Empyrion I: The Search for Fierra

by Stephen Lawhead

  Treet knew enough about repressive regimes to understand that he’d just been fed the accepted party line. There seemed to be no reason to badger Calin about her explanation. Very likely she believed every word herself. He tried a different tack. “This war interests me. I would like to find out more about it.”

  “The Archives,” she said softly. “The data bank you speak of.”

  His eyebrows went up. “Yes?”

  “That is where you will find what you wish to know.”

  “I thought you said it was forbidden.”

  “It is. No one may go there—not magicians, not even Hage priests. No one but the Supreme Director himself.”

  “Or someone who had his permission perhaps?” Treet stopped in his tracks. “Take me to him now. I want to ask him.”

  Calin studied him for a moment, as if trying to read his thoughts from his face. “I will take you to him. But whatever answer he gives must be sufficient.”

  “Whatever he says goes. That’s fine with me.” They began walking the opposite direction, back toward Saecaraz deep Hage. “Do you think I have a chance?”

  Calin smiled slightly. “I can’t say. Perhaps. I know that he has given you special privileges for a purpose.”

  “What purpose I wonder?”

  The magician shrugged. “He has not told me.” Her tone became gravely serious. “It is said among us, however, that he who stands too near the Threl deserves his fate. You must be careful.”

  Treet gazed at the dark-haired magician. Her concern touched him; it was the first time she had given any hint of feeling for him. “I’ll be careful,” he told her. “Now, let’s go see Rohee. I have a feeling he’ll want me to see those Archives.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  The Archives of Empyrion were like nothing Treet had ever imagined. The main room was a chamber half a kilometer on a side with a flat expanse of a roof a good fifty meters from the floor. In essence the enormous room was the colony’s attic: a place where the flotsam and jetsam of an aging civilization was consigned to molder quietly into dust.

  In entering the room, he and Calin had passed through a dark, steep downward passage protected first by sleepy Nilokerus guards and then by heavy metal doors at intervals of thirty meters, each with its own coded lock. The last door, twice a man’s height and ten meters wide, had been sealed; it gave a whoosh of indrawn air when Treet, following Rohee’s precise directions, pressed the code sequence into the pentagon of lighted tabs on the lock and twisted the opening mechanism. Dusky light filtered down from skylight wells overhead as they stepped down onto the floor of the chamber.

  Treet had often fantasized about what it would be like to discover a lost Pompeii, or the forgotten tomb of an Egyptian Pharaoh in the Valley of the Kings. Upon setting foot in that silent room, his dream became reality. His heart palpitated; his throat tightened; his palms grew clammy and his knees spongy. Here was a vast treasure trove of the unknown past, a mine of information about the colony’s history. Its riches were his and his alone to discover.

  Supreme Director Rohee had been cagey when approached about the Archives. He had not said no right away, neither had he agreed. Instead, with sly, hooded eyes, peering down his beak nose over steepled fingers, he listened to Treet’s lengthy entreaty and then questioned Calin closely before making them wait six hours for his decision. The waiting had been maddening—all the time Treet suspecting he would be denied access to the Archives, and wanting it more by the minute. But his frustration melted at once when a Saecaraz Hage priest appeared at his kraam with the message that he was to come at once to Threl High Chambers. There Rohee had informed him that he and Calin would be allowed to examine the Archives in the company of the Hage priest who would keep watch so that the spirits of the place would not be disturbed.

  The three of them had set off at once. It was still early evening and, since Treet intended to make his first visit a meaningful one, they had brought food and drink with them.

  The Hage priest had not spoken a word since delivering his message. He remained a mute sentinel, hanging back as Treet tugged open the door, following warily, like a creature flushed from its natural surroundings. The priest’s curious reluctance brought to Treet’s mind a stock character in old 2-D movies: the cowering ethnic guide who is made to trespass on his forefathers’ burial ground by gold-lusting fortune hunters.

  “Jackpot!” Treet’s voice rang hollow in the cavernous room as he stepped lightly down from the last of four steps which formed concentric ledges around the Archives’ circumference. A fine gray film lay over everything—not dust, for the room was sealed. It looked like time itself, oxidized and deposited as silt to form a transparent shroud over Empyrion’s past. Not a trace of a smudge anywhere, Treet duly noted; any intruders’ footprints would be plainly visible on the floor. Therefore, he concluded that no one had entered the Archives in a very long time—years at least, perhaps centuries.

  “I guess Rohee doesn’t come down here much,” said Treet, gazing around. The size of the room made his voice small. Directly before him lay a jumble of artifacts and machines and stacks and ranks of containers of various sizes and shapes, around and through which ran a maze of intertwined pathways. He fought down the impulse to dash forward along the first path at his feet and start prying into everything he saw. “We’ll have to have a plan,” he said, mostly to himself. “There’s too much here to just run at it. We’d be here months before we even knew what we were looking at.”

  At that moment, the priest, above them on the steps where they’d left him, stretched out his arms and began chanting in a trembly sing-song. He held in each tight fist something that looked like a frayed black rope bound to the end of a stubby handle. As his voice rose and fell, echoing eerily back from the depths, he began flailing away with the ropes in loopy figure eights.

  “What’s got into him?” wondered Treet.

  “He is clearing an astral zone for us to work in. There will be many spirits gathered here, clinging to the old things. He is reminding them that we, the living, are their masters. We should not have any trouble from them.” Calin’s dark eyes were wide with wonder as she spoke, her voice tinged with awe.

  “Well, let’s get started. There must be some sort of map for this place, or a floor plan or something. I would guess it might be near the entrance here. Let’s look around for anything that might show us the layout.”

  Calin nodded, although she little understood all that Treet had said. Together they began searching the immediate area, stirring fine gray powder from everything they touched.

  “Make a note: we’ll need masks if we’re going to be working in this stuff,” said Treet after only a few moments. Clouds puffed up around his hands and feet; his clothes were already well decorated with powdery handprints. “We could use a vacuum cleaner, too. Hold on. What’s this?”

  Calin’s head jerked around as she straightened up. “You have found something?” She came to where he stood bent over a pedestal set in the floor. It was covered with a cloth whose filth-encrusted folds had stiffened with age.

  Slowly, so as not to dislodge an avalanche of “dust” onto whatever had been protected beneath, Treet lifted the covering. The pedestal was a freestanding data terminal, quite old—yet of a design Treet had recently seen on Earth.

  A strange feeling of displacement stole over Treet. How odd, he thought, to find an object of the very latest modern design looking a thousand years old. Here was something that could not be more than five years in service at the more up-to-date corporate offices, yet bearing the marks of countless years of hard use. It was unsettling.

  “Time travel,” Treet whispered, letting the cloth drop at his feet. “I wonder if this thing still works.” He regarded the terminal doubtfully. It was so old. And yet, silicon and platinum were hardly perishable substances. With a shrug he touched the sensor plate.

  Nothing happened.

  He tapped it and then punched it harder. Still nothing.

  He
turned to Calin. “You’re a magician—do something.”

  The woman bent over the terminal and placed her hands against its sides. She closed her eyes, became motionless.

  Treet stared at her in disbelief. His comment had been meant as a joke. But Calin apparently took him seriously, and acted on his suggestion. What could she be doing? he wondered. The colonists were afflicted with a weird regard for spirits and such, but did they believe they could communicate with machines too?

  In a moment the dark-haired magician straightened and lifted her hands away from the terminal housing. She delicately placed a finger on the sensor plate and held it there. To Treet’s amazement, the screen flickered to bright green life.

  Magic?

  “This one is very old. It needed coaxing,” Calin explained.

  “So I see.” Treet scrutinized the young woman, seeing her in a strange new light. She appeared inexpressibly foreign to him just then: mystery wrapped. “No wonder they call you magicians,” he said at last, then turned his attention to the terminal. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”

  There were a half-dozen symbols embossed on the sensor plate and Treet recognized them as ordinary computer function designators. He brushed one with a finger tip, and a menu came up on the screen. “So far, so good. It’s in the mother tongue at least.”

  At his shoulder, Calin squinted at the black letters. “This is the writing of the ancients,” she said. “Very difficult to read.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” remarked Treet, and rattled off a string of words from the menu.

  Calin marveled at this achievement. “You know the writing of the old ones? But how?”

  He decided on an evasive answer to save a lengthy explanation. “I learned it a long time ago.” Treet scanned the menu and chose an entry called General Reference, made his selection, and watched as the screen cleared and another menu flashed up. He grinned at Calin. “Banzai! This is what we’re looking for.”

  Among the entries on this second menu was a selection titled Archival Orienting. He chose it and watched as the screen drew a detailed floor plan of the enormous room, dividing it into multicolored sections. Lips pursed, chin in hand, Treet alternated his study of the screen with a survey of the room, fixing the layout in his mind.

  Presently he looked up to find Calin sifting among a stack of sealed lightprint disks. “I found these over there,” she said, inclining her head toward a formidable tower of barrel-shaped plastic containers whose base was littered with the disks. She held a handful out to him.

  The magnetic ink on the yellowed plastic labels had faded almost beyond legibility, but Treet managed to decipher some of them. He read: Maintenance: Fusion Core Ceramic Shields; Stress Factors in Spun Steel Suspension Systems; Integrated Circuitry and Biogenics: Crystal Patterning.

  “These are the instruction manuals,” said Treet.

  “Instruction manuals?”

  “For the colony—all this.” He waved his hand to embrace all of Empyrion. “Everything.”

  “Is this a find?” Calin asked.

  “You pay attention, don’t you? Yes, it’s a find,” Treet allowed. “But not exactly what I’m looking for.” He turned back to the screen. “What we want is human documentation.”

  “Human doc—?”

  “Records, files, disks, cartridges—but about people, not how to grow crystals,” he said absently, studying the glowing screen before him.

  There did not seem to be any particular place where documents were kept. What Treet hoped to find was a cache of diaries or logbooks of the colony’s first years of operation. Surely such things existed. He had never heard of a colony that did not keep copious records on itself. Empyrion, being the first extrasystem colony, would have monitored itself scrupulously and generated an ocean of data.

  Treet heard a soft, grunting sound like an animal snoring, and looked back to the upper ledge where the Hage priest lay. He had spread his yos under him and now slept with his head on his arm. Strange bird, thought Treet. Doesn’t he know what is here?

  He punched up the menu again and spent the next hour trying its selections, but found nothing that promised immediate help. He sighed. This was going to be a long haul. Unless they stumbled over something accidentally, the information he sought would only be found through a methodical and painstaking search. The thought made him cringe—sectioning off a room this size with its jumble of articles … daunting, to say the least.

  When Treet finally raised his head from the datascreen, he saw that the light had dwindled. Sinking into darkness, the shadows thickened in the room, fusing, deepening.

  Where was the light switch for this place? he wondered. He trotted back to the entrance, stepping over the body of the sleeping priest. He searched the area for a switchplate of any description, but found nothing. There must be lights somewhere, but where?

  It was getting too dark to search, and without a clue to where the lights were, there was no hope of finding them in the dark. “Calin!” Treet called. “We’ll have to come back tomorrow. It’s getting too dark to see, and I can’t find the lights. Calin?”

  He listened. Nothing.

  No sound came from the floor. She had been right there only moments before, standing next to him. Where could she have gone? He stared around him at a broken wall of dimming shapes, now pale and unreal in the twilight. In the silt of one of the many pathways through the mountains of discarded objects her footprints lay—but which one? It was now too dark to make out footprints anyway.

  “Ca-a-l-l-i-n-n!” he called.

  “Hageman, we want to talk to you.”

  Nendl, casting a quick glance over his shoulder, hesitated. Two Hagemen in Jamuna brown were coming up fast behind him. He hadn’t known he was being followed. His kraam lay but a few meters ahead, so he put his head down and ran to it, slipped in, and snapped on the unidor. He lay panting against the wall.

  They had seen where he went, he knew. But that could not be helped. At least he was safe in his kraam now, and it would be night soon; they would not wait for him all night. They would try to nab him in the morning on his way to the fields. But by then he would be safely hidden where they’d never find him.

  He moved away from the wall and heard a heavy scraping sound, like someone boring through the stucco of his kraam. The wall began to vibrate. He put his hand out and withdrew it instantly—the surface was hot to the touch.

  As he stood watching, the wall convulsed and a section collapsed inward, scattering dust and debris. The two men stood looking at him through the haze of dust. One of them had a flat, nozzle-shaped instrument in his hands; the other stepped into the kraam through the jagged hole.

  “Hageman, you forget your manners,” he said. His eyes were hard, his voice soft and silky. “Your name is Nendl.”

  “No,” the Jamuna recycler replied. He swallowed hard, his heart beating in his throat.

  The man smiled thinly. “Perhaps that is not your private name, but Nendl is your Hagename.”

  “Who are you? What do you want?”

  “Only to talk to you.”

  “Go away. Come see me tomorrow.”

  “We will go away when you tell us what we want to know.”

  Nendl glared at the man, but clamped his mouth shut.

  “Tell us where your Hagemate is.”

  “I have not had a Hagemate in several years.”

  The man smiled patiently. “The one who has been living here with you—where is he? Answer quickly—we grow tired of your impertinence.”

  “I don’t know who you mean.”

  “Liar!” the man roared. Smiling unexpectedly, he moved closer. “Try again. Where is he?”

  “I don’t know.” Fear made Nendl’s voice quiver.

  The man spun on his heel. Nendl did not see the leg swing up and the foot snap out. The kick caught him on the point of the chin and drove his jaw backward, breaking off the lower front teeth and dislocating his jaw. Nendl fell backwards, blood spurting from his mouth.
The man stood over him, smiling, then lifted his foot and ground it into the recycler’s genitals. Nendl screamed.

  “You should have shown us some courtesy, Hageman,” said the man softly, watching his victim writhe on the floor. He turned away abruptly and jerked his thumb over his shoulder at Nendl. “Bring him,” he said to his companion, and strode out.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  The message had been explicit; there was no mistake. Tvrdy had acted at once to arrange a meeting of the Cabal. Now he waited at the appointed place—a granary in Hyrgo deep Hage. He wore the green-sleeved yos of the Hyrgo and sat among bulging sacks of fresh-smelling grain. He waited patiently, knowing the others would join him soon, content to allow Piipo’s personal bodyguard to keep watch over the meeting-place.

  How long must we continue to practice our deceptions? he wondered. Not long, he guessed. One way or another there would be an end to their secret activity. The day was coming for open confrontation. He could feel the dread approach of that day in his bones. It would be a dark day. Yes, a dark, bloody day.

  The quick flit of a shadowed figure hurrying along the aisle between the steep stacked bags of grain drew Tvrdy’s attention away from his thoughts. He recognized the furtive step as that of Cejka’s. He stood and welcomed his friend.

  “No trouble tonight?” Tvrdy glanced past Cejka’s shoulder—a reflex action born of years of exacting vigilance.

  “I was not followed, nor was I seen. Don’t worry.”

  “Did you see anyone else?”

  “No one.” Cejka studied him closely. “Should I have?”

  “Piipo has several of his personals at watch. I thought it best to maintain extra security tonight.”