by Mark Henwick
So I must give up?
Talan brings me a cup of tea. She’s not asking questions, but I can feel the worry radiating from her. I know I’ve gone quiet. Bleyd noticed too. That’s stupid of me. He can’t afford to be worrying about me while he’s knocking heads together down on the islands.
“Thanks,” I say and take a sip from the cup. It’s horrible. “Can you get an urgent message to the Golan?”
She blinks.
“Yeah. Might take a while to speak directly to Morgen, but she’d take my call.”
I raise an eyebrow at that, but leave it for now.
“Okay, this is what I’m proposing. As soon as Hwa gets here, we head back to the airfield and fly to Cardu. We go straight from the airfield down to meet the Golan, however late it is. If she can take Hwa and me from there to meet the piskatellers directly, we’ll do it.” I look sideways at Talan. “I’m assuming that involves going out to sea?”
Talan nods.
“Great. The Low Lady is down in the harbor. We’ll use her. Warn the harbor master. Organize something suitable for us to wear while we sailing. Then tomorrow, we’re flying back. We have Lady Howriel’s party to attend in the evening.”
At least the party isn’t in Bason. Lady Howriel lives in Portscatho, down on the Kensa coast. That saves us an hour of flying time.
Talan looks surprised at our new schedule, but takes out her pad and starts making calls immediately.
Gaude messages me. He’s delighted that Hwa and I will be able to attend Lady Howriel’s party. Should he arrange for a dressmaker with something suitable that can be quickly adjusted? To which hotel should the dressmaker go? What about a hairdresser? A shoemaker?
He thinks I’m staying in Bason.
I message back: I’ll be at Pyran Manor tomorrow. Arrange for someone after lunch. Keep it plain.
Which means that what with piskatellers, dressmakers, my daughters and minor matters like sleeping, I’ll have no time to check on the progress of rebuilding at Cardu or preparations for harvest.
That is something I already feel I’m going to lose. Gaude will step into the management role for the estate and the rebuilding. The question is, what will I replace it with? What can I do for Newyan, anchored as I am by my heart to my new life on Kernow? What will make a difference? How can I use my powerful position as Duchess Aguirre-Tremayne of Kernow?
My thoughts are interrupted—a message comes in from Hwa: Meet at airfield.
Talan and I run outside to get a car to take us.
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞
The airfield is busy, not only on the ground, but in the air as well. It’s not until we’re about forty minutes out and I sign off from Bason Air Traffic Control that Hwa and I speak.
She’s angry, with the sort of stillness of a furious cat.
I tell her as briefly as I can about what the Terran Navy is not doing. It doesn’t improve her temper, or mine.
“But there is something in Ivakin’s claims,” she says at one point. “The way the Hajnal takes over planets doesn’t ring true.”
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“Revolutions throughout human history follow set patterns, including warning signs and counter-revolutionary efforts. The spread of the Hajnal doesn’t follow those patterns,” Hwa replies. “It gives little warning on any world, and the increase in speed and power suggests each previous planet taken must be contributing to the next, even to its own disadvantage. That’s not a characteristic of individual revolutionaries so much as a campaign of conquest.”
“But the Hajnal’s come out of the Frontier worlds. There aren’t political entities in the Frontier big enough to do that.”
“You’re right. In fact, there’s nothing big enough in the Margin either.”
There’s a moment while I mull that over. “So... who’s directing the Hajnal?” I say. “For what purpose?”
“We don’t know.”
That we probably means the combined processing power of the Self-Actualized Entities of the Xian Hegemony don’t know. That’s... worrying.
Hwa gets me to go through again, step by step, what the Terrans said, to see if there’s a discrepancy between that and what’s been reported to her by the courier ship. Anything to give a clue to what’s going on behind the scenes.
For once not asleep in the back seats, Talan pitches in halfway through.
“I don’t get the big deal about Newyan applying to join the Inner Worlds,” she says. “It’s just a name, isn’t it?”
“No.” It’s Hwa who replies. “Margin worlds and the companies based on them can only operate through their delegations on Inner World planets. And those delegations are under strict rules of scrutiny by the Inner World governments. Margin worlds can’t directly own property or buy companies on Inner Worlds. But other Inner Worlds can. If the Hajnal get one planet inside the Inner World sphere, they have direct access to markets and ownership in all the Inner Worlds. That’s probably why they saw Kernow as such a prize; it’s already an Inner World. They hurried their plans and we defeated them here; now their plan has changed to getting that Inner World status for Newyan.”
There’s a pause while Talan digests that, then: “Okay. Forgive me asking, but what’s it to Xian?” she says.
The Xian Hegemony is on the other side of human space.
“Officially? Xian is immensely concerned with the disruption in trade. Our merchant fleet handle more than half of all trade between the Inner Worlds and the Margin, and almost all trade inside the Margin itself. We’ve found trade on all the Hajnal dominated planets falls. Commercially, we are already threatened by the Hajnal.”
“Unofficially?”
Hwa’s mouth is a tight line. “For some of us it’s also personal. It’s difficult to describe to you.”
Talan was there when the silvery ghost of Hwa’s pseudo-organic quantum state was downloaded from the Xian servers and into my brain. Talan knows it, but she can’t feel it. I know exactly why Hwa responds the way she does. Hwa is something between daughter and sister to me. What affects me, affects her in the same way, and that bone-deep empathy has passed on from Hwa to Shohwa, and through her, to a network of related Self-Actualized Entities.
It’s wonderful and frightening at the same time.
“Think of it as Shohwa and Hwa being part of my family,” I say to Talan. “And me being related to a dozen more ship captains of the Fortunate Stars Hong.”
The Fortunate Stars is the trading combine that commissioned the Shohwa and her sister ships. It’s the second largest of all the Xian Hegemony trading companies. Not every merchanter ship in the Fortunate Stars is captained by a Self-Actualized Entity, but enough of them are that the sense of personal involvement in Newyan and Kernow’s affairs has seeped from the hong into Xian governmental thinking, so Hwa tells me.
“Sort of ‘blood is thicker than water’?” Talan says, and I nod.
That’s good enough. She can’t understand how this relationship works for Self-Actualized Entities, but she can think of it as family and that makes sense to her.
We don’t reach any conclusions as the ocean gives way to the night-dark land mass of Murenys beneath us, and I start thinking about landing at Cardu. There are lights for the runway now and my navigation systems are guiding me in, so it’s not going to be a difficult landing.
We have a truck parked there. We’ll drive straight down to the harbor where Morgen Golan will be waiting on the Low Lady, despite it being the middle of the night.
Morgen. Stormhaven’s Sea Witch. The Voice on the Wind. The woman who speaks directly to the sea people.
Then we’ll sail out into the nighttime ocean and speak to them ourselves.
I shiver.
Not just at that; the conversation on the flight has left me restless and unhappy. There’s something Hwa’s not telling me.
But she lets slip one bit of information I didn’t anticipate.
I’d just said: “It’s almost as if the Hajnal is trying
to fight an interstellar war without declaring it.”
Hwa’s face was bleak in the glow from the instruments.
“Yes. It is exactly like an interstellar war. They’ve deployed mercenaries from a Frontier world on Newyan.”
Mercenaries on Newyan. The thought of that shocks me to my core. Hwa says she’s not ready to discuss it further and we fall silent for a long time.
Chapter 8
Kernow
We arrive at a deserted Cardu airfield. Given how tired I am, Talan drives the truck.
At the headland crossroads, the road splits—straight for Cardu, right for Stormhaven Wyck and the harbor, left for the bay.
Talan turns left.
“Hey?”
“Morgen brought the Low Lady around to the bay,” Talan says.
Minutes later, as we zig-zag down the switchback dirt track to the isolated bay, I can see the boat as a dark shape on a sea turned to rippled silver by the light of the moons. It’s riding to anchor beyond the surf.
“We’re going to have to swim out?”
Talan grins and nods.
Great. That will wake me up.
Talan parks where the track levels out just short of the beach. With the engine and headlights switched off, the horizon seems darker and wider.
There are three-quarter length wet suits in the back of the truck and we strip and change quickly. I’m shivering, as much in anticipation of what’s ahead as the chill.
The wind is offshore, and in fact, it’s cool but not really cold. It smells of late summer—dusty harvests and sweet berry hedges, ripe fruit and sun-dried hay bales. I try and block out the messages the wind is bringing me of autumn duties abandoned, and concentrate instead on tonight.
What will Morgen Golan be like?
Sea witch? Wizened old woman stirring a cauldron? That’s foolish, but she’s got to be something unusual. And just how do you become sea witch for a fishing village?
There are no lights on the Low Lady.
“She’s waiting on the boat?” I ask Talan.
She shakes her head, which is difficult because she’s making a braid of her hair.
Hwa points. “She’s not that crazy woman, is she?”
My eyes follow her gesture.
Out in the silvery sea, short of where the Low Lady waits, the waves make long, rolling shadows as wide as the bay and tall as the truck. When they’re not fishing or harvesting, Stormhaven folk come to the bay for swimming... and surfing.
And yes, there’s a crazy person out there, riding the midnight waves, wild hair sprayed out like a headdress behind her.
“Yup. That’s Morgen.” Talan is grinning again.
As well as apparently a serious addiction to surfing, Morgen has talent. It’s difficult to see her clearly while she rides in the curl of the wave, but just as it all starts to break, she crests it and pirouettes effortlessly, before letting the remaining swell float her gently toward the beach.
So exactly what kind of person becomes a sea witch? A surfer.
The woman hops into the water as the beach shelves up and carries her board to where Talan is trotting down to greet her.
They hug, laughing. Old friends. No wonder Talan was confident that Morgen would take her call.
She’s no old crone, but the sea witch is unusual. It’s difficult to be sure in moonlight, but I think her hair is red-gold and fine, a little like Rhoswyn’s. Thank the Goddess that Rhoswyn’s not here to see her, because Morgen’s solution to untamable hair is to braid it through sea shells. Her hair has a bouncy mass and it clicks as she moves. She’s wearing a wet suit like ours, but hers is decorated in patterns of dizzy swirls.
Talan introduces us. The sea witch is polite and speaks with the soft Arvish tones I expected.
It’s also difficult to see her eyes in the uncertain moonlight. Trying to peer at them without being rude, I get the strange feeling I’m looking into a star field, like it is with Hwa sometimes.
Morgen and Hwa greet each other with equal interest.
“I don’t want to give offence,” I say, looking out to sea, “but we’re expected back by the afternoon. I don’t know what this meeting entails.”
Morgen raises her head as if scenting the state of the sea. “Can’t say as being busy would offend them,” she replies. “Should be good on timing too: we’ll be running ’fore the wind both ways. Best be about it, though. We can talk more on the boat.”
She puts her board in the back of the truck and we swim out to the Low Lady, a long effort which tells me I’ve spent too much time sitting down in an office.
On board, there’s no time to rest. Anchors and sails need raising, and then we take turns drying ourselves while Morgen steers. There are some salty windbreakers in the cabin which the three of us put on, but Morgen doesn’t appear to feel the cold.
The first part of her prediction is correct—the wind is steady and we make about ten knots heading straight out. I’ll be interested if her prediction is right about the wind on the way back in.
“They don’t mind being called piskatellers,” Morgen says in answer to my question. “They don’t have names that we could easily use, but sea folk is as good as any, for them all together.”
“The one who saved us doesn’t have a name?” Hwa asks.
I forget, when I think of the piskatellers saving me, they actually saved both of us.
“No name or number.” Morgen sees our confusion and continues. “The sea folk aren’t what you’d call unitary beings. There is no ‘one’ who saved you.”
“I saw...” I begin.
But what I saw was the Lady of Sorrows. A projection, as oxygen starvation induced hallucinations in my brain.
“A kind of mirror of what’s in your mind,” Morgen fills in the silence. “They share your thoughts, take images from your mind, change them, send them back. That’s how they talk to us, mainly.”
I shiver again—nothing to do with the temperature.
“Our mind was a strange place when they saved us. Maybe that’s the reason they want to talk to us again,” Hwa says.
Very few people know what happened with Hwa; the way she was downloaded from the Xian delegation’s servers into my brain. The whole process and its similarity to the sort of mental invasion used by Jackers still terrifies me. I’d just about got used to having Hwa sharing my head, when Shohwa separated us. Now it seems the piskatellers want to go burrowing back into my brain.
I owe them for saving my life; otherwise I’d turn the boat back now.
Hwa and Morgen are still talking.
“It may be you’d want to think of them as shoals,” Morgen is saying. “Younger shoals merge and split and merge again with the seasons and the need of the Tellings. But the old shoals keep their cores, even as they take and give parts of themselves, they keep what land folk would say was their identity. The blue water shoals are people like you or me. The Great Old Ones out in the deep...” She shrugs.
I heard the weight of the word as she said it. “Tellings?”
“The sea folk have a need to speak.” She grimaces. “All rivers flow down to the sea. The weight of water cannot be borne. It must be released back to feed the land.”
Her phrases have the cadence of a recitation. She shrugs again. “That’s how they describe it.”
“I don’t understand,” Hwa says.
“Everything that happens in or near the oceans, everyone who visits the sea folk, all tell them their tales, big or small. These tales pass among the sea folk, mingle and merge with other tales, grow or shrink. Then they have to tell them back. It’s what makes the sea folk what they are.”
Talan had been silent so far. Now she speaks: “I always thought of them like the weather monitoring system. After all, that’s one of the things they do for us. The lesser shoals all over the oceans sense the changes, and pass the information to the Old Ones who use it to predict the weather and pass on warnings back to us. Like our satellites and weather monitoring stations pass inf
ormation to the central computers to produce the forecasts they send to us.”
Except the piskatellers are much better at it. They’re like massive organic super-computers, Self-Actualized Entities, filling the Kernow oceans and comprised of...
“Hold on a moment,” I say as that thought catches up. “Shoals? Like fish? Don’t we...”
“Yes, we eat the individuals, which doesn’t harm the shoal. The sea folk and the land folk who know honor each other in this way.”
I shudder. Goddess, that sounds so strange. I’m not even sure whether I’ll be able to eat fish pie again. And we honor them? I’d heard burials at sea are popular on the coast...
“But you two,” Morgen is saying, “you’ve brought them tales from far away. The sea folk will be hungry for more.”
Another shudder. Hungry mouths in the water. What have I let myself in for?
“That, and I guess they may have something to say back to you—”
She stops, startled by a loud banging noise. It’s coming from below us.
Chapter 9
Newyan
Kattalin jerks awake and immediately freezes in position, heart racing.
No one can see me.
She’s lying under a camo-net, which is itself hidden under a leafy branch. She looks and breathes through a filter of twigs and leaves. She’s as invisible as she can make herself in the electromagnetic spectrum from IR through to UV. She has no electronic equipment switched on. The plasma rifle ran out of charge a long way back and she buried it. She’s emitting nothing but breath and heartbeat. And smell, no doubt.
A saying from a truly ancient holovid, older than presence of humans on this planet, drifts through her mind.
It is said a Shaolin priestess can walk through walls. Looked for, she cannot be seen. Listened for, she cannot be heard. Touched, she cannot be felt.
She snorts quietly and wonders whether those priestesses ever had to hide from dogs. Dogs are what she’s really worried about now.
The Syndacians have seekers—detecting instruments which are almost as good as dogs—but Ohana had been right; they weren’t really interested in chasing her into the mountains.