Warlock

track, moving toward areas where pieces of the Blank survived.
        
        Later, they saw the shell of a smashed aircraft, a mammoth thing, circular as the small patrol planes were, but a hundred times as large. There were holes torn in the hull, and the light glinted off strange things concealed in the shadows inside. At the Shaker's insistence, he was permitted to light a torch and enter. Mace went with him, as did Gregor, though no one else felt up to it. Within the damaged structure, they found a great deal of fungus clinging to the walls and to the shapes of what had once been seats. By counting the metal frames of the seats in an unobscured row, they estimated that the plane had carried some nine hundred passengers. They were staggered by such a discovery, but the proof was indisputable.
        
        There were two skeletons in the passenger's cabin, one of them intertwined with ugly, cancerous fungus that shivered whenever one of the three came close to it. The other skeleton's skull was bashed in, the cause of death obvious. Most of the other passengers had apparently escaped.
        
        In the control room, which was every bit as large as the entire downstairs of the Shaker's house in Perdune, they found the skeletons of fourteen men. None of the crew, it seemed, had lasted through the grinding impact of the crash. Here, the walls had been stoved in, punctured by rock formations. The nose had been crumbled backward, and the floor had been driven up perilously close to the ceiling near the left-hand wall. Some of the crew had been crushed, others had been decapitated by exploding sheets of pressed hull metal. Some were flung about the chamber in an almost gay disarray, while others remained seated, strapped to the pilot chairs before their instrument clusters, the flesh gone but the spirit apparently still willing.
        
        They left the craft no wiser than they had entered it, though their respect for the civilizations of the past was immense. There had been relics in their home lands, beyond the mountains, of course, though nothing so fantastic as this. Some said the Darklands and Oragonia had been swept clean of most of what had been there, swept clean by mammoth tidal waves that towered hundreds of feet into the air and crashed across the land with the power of the gods, obliterating history. Since the fossils of sea creatures could often be found a hundred miles inland and even further, such theories were highly regarded.
        
        Farther on, they found the wrecked tangle of what might have been several ground vehicles, though rust and corrosion had destroyed the mass too much for any guess to be accurate.
        
        For a time, the struggling masses of metal and shattered stone-and unidentifiable plastic casings-grew larger and more distinct, until the party walked between walls of litter, down streets of rubble and debris which seemed to sprout of the earth like weeds.
        
        Abruptly, all of this terminated in a crater more than a mile across. The floor of the depression was a smooth, black glass which was drifted over in most parts with windblown dirt and clumps of dried grass and weeds. Some tremendous heat seemed to have fused the very soil into a hard, glittering, bubbled surface which rang hollowly under their booted feet.
        
        By evening of that fourth day, they had crossed the crater, walked through more rubble and senseless ruin, and had reached open fields again. This place seemed to have once been cultivated, for there were remnants of stone-bottomed irrigation ditches, and the rusted tubes of what might have been irrigating equipment of some complex design. All that grew here was a tall, bamboo-like reed which soared twelve feet into the air. The stuff grew as thickly as normal grass, and it presented an almost impenetrable wall. The ground beneath it, as the Shaker attested, was warmed like the ground beneath the jungle had been, though this did not seem much like an amusement park so much as a crop.
        
        “But what would they want with such stuff to go to this expense?” Richter asked.
        
        “Who knows. But it must have been precious. To a man who has never seen gold, it might seem valueless too.”
        
        “Well, if it lies in our path,” Richter said, “I'll welcome it. We must be nearing our goal, and I want to be certain we have cover for the last leg of the