The Gem Lords

The False Cleric - Part 4

It took eight hours, but finally Strong was able to relax, secure in the knowledge that everyone in his crew was exactly what he or she appeared to be. There was no clay man. That left the question of why a wizard had made such a claim, but he was content to leave that in Major Hort's hands. If it had been a diversion, something to occupy his attention for a while and keep him out of the way, then it was his problem to deal with. It was nothing that affected the ship. He put the matter out of his head, therefore, and turned his attention back to the final approach to the planet.

Only Daleen herself had any idea what it had all been about. Or rather, not Daleen herself but the being whose mentality had been hiding in her holy symbol; the marble egg. Lapis Lazuli had teleported up to Kronos while the Jules Verne's crew had still been housed there, before they'd teleported up to the ship of space for its passage through the portal. She'd arranged a meeting with the cleric, under the pretext of suffering a crisis of faith and needing prayer and counseling, and Daleen had been all too willing to meet with the blonde, blue eyed woman in the rooms she'd taken in Kronosia, the moon city.

Lapis Lazuli had offered the cleric a cup of tea into which she'd slipped a slow acting sedative, and had then talked for hours and hours, pouring out a seemingly endless stream of problems until the cleric slowly slipped into unconsciousness. When she'd woken up, she thought she'd simply fallen asleep in her chair and that Brenda, the name the other woman had taken for herself, had left her stretched out on the sofa before going off somewhere. She hadn't dreamed of poking around in the woman's home, of committing such a flagrant breach of privacy, and so she hadn't found the gem rak's seemingly lifeless body lying on the bed in the next room (Lapis Lazuli had locked the door just in case, though. She believed in leaving nothing to chance).

The cleric certainly never dreamed that Brenda had replaced her holy symbol with the ark to which her soul was inseparably attached, now disguised as the marble egg, and when she'd teleported aboard the Jules Verne, Lapis Lazuli's soul had gone with her, contained within the ark. So long as it was in direct contact with the cleric's flesh the ark rak could enter and possess Daleen's living body any time she pleased, returning to her ark again if discovery threatened, as had happened just now.

The clay man warning had come from Lord Ruby, of course. Her absence from the Realms had been noticed, sooner than she'd expected, and they'd guessed her intentions. The clay man warning had been a feeble attempt to warn Strong that he had an intruder aboard. The Gem Lord couldn't simply tell the truth, because it was so fantastic that it would have been dismissed out of hand, but the clay man story was believable and had forced a wizard to read Daleen's mind, which would have revealed the truth if it had been as simple as Lord Ruby believed. The Gem Lord thought Lapis Lazuli had simply taken a body identical to that of the cleric, in which case she would indeed have been discovered.

Lord Ruby had never accepted that she surpassed him in bodyswapping no matter how many times she'd demonstrated it over the centuries, and she'd never revealed her ability to insert her soul into a body that was already occupied by a soul of its own. That was her secret, her ace in the hole, and it had worked splendidly. All she had to do now was lie low for a while until the fuss had died down, and then she could carry on where she'd left off. The shae bitch would die in a terrible 'accident' and Tak Eweela would be hers once more, as he had always been meant to be...

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At around the same time that the Jules Verne was being searched for a nonexistent clay man, the magical fields powering the ship were deactivated and the Jules Verne coasted along at a constant velocity. Then, the shae folk tending the Orb of Propulsion gave it the instructions to turn the ship about, to face back the way it had come. A man lying on his back on top of the almost spherical vessel, watching the tiny yellow sun hanging directly above him, would have seen it slowly slipping away to one side as the starfield revolved around him until it came to a stop directly under the ship, and then the Jules Verne began accelerating again, but this time in the opposite direction. Slowing it down. Those who were plotting the ship's course had calculated that this would bring the ship to a halt about a hundred million miles away from the star, about the distance where they expected to find the planet, and then the search would begin. Searching star after star through their magnifying devices until they found one that appeared as a visible disk, hopefully with oceans and continents. Then the ship would turn again, targeting itself on that world, and would begin to accelerate again, closing on its target.

The eight days which the Jules Verne needed to travel to the inner part of this solar system were dull ones for Thomas Gown. Until they actually arrived and made contact with the Shipbuilders, he had nothing to do and so was spending most of his time either with the other junior wizards in the lounge, trying to think of something new to talk about, or in his own cabin, idly leafing through one or another of the books he'd brought with him. He was reading one such book, a history of the fell men written by a Nyundian scribe whose country had been fighting them on and off for a thousand years, when there came a firm knocking on the door. He carefully put down the book, marking the place with a short length of red silken ribbon, and rose from the cot that took up more than half the available space, bumping his knees against the small writing table as he made his way to the door and opened it.

He was surprised to see Daleen Verdantia standing there, smiling at him. They'd spoken now and then since the ship passed through the portal, in the chapel after one of her infrequent sermons or when passing each other in the corridor, but she'd never sought him out like this before.

Thomas had long since decided that he liked the pretty cleric, and by a coincidence his mind had turned towards her earlier that same day, wondering why he hadn't met with her more often. No doubt she was as bored as he was with the long journey from the portal to the Shipbuilder world. They could have been enjoying each other's company, getting to know each other, instead of each of them sitting alone in their own cabins. It wasn't too late, though. They still had days to go before they reached the inner solar system. Perhaps the two of them could meet up in the common room with Lenny and a few of his other friends. He had the feeling that, if he could get her together with Lirenna they'd get on well together and be best friends in no time.

The woman standing outside the door was so different from the quiet, unassuming woman he'd come to know, though, that it took him a moment or two to realise that it was the same person. She was still wearing the same white robes she always wore, the simple garment that was almost the uniform of the faith of Ramthara, and she still had the polished white marble egg on its chain around her neck, but the woman inside was transformed. Her hair, which normally hung straight down her back to her waist, now crowned her head in a golden halo, shining as it reflected the ship's lighting and bouncing lightly on her shoulders, styled and dressed as if by an expert.

She stared at him directly, with none of the self-conscious downward glances that so characterised her, and her eyes fixed on his with an intensity that he found disconcerting. He found himself checking the room behind him and the corridor behind her for any sign of his wife, who might well misinterpret such a direct gaze, or at least he hoped she would be misinterpreting it. It was the same look he'd received many times from Tassley Kimber who'd made no secret of her interest in him.

This woman standing in front of him was so different was from the Daleen Verdantia he thought he knew that for a moment he wondered whether it was, in fact, Tassley, wearing the cleric's clothes for some kind of joke. Although there was a superficial physical resemblance between the two women, though, he quickly saw that it was indeed the cleric, standing proudly erect. Her chest pushed out to draw attention to the figure that, although everything a man could want in a woman, he'd never noticed before. In fact, she'd even loosened her robes so that they parted a little below the neck, showing an inch or two of cleavage.

"Er, Daleen?" he asked uncertainly. "This is a surprise." He had never spoken a truer word.