Northlight

by Wheeler, Deborah

  Orelia raised one eyebrow as if to say, You think it could be otherwise?

  “Initial appearances are often misleading,” Esmelda went on. “Someone with your experience knows better than anyone how the truth can turn out to be something quite different.”

  “I suppose there might be other possibilities...”

  “The fact is,” Esmelda said, “we have a single assassin, a dagger of apparent norther design — and nothing else.”

  “Who else could be responsible?” Cherida sounded genuinely puzzled.

  “There’s no way we can keep the dagger secret,” Montborne said. “Besides, the people are going to draw their own conclusions. They aren’t stupid. They all know what the northers can do. If we’re too cautious in what we tell them, they’ll think we’re lying or covering up something worse.”

  “Most people will indeed think whatever they want to,” Esmelda said, ignoring his oblique barb. “If they want to see a norther conspiracy, then the truth won’t stop them.” She jabbed one index finger at the cheap gray wood in front of her. “Maybe the northers are responsible. But maybe they’re not. Maybe somebody would like us to believe they are.”

  For a long moment, no one said anything. Then one of Orelia’s junior officers brought the residue specimen for Cherida.

  “Who else would want Pateros dead?” Cherida asked again.

  “To begin with, the Archipelago chieftains, the Cathyne merchant cartel, a madman,” Esmelda said. “Even a leader who’s loved has enemies.”

  Chapter 6

  Outside the City Guards building, people went about their business unsmiling, voices subdued. The overcast sky hung above their heads like a dingy pearl. False-peach trees stood like sentinels along the street, their scentless blossoms stirred only by the lace-winged pollen flies. Terricel shivered, remembering the smothering perfumed walls of his vision.

  “I’ve got meetings all morning,” Esmelda said in the voice that meant her thoughts were three steps ahead of her words and she resented having to pause long enough to catch up. “I want you in the Archives, finding out how all the past electoral colleges were constituted, the problems they ran up against, and how they ruled on them. Look for precedents on how the separation of powers was handled. Anything that constituted a de facto regency. Whether the candidates were drawn from the Inner Council or collateral branches of the current dynasty. Any instance when a candidacy, even a pro tem, was rejected on the basis of conflict of interest with the military chain of command.”

  Terricel ran his fingers over his jaw thoughtfully. “Wouldn’t Karlen be the one to consult about that?”

  “Karlen’s expertise is in present-day law, and besides he has his hands full. You’ll have four, maybe five hundred years of records to search.”

  Terricel had done enough of that type of research to know what was involved, the intense concentration, the meticulous attention to detail. He slowed his steps, mentally juggling the hours he would need for his proposal presentation, as well as his other academic commitments.

  “I’ll have to work around my schedule for this next week — ”

  “Cancel the schedule!” Esmelda snapped. “If this were trivial, I could just as well have one of my Senate pages do it. Very few have the training to know where to look and even more important, to understand the implications of what he finds.”

  She paused and turned back to him, her shoulders hunching slightly. “Terr, I need someone I can trust for this.”

  Terricel clamped down any further protest. “I’ll take care of it. It’s just this week that’s the problem, anyway, and Wittnower can get someone else to handle my tutoring. Do you want a daily report or only when I’ve found something important?”

  “I knew you wouldn’t fail me.” She touched his hand and he was surprised, as he always was, by how warm her skin was. He always expected her to be cold, like a house snake.

  “Things may get hectic for both of us,” she continued in her usual brisk tone. “If I don’t see you at dinner, leave your notes on the library desk. Every day, even if you have nothing for me.”

  o0o

  Terricel found Wittnower, his History mentor, in the sunlit lounge that served the faculty and master’s candidates of the Humanities school. Terricel hadn’t been on campus since the assassination, and he found the atmosphere here still and dense, difficult to breathe, as if the entire University had been placed under a bell jar. They sat together in a pair of oversoft armchairs wedged in a corner. Terricel refused the usual honeyed tisane, but his mentor drank cup after cup.

  “This comes as no surprise, given recent events and your mother’s position,” Wittnower said. The oblique light gleamed on his pale scalp, giving it a sheen like marble. “Don’t worry about the tutoring schedule. I’ll shift that around and cancel the proposal presentation as well.”

  “No!” Terricel’s voice rose above the hush of the room. “No,” he repeated more quietly, “I intend to keep that.” On his way to the University, he’d figured it all out. Once he’d gotten the approval, he didn’t have to start on the project right away. He could put it aside until things settled down. Like the Starhall itself, it would still be there to come back to.

  Wittnower’s eyes, bright beneath shaggy brows, fixed on Terricel’s. “I said before and I’ll say again, you’re asking for trouble. If you take my advice, you’ll use this break to reconsider, find something else you’re interested in, something that has a decent chance of approval. There are plenty of other worthwhile topics you can choose from. Your term paper on the norther raids during Worrell’s time, for instance.”

  “We went through all that last year,” Terricel said. “I don’t want to rehash what’s already been studied half to death. I want to do something new, something important. And you didn’t say it couldn’t be done. You said that with a tight enough argument, the committee couldn’t find a reason to say no. You said you’d support my decision.”

  “That I did, and I’ll stand by it. But it’s a fool’s chase, and we both know it.” Wittnower leaned forward, gesturing with one hand. “If it were anything else, the committee would make allowances. After all, these are hardly normal times. But this — why does it have to be this topic?”

  “Because it’s what I need to — want to do. Because I want my dissertation to make a difference.”

  Terricel had trusted his mentor enough to tell him that he intended to dig beneath the Starhall and solve the old debate, put the legends to rest. But he didn’t trust Wittnower enough to tell him why.

  Now, for a fleeting moment, he remembered that night, so many years ago, when he’d sneaked into the Starhall alone. He was eleven, Aviyya had been gone two years, and his mother had started bringing him to meetings of the Inner Council, amid greetings of, “So you’re Esmelda’s son, are you? We expect great things of you, lad!”

  At the time, he couldn’t understand why he felt so dizzy inside the hall and yet well again as soon as he left, but it hadn’t taken him long to see that no one else had the same reaction.

  The Councillors teased him about being sick enough to throw up whenever he passed the great bronzewood doors. “He’s such a sensitive, impressionable youngster,” they said, laughing. “The excitement is too much for him.” They did not add, although he could feel them thinking it, Not to mention having to live up to being Esmelda’s son.

  “There’s no need to be ashamed of a little human weakness, lad,” they said. “You’ll get used to it in time, ha ha!”

  Pateros had taken Terricel aside and laid a hand on his shoulder. “Sometimes these things aren’t meant personally. You have to use a different perspective, take the whole picture into consideration. They may be trying to use you to get at your mother, but you’re stronger than that.”

  Terricel had lifted his chin and blinked the unshed, furious tears from his eyes. “They think I’m a crybaby.”

  “The same sort of thing happened to me when I was your age,” Pateros went on in that casual to
ne that made Terricel feel so grown up. “People were always comparing me to my father or talking about what kind of Guardian I would make when I grew up. I survived, and you have the courage to do it, too. But remember that no matter what they say, all those important people, you have to follow your own dreams and make your own choices. Don’t let anyone else do that for you.”

  Terricel had never forgotten what Pateros had said, never given up fighting the thing beneath the Starhall. All he lacked was a convincing reason to get the permission for the excavations.

  How could Wittnower or anyone else from the University, living as they did in Esmelda’s shadow, understand?

  An ache pulsed through Terricel’s chest, as if something had torn inside him. Pateros, he thought numbly, would have understood.

  “Have it your own way, then.” Wittnower said, shaking his head, perhaps misinterpreting Terricel’s silence for continued obstinacy. “I’ve warned you, but I won’t stop you. But there’s a limit on what I can do to rescue you from your own folly.”

  o0o

  After leaving Wittnower, Terricel went to gather his supplies from the suite of study cubicles he shared with the other History candidates. The friends who greeted him seemed distant and preoccupied as they went about their business. Seeing him with notebook and pens, they probably thought he was doing the same. Then, suitably armed, he passed through the Library and into the velvet quiet of the Archives. The light in the back rooms had a curious pastel quality, a sense of suspension, as if the same dust motes had hung in the air for centuries and never drifted to rest. The reference assistant on duty assigned him a carrel and issued him an access permit to the closed stacks and historical materials.

  Time slipped by, hours and then days. Terricel sketched out a chronology and methodically worked his way backward, looking for periods of political upheaval when the succession of the Guardianship might have been subject to debate.

  There wasn’t much of interest until the Jeravian dynasty, three hundred years ago. Terricel had studied the era, but from a different perspective. The flurry of norther raids had been used as a warning of the necessity of continual vigilance. But now, as Terricel worked his way through the actual records, words and deeds leapt off the pages to vivid life. He could almost hear the speeches, the bitter accusations and counter-accusations, hear the clash and smell the dust and blood of battle, look over the shoulders of people scheming for power, struggling among themselves as well as with the northers.

  One Jeravian, nephew to the suddenly-deceased incumbent, had stepped in during the emergency and later become Guardian. The legal maneuvering was complicated, stemming from his having previously acted as de facto Guardian during his predecessor’s illness and therefore he wasn’t considered pro tem the second time. He appeared to have been confirmed by the leadership of the gaea-priesthood without the convocation of an elector’s college. A precedent from several hundred years earlier was cited. Terricel had never heard of such a procedure. He decided this was a lead worth following up.

  At first, the senior archivist refused to allow Terricel access to the most ancient documents. Normally, the archivist insisted, these areas were off-limits to even senior scholars, their contents too fragile for ordinary research. They were not available for casual browsing. In the end, it took a written request from Esmelda to get an exemption to this policy.

  The next morning, wearing a mask and cloth gloves, Terricel entered the temperature-controlled chamber. Journals and log-books, each wrapped in specially-treated paper, sat in individual cubbies on the ranges of shelves. Terricel took them down, one by one, and began examining them. Some had been reprinted or copied over from earlier works, but many others were original, on parchment or elkhide vellum.

  As Terricel went on, deeper into the past, the language became archaic and convoluted, the handwritten cursive more difficult to decipher. He felt as if he were entering a secret, vanished world. Whenever he saw a mention of the Starhall, he read more carefully. These records came from a time when the entire Senate, not just the Inner Council, met in the Starhall’s central chamber. The people of those days must have seen the Starhall in a different light, held different beliefs about its origin. Perhaps they knew things that had since been forgotten or relegated to folklore. Perhaps someone then had even tried to find the hidden starship or whatever lay beneath the Starhall.

  A twinge of resentment curled through Terricel as he realized that he would normally never have access to these records. He wouldn’t have even known they existed. He set aside the notebook filled with political notations and began a new one.

  Late in the afternoon, he came across a section at the back of the archival chamber, a set of leather-bound volumes, very old even by the standards of the other materials. Terricel found that by working slowly and consulting his dictionaries, he could decipher much of the script. They appeared to be the diaries of some important official, although whether a Guardian or a gaea-priest wasn’t clear. The writer or writers often referred to the priesthood and the Guardianship as if they were the same thing.

  “The Guardian, though he be of the priesthood and sealed to its mysteries, must yet speak to and for the people. He must be Protector as well as Gatekeeper. Therefore, as the power of knowledge and the light of dedication passes through the Three in the fullness of time, the Guardian may arise from any One, according to his merits and the requirement of the day...”

  Protector as well as Gatekeeper? Gatekeeper? Was this an indication that the Starhall object, assuming there was one, was indeed some kind of physical gate? Or was it merely a metaphorical allusion to the gateway of knowledge?

  Terricel read on, hungry for more details, but very little of the rest was understandable. It seemed to be in code, marked by a familiar symbol: the dotted double circle. Perhaps Esmelda knew what they meant. He’d ask her when he turned in the rest of his findings.

  Terricel copied down the most intriguing excerpts from the coded logs. As he did so, he noticed the archivist hovering just inside the door and wondered how long he’d been there. Terricel stood up and stretched, his spine crackling. He stripped off the mask and gloves and handed them to the archivist.

  Notebooks in hand, he made his way back to the open stacks, where once more he immersed himself in more recent history. This time he didn’t resent the work. At first, he had feared that doing this research for Esmelda would take time away from his thesis proposal. He never imagined he might find such tantalizing clues, clues that might well lead to an even more momentous discovery. All he needed now was the time to delve deeper.

  Chapter 7

  “Terricel? Terricel sen’Laurea?” came a soft female voice behind his left shoulder. He looked up from the volume he’d been combing, line by line. As his thoughts struggled free from the intricacies of Senatorial debate over the status of an illegitimate minor heir, he felt amazed that anyone had known where to find him here.

  The voice that had shattered his concentration belonged to a young woman dressed in a red and bronze uniform. No, he corrected himself as he took a closer look at what lay below the piles of brassy curls, she was still more girl than woman, fourteen or fifteen at most, despite the curves under her fitted tunic.

  “Terricel?”

  “I don’t know you, do I?” he said, thinking he might have seen her in the junior classes. He didn’t think he’d tutored her. Surely he would have remembered that impossibly bright hair.

  “I have been instructed to bring you with me.”

  “I’m busy,” he said, irritated by her officious tone. “As you can see. What’s it about?”

  “I’m not supposed to tell you, I’m supposed to bring you.”

  Terricel relented. This must have something to do with Esmelda, a message to be passed on personally to her that was too sensitive or urgent to be entrusted to the mail.

  “What’s the uniform?” he inquired as he gathered up his notes and placed the volume he’d been using on the reshelving cart.

&
nbsp; “We’re called the Pateros Brigade. In honor of him.”

  Terricel frowned. On the day of the assassination, he’d overheard snatches of a conversation between Esmelda and Montborne regarding a paramilitary unit for young people — to keep them off the streets or something like that. Esmelda hadn’t thought much of the idea. It was right before that man in the crowd had started shouting — the man Orelia’s people still hadn’t found — and that was right before...

  ...Pateros’s face, the mouth fallen open, the hazel eyes wide and blank...red blood soaking the green robes and spilling on to the pavement...

  Terricel winced at the brightness as they stepped on to the shallow steps outside the Library. His temples throbbed. An invisible clamp settled around his skull and tightened with each pulsebeat. It had probably been building for hours, but he hadn’t noticed until now.

  “General Montborne, he believes in us,” the girl said. “He’s willing to give us a chance. Not like my parents, they think my friends are nothing but trouble. They think all we care about are parties. But Laurea means as much to us as to them. More, because we’re Laurea’s future.”

  Terricel smiled at her speech.

  “The problem,” she went on without missing a beat, “is there isn’t anything to do except go to school!”

  Some people run away and join the Rangers. “School’s not such a bad idea.”

  “That’s all very well for you to say!”

  “What does that mean?” he snapped.

  “Well, you must like all those old books, right? or you wouldn’t be spending your time here. But some of us would rather get out and live life instead of study about it.”

  “Is that what this Pateros Brigade is for — ’living life’ instead of studying?” It was a mean-spirited thing to say, but he couldn’t help it.