paused. “We’ve been strangers to the others for far too long, I think. We all have the same responsibilities, so a bit of cooperation might be in order. I’m still not too happy that you didn’t tell the rest of us what you had in mind, Dahlaine, but we can set that aside for now. What’s next?”

“First off,” Zelana said, “I don’t think we want to get too specific about what’s happening when we’re speaking with our Dreamers. They’re still children, and children are impressionable, no matter what their species. We don’t want to contaminate their dreams by explaining what these dreams really mean. As long as they believe that their dreams are just flights of fancy, they won’t become too upset by any horrors that crop up. Then, too, if they realize what they can actually do with their dreams, they might try to tamper with them at the deepest level of their awareness, and that raises the possibility of total disasters. At that point, Mother Sea might decide to exile all eight of us to the moon—not just Veltan.”

“You’re probably right, Zelana,” Dahlaine agreed. “Let’s keep the dreams as pure as we possibly can.” He scratched at his chin speculatively. “We’ve got a problem now,” he said. “I’m almost positive that the Vlagh can sense these dreams—not the details, maybe, but the fact that the Dreamers are here and doing what they were sent here to do will certainly stir it to send the creatures of the Wasteland swarming across the mountains, and we don’t have enough people to meet them. I seriously doubt that there are even a half-million man-things in the whole of the Land of Dhrall, and the Vlagh probably has at least ten times that many servants. The servants of the Vlagh aren’t very bright, but the sheer numbers alone put us in an impossible situation. I think we’ll have to bring in the outlanders from other parts of the world.

“Absolutely out of the question!” Aracia exclaimed. “Our people are pure and innocent. The outsiders are barbaric monsters. They’re almost as bad as the creatures of the Wasteland.”

“Not quite, Aracia,” Dahlaine disagreed. “We can manipulate them if we need to. The only problem I can see is linguistic. The outsiders don’t speak the same language our people speak.”

“That’s not really a problem, Dahlaine,” Veltan told him. “I’ve looked in on several of the outsider cultures. Their babbling didn’t make any sense at first, but I found a way to get around that.”

“Oh?” Dahlaine said. “I’d like to hear about that.”

“All you really have to do is step around language and go right straight to thought.”

“He has a point, Dahlaine,” Zelana said. “It didn’t take me much more than a week to learn the language of my dolphins. If you listen with your mind instead of your ears, it comes very fast.”

“Interesting notion,” Dahlaine mused. “Unfortunately, I don’t think people could do that.”

Veltan shrugged. “I’ll do it for them, then.”

“Would you like to clarify that, Veltan?” Aracia asked.

“It’s a little complicated, dear sister,” he replied. “Are you really sure you want all the details?”

Aracia shuddered. “Spare me that, please. Just tell me what the results are likely to be.”

“The outlanders will babble in their own language, and our people will babble in ours. Neither group will hear babbles, though. They’ll think that they’re listening to their own language, so they’ll understand each other perfectly.”

“Would it work that way between different groups of outsiders as well?” Dahlaine asked. “We’ll probably be bringing in several different cultures.”

“No problem,” Veltan said. “We’ll have to decide how far out we want to take it, is about all. We might want to limit it to the Land of Dhrall, though. The outlanders all speak different languages, and maybe we should keep it that way. If they can communicate with each other, they might start forging alliances, and that could cause trouble on down the line.”

“You may have a point there,” Dahlaine conceded. “Let’s try it and see how it works.”

“I’m against the whole silly notion!” Aracia said adamantly. “We can’t bring those murdering barbarians here to the sacred land!”

“How sacred do you think it’ll be after the unholy monsters of the Wasteland sweep over the mountains?” Dahlaine asked her pointedly. “The outsiders are a little crude, I’ll admit that, but they are mostly warriors. Our people haven’t even discovered iron yet, so they’re still using stone tools. The people of the outside world have no idea of the significance of Dhrall, but they do know how to fight. They spend most of their time practicing on each other. I think maybe we’d all better visit those outlands and find those various warrior people. There are several tricks we can use to get them here to Dhrall, and once they’re here, we can wave gold in their faces to get their interest.”

“Gold isn’t really very useful, Dahlaine,” Veltan objected. “It’s sort of pretty, but it’s too soft for any practical uses. It’s much like lead, when you get right down to it.”

“The outlanders seem to like it, and if they hear about mountains of gold in the Wastelands of the interior, we won’t be able to drive them away with whips. I don’t think we’ve got much choice. Our people are too unskilled to face the armies of the Vlagh. We need large numbers of what Aracia calls howling barbarians, and we need them in a hurry. Let’s go to the outer world and find warriors. It’s the only way we have to save Dhrall from the forces of the Vlagh.”

4

Zelana rode the wind westward from the coast of Dhrall for many, many leagues across Mother Sea. She knew that there was land far to the west—at least there had been before she’d gone to live in her grotto hideaway on the Isle of Thurn. Perhaps it had wandered off again.