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by Judith Reeves-Stevens

  “She’s dead,” Jess said.

  The two men nodded.

  “How?”

  Both messengers glanced at Charlie. “You’re summoned home at once,” one said.

  Jess knew better than to press the point. She nodded, and only then did the two men stand.

  “Who are you?” Charlie asked her quietly.

  Jess also knew better than to answer. “Charlie, thank you for saving my life. I’m sorry, but I’ve got to go with these men now.”

  “Why?”

  “Family business of my own.” Then, as she had always known she must, Jessica MacClary turned her back on her life in the world, to assume the mantle of her birth, and her gods.

  CORNWALL 7,322 YEARS B.C.E.

  When the sentinels with their distant eyes had first sighted the painted sail of Torhiram’s bridge ship, the signal flags they raised on the watchtowers were old and faded. Still, to see the purple cloth streaming against the gathering storm clouds sent a charge of anticipation through the scholars of the outpost.

  It had been twenty years since those flags had last flown. Twenty long years since the people of Kassiterithes had been visited by a ship from home.

  Hamilkir, Master of the Star Paths since his mother’s death, waited at the docks with his apprentices, on the largest wooden pier. A crew of oak people used ropes and poles to reposition the trading barge already moored there, making space for the unexpected visitor. The tide was high, the water choppy, and the first gusts of rain from the darkening skies swirled in with the sea spray. Yet Hamilkir and the others like him—whom the people of the oak called shadowmen—felt no discomfort. The oldest among them had memories stretching back two decades and more, and had known weather far worse, while the youngest had heard the stories of home. The raging thunderstorms of this region, one day to be known as Cornwall, were minor distractions to the shadowmen, especially now.

  Even as anticipation of hearing news from home kept Hamilkir strengthened against the storm, he realized the visitors were not what he had hoped.

  The massive wooden vessel, its triangular mainsail bright yellow and marked with the cobalt blue cross of the Navigators, had anchored two stadii offshore, as if its pilot couldn’t read the floating markers showing safe passage to the docks. Instead, a landing boat was launched, and even at this distance through rain and spray, Hamilkir could see that seven of the boat’s eight rowers were ahkwila, small and light-skinned like the people of the oak. Only one rower was khai —a true person.

  As a crew, though, the rowers were sure and strong, and the helmsman, also khai and female, brought the landing boat to the pier with skill. The oak people threw ropes to lash the boat in place by the floating gangway, and, true to tradition, the helmsman was the first to debark, carrying her wayfinder’s chest.

  In the brief glimpse he had of it, Hamilkir admired the workmanship of the rounded and polished wooden case, as long as an adult’s arm and twice as thick. He could tell from the intricacies of its silver panels that it was from home, marked with the star paths in the old way, with no text engraved to aid in memorization as his apprentices preferred. It was the chest of a star path master, perhaps one who had studied in the Navigators’ Hall itself.

  Hamilkir and his apprentices stood aside without speaking as the helmsman carried her burden along the dock to solid land and secured it in the storage cairn. Only when the chest was safe from loss at sea, when its distant eye and timekeepers and horizon boards were secure, could she—or any wayfinder—attend to other business. Such was the importance of navigation. Such were their traditions.

  In less time than the passage from ship to shore had taken, Hamilkir had dispatched an apprentice to return on the landing boat and serve as pilot to guide the anchored ship through the shoals to the pier. The apprentice took the female’s place as helmsman, while one of the oak people replaced the male khai on the oar.

  The visitors had misgivings at seeing a single khai on a boat with eight ahkwila.

  “Have you tamed them?” the female Master asked. Her name was Rutheme. She stood as tall as Hamilkir, a full head above the tallest of the oak people. Her skin was as black as the spans between the stars and, in the custom of the travelers, her scalp was shaved and oiled. Few of the khai at this outpost maintained their appearance in the old way, and Hamilkir found it unexpectedly alluring.

  “They don’t need taming,” Hamilkir answered. “They need to be fed.”

  The khai spoke in their own language, whose clicks and harsh consonants defied the understanding of most of the people of the oak, and the ahkwila remaining on the dock made no effort to listen to what the two shadowmen said. They only stared at Rutheme. There were few females of her kind at Kassiterithes. Such was the price of children—a price not paid by the oak people, who bred more easily, with many fewer deaths in childbirth.

  “At Ehschay, teaching them farming isn’t enough.”

  Hamilkir knew of that outpost, slightly closer to the world’s middle circle than Kassiterithes, but almost twenty thousand stadii across the dark sea before him. “Is that where you’ve sailed from?”

  Rutheme clicked her agreement. “Seventy-two days.”

  “Before that?”

  Rutheme understood the intent of his question. “I was born at Ehschay. I’ve never been home.” She pulled her fur-lined cloak closer as the wind kicked up. Wolf fur, Hamilkir recognized, but of a species not found here. Fifty years ago, his grandparents had told him, trade had not been limited to barges traveling up and down the coast. Bridge ships from other outposts had made regular arrivals at Kassiterithes, bringing goods from all the world’s lands.

  “And my outpost has not been visited,” Rutheme continued, “for almost thirty years.”

  “Thirty . . .” Hamilkir looked away. The storm-tossed horizon was hidden in the gray mist of driving rain, moving onshore, almost here. “Has it happened, then?”

  “I think it’s up to us to find out.”

  Hamilkir turned his attention to the bridge ship at anchor. The launch boat had reached it and was being hoisted on board. “We have no more ships that can make the voyage. Can yours?”

  “We can cross the sea, but not to the White Island.”

  Hamilkir knew what his next question had to be. “Then we’re to build new ones that can?”

  “We must. I’ve brought the knowledge.”

  “We have it here as well.” The knowledge of the bridge ships was safely preserved on the stone altar in the outpost’s Chamber of Heaven, along with the eleven other gifts.

  “Do you have the workers?”

  “Yes. And the forests.”

  Rutheme clicked again. On her ship, both rows of oars were being set in motion to maneuver it to port. The wind was too strong to risk the sails, and they’d been struck.

  Hamilkir saw beyond the reason for her questions. “You no longer have those resources at Ehschay.”

  “We’ve had to turn the library into a fortress.” Rutheme wrinkled her forehead in confusion. “We’ve given them everything. Yet they attack us. Do they not do that here?”

  “A few ambushes out past the farmlands. It’s more a question of differences between the hunters in the forests and those we’ve taught to farm.” Hamilkir knew there would likely be more ambushes in the time to come as logging operations expanded for the new ships suited for the voyage home.

  The ahkwila here believed the oak forests held special properties that Hamilkir had not seen demonstrated, and so could not accept. For, if an unseen force could produce no consistent effect, in the way that channeled lighting could always attract certain metals, then the force wasn’t simply unseen, it wasn’t real. The people of the oak, however, had yet to grasp that basic understanding of the world and its workings: that a thing was a known fact, or it was not.

  Rutheme glanced at the ahkwila standing together, waiting for her ship to reach the dock so they could moor it. She dropped her voice as if she feared that one among them might underst
and her language. “Do you feel safe here?”

  “I do. We’re making a difference. The oak people honor the library.”

  “Then they’re different here. Different from all the others.”

  All the others. Hamilkir was afraid to ask her what she knew about the other outposts. Though, in time, he knew he must.

  That night, the storm raged and lightning flashed. This time, though, it wasn’t captured in the rods of iron to be stored in glass jars and slurries of iron filings. Instead, the scholars and apprentices of Kassiterithes gathered in the great hall for the evening meal. Not for companionship—the khai had little need of that—but to hear the story of the crossing of the dark sea.

  It had been uneventful. For three days of the crossing, the winds had slowed, so the rowers had toiled: Bridge ships were never becalmed. Most importantly, the star paths remained true. When land had been sighted on the seventy-second day, the watchtowers of Hamilkir’s outpost had been easily seen through the lenses of the distant eye. Rutheme’s wayfinding had been that precise, even on a voyage that she, and her khai rower, Torhiram, had never made before.

  After the formal stories had been told and reports given, the visitors mixed among their fellow scholars to ask and answer questions. Rutheme and Torhiram shared Hamilkir’s table, but the conversation was strained.

  Hamilkir was puzzled when he realized the cause of the unusual tension: the presence of his ahkwila concubine, Brighid. True, at first sight, she could seem alarmingly pale, the straw color of her braided hair indicative of disease had she been khai. Even so, he had learned that, like all creatures, different ahkwila took on forms and coloration specific to their different regions. This was a known fact, and easily adjusted to.

  Instead of her appearance, then, Hamilkir wondered if it might be his concubine’s knowledge that caused his guests’ concern. He had seen the flicker of surprise in both Rutheme and Torhiram as Brighid had greeted them in their own tongue. Yet why would anyone be troubled by evidence of knowledge shared?

  Finally, he thought he saw the answer in Rutheme’s eyes. The way she stared at Brighid’s belly when the concubine’s purple-trimmed white shift pulled across her. A child grew there. His.

  Then Rutheme, noticing that her host had registered her distaste and disapproval, spoke as if Brighid were not capable of understanding.

  “Are there others?”

  Hamilkir knew she meant children born of oak and shadow. “Twenty-two.”

  Whatever Rutheme and Torhiram thought of that answer, they shared their reactions only in a glance between them.

  “Are there not similar children in Ehschay?” Hamilkir asked.

  “There were,” Torhiram answered.

  Hamilkir could see his concubine’s concern at Torhiram’s use of the past tense.

  “Where did they go?” Brighid asked. She slipped her hand into his and squeezed it. As mysterious as the gesture was, Hamilkir had learned the ahkwila took comfort from it.

  “They were not khai,” Rutheme said. “They were not ahkwila. Where could they go? Accepted by no one.”

  Hamilkir squeezed his concubine’s hand as she had taught him. “We accept them.”

  “So did we,” Rutheme replied, “until the attacks began.”

  “I told you,” Hamilkir said, “there’s no fighting here.”

  “There’s always fighting.”

  Hamilkir refused to accept that pronouncement.

  “Two wolves in a cage,” Torhiram said. “There can be only one. So, in time, there is only one.”

  “We’re not animals.”

  “No,” Rutheme agreed. She stared at Brighid. “But they are.”

  Tears trickled down Brighid’s cheeks, pale no longer but splotched with red. Hamilkir had been with her long enough to know the tears did not mean his concubine was in physical pain—instead, some thought had caused her an internal, unseen discomfort.

  He spoke more sharply than he meant to. “That’s not a known fact.”

  Neither of his guests responded to his unintended insult.

  “Sometimes,” Rutheme said, “I believe that the ahkwila are what the Navigators warned us against.”

  “They warned us of the ocean.”

  Rutheme gestured at the pregnant ahkwila. “Which one? The ocean of water? Or the ocean of flesh? Both can swallow us.”

  “Unless,” Torhiram added, “we take action against them.”

  Hamilkir stood. He found the conversation unpleasant. “I’ll take no action against the people of the oak.”

  “Someone must,” Rutheme said. “Or else the Navigators will be proved true twice over. Once for the fate of our home, and once for our own.”

  SIX

  “Tell me you’re going to arrest David Weir.”

  Jack Lyle’s response was a snort of amusement. Twelve years in the air force, another sixteen as an agent in the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, and he knew Colonel Miriam Kowinski’s type. One detail out of place, one comma missing, and she’d bring down the wrath of heaven on the hapless fool responsible. A quality he could admire, if not emulate.

  “Eventually,” he said.

  As if preventing herself from saying anything she’d regret, the colonel shifted her attention to Lyle’s specialist working on David Weir’s computer. It was midnight on a Monday, and the rest of the office area in the lab was deserted.

  “He was stealing DoD data,” the colonel said.

  “I understand.”

  “We’ve known about it since the first day he tried to cover his tracks.”

  “Colonel, your lab’s security is outstanding.”

  “So why isn’t Army CID in charge of this investigation?”

  “Because the Air Force OSI is in charge, per General Capuzzi’s direct order.”

  Lyle saw Kowinski’s spine straighten at his not too subtle reminder that in this affair, he, a civilian agent of the air force, had authority over her, an army colonel.

  Before she could protest again, his specialist said, “Gotcha.”

  She was Roz Marano, delectably freckled with short brown hair and, like most of the agents in Lyle’s detachment, all of fourteen. Sometime around age fifty, Lyle had begun to notice how everyone else he worked with was growing younger.

  Roz, who was actually twenty-nine, sat back in Weir’s chair and cracked her knuckles. “I’ve extracted the core roots from the protected files and set it to write to disk.” She turned her head to look innocently at her boss. “Want that in English?”

  Lyle shook his head. Two months earlier, when this investigation had led him to Weir, Roz had slipped a program into the lab’s network that recorded every keystroke Weir made, and whenever he deleted a file, it made a copy where he couldn’t find it. Lyle was content not knowing more than that. In his life, machines that required anything beyond an ON and OFF switch rarely stuck around long enough to become good friends.

  “How about an ETA?” he asked.

  Roz checked Weir’s computer screen. Lyle couldn’t tell what she saw there that could give her a time estimate. “Five minutes.”

  He turned to Kowinski. “Then the computer’s all yours.”

  “It’s always been mine.”

  “Colonel, I don’t like getting my toes stepped on, either, but sometimes we have to let the little fish go so we can get the big ones.”

  “Mr. Lyle,” Kowinski said, emphasizing his civilian title, “I get that Weir is selling the data he’s stealing to someone you think is more important than his sorry ass. But the only reason this lab accomplishes its mission is the trust the men and women in uniform have for it. Maybe stealing someone’s genetic profile isn’t as big a crime as whatever you’re gunning for—but multiply that small crime by three million people feeling they’ve had their privacy rights trampled. Then add all the people who, because of that betrayal, decide not to cooperate with us in the future. To this lab, and to me, that’s irreparable harm.”

  Lyle thought that over, though
he knew he didn’t have to. Three million service members having their feelings hurt and future recruits being hesitant to add their DNA to the armed forces registry was an easier challenge to deal with than America’s enemies being able to pinpoint every secret underground command post and continuity-of-government facility in the country, and every hidden U.S. sub pen around the world. How Weir was linked to the person responsible for that very real threat, Lyle didn’t know, but he was determined to follow any lead that would result in achieving his mission to bring Holden Ironwood to justice.

  Of course, he could say none of that to the colonel. “I understand your concern.”

  Kowinski folded her arms, apparently realizing that if he couldn’t give her even the slightest indication of the stakes he was playing for, then those stakes must be huge. Lyle felt bad for her, but relieved.

  While the two women watched whatever there was to watch on the computer, Lyle ran his eyes over the featureless office cubicle, noting how little had changed in Weir’s absence. When the suspect had resigned this morning, a security guard had watched as the kid boxed up his personal items, not that there had been many to begin with. Two months earlier, the first time Lyle had searched the office, he’d been struck by the impersonal feel of it.

  Almost everyone else in this section of the lab had a personal coffee mug with slogans or pictures. Almost everyone had photos of family and friends on the bulletin boards and on the walls boxing in their desks. At least a third of the cubicles had artwork by children. David Weir’s was different.

  On his cubicle’s bulletin board, he had lab schedules and memos, all current and neatly arranged. The only other item on the board had been one personal photo: a three-by-five color print of a forested landscape, completely nondescript.

  Roz had copied the photo with one of her handheld gadgets and sent the file to OSI forensics for analysis. She’d also noted that it was an actual photograph, not something produced on a home printer. The code on the back of the print revealed it had been made twenty-one years ago at a large film-processing lab that, in the predigital age, served more than two hundred supermarkets, drugstores, and camera and gift shops in Los Angeles. After all that time, there was no way to determine where the original roll of film had come from, or who had submitted it for processing.