Nightmare journey

trundling the stuff away to licensed garbage dumps.
    “Why do they bother to clean up this one thing?” Jask asked, fascinated by the noisy trio. “Why worry over a single pile of stones in the midst of disaster?”
    “Who can say?” Tedesco asked, shifting the weight of the rucksack on his broad back. He wiped sweat out of his eyes and sighed deeply. “They're still clanking around, guided by the orders of men long dead, as alien to this demolished city as we are. Who can say what they mean or what they expect?”
    “If these machines survive,” Jask said, “perhaps others survive, in better condition-perhaps enough of them to risk dissecting a few to see how they're constructed.”
    “Perhaps,” Tedesco said. “But we haven't the time to linger and find out. Come along, we must get moving again.”
    The robots kept at their work.
    One limped.
    One slapped at the air.
    One stumbled blindly.
    Wearily Jask hefted his gray cloth sack full of supplies, slung it over his back as the bruin had taught him to do, and followed in the dusty steps of the quasi-man, now and again turning to look back at the rattling, banging, merry crew of workers until they were no longer visible and the sounds of their mindless labor had been swallowed up by warm air, sunshine and the sound of their own footsteps.
    As they walked through the last of the antediluvian metropolis, the thrusting green heads of trees now visible as the forest neared, Jask wondered, for the first time, how strange and unacceptable the Wildlands must be. If here, so close to the white cliff and the fortress, lay ten thousand unfathomable mysteries, what even more inexplicable and awful things lay in the Chen Valley Blight and beyond? Here, according to the theology he had been taught, Nature at least maintained some grasp on the land, held out however minimally against the Ruiner. What madness had been perpetrated in lands where Lady Nature had no control at all, in the wild places?
    They walked in a place where the ruins were far less momentous than they had been, scaled down by wind and rain and made the home of silent, quick-footed animals that watched the two espers but were not seen.
    They walked on a cracked road where the vines, scrub and trees had nearly covered the gentle mounds of powdered stone.
    They walked, at last, in the full depths of the forest where no signs of man lay upon the earth.
    Aware that the Wildlands were close at hand, Jask grew increasingly miserable until, finally, he knew that he would soon have to take out his knife and use it on himself. Even that sinful act was preferable to entering a place where Lady Nature exerted no power and could offer her creatures no blessings whatsoever.
    9
    MERKA SHANLY-female, Pure and badly frightened but determined not to show it-was hauled out of the drain in the basement of the village inn by two of the younger and stronger Pure soldiers, who, despite their size, were very nearly dragged into the muck with her. She was filthy, soaked through with stagnant water and her own perspiration, her dark hair hanging in unlovely clumps across her narrow shoulders. She had dropped her cloak in the flight back from the place where Kane Grayson had died, and she had not bothered to pause and locate it. She wore only the one-piece, toe-to- neck stretch suit that was standard for all Pures beneath their cloaks, and despite her condition, she was not unaware that it accentuated her attractive figure.
    “I must see the General,'' she told the two who had pulled her from the tunnel. “I have extremely important news.”
    She was conducted out of the inn and down the main street, an altogether unusual spectacle, trailing water and strings of moss behind her, brushing her sticky, matted hair away from her left ear. She was the center of attention for the spiraling, mutated flies as well as for the Pures and tainteds who watched from the street and from behind curtained windows.
    “I think you had best stand off a bit,” the General said when Merka was brought into his company.
    So she stood alone just outside the shade thrown by the massive oak, stinking even more intolerably for the effect of the relentless heat of the sun.
    “Your name is-”
    “Merka Shanly, Your Excellency. And I have vital news.”
    “You destroyed the espers?”
    She bowed her head a second in contrition, but raised it almost instantly, not about to be subdued. “We encountered them, sir. Kane Grayson was murdered by the creature that looks like a bear,