Empyrion I: The Search for Fierra

by Stephen Lawhead

  “It’s amazing, isn’t it,” he said at last. “The quiet. It’s so … profound.”

  The air was still and deathly silent. He had never heard such an absolute absence of sound in the outdoors: no piping birdcalls, no burring insects, no rustling leaves or ticking branches. Nothing.

  This is what it’s like to be deaf, thought Treet.

  “Not deaf,” said Yarden. “More like immune.”

  Treet thought about asking her what she meant, then thought that she already knew he was thinking about asking her and decided not to. Instead, he leaned back and gazed upward at the stars beginning to glow in the deepening twilight. Empyrion had no moon, so the stars shone especially bright in the darkening heavens. “Do you realize we’re looking at constellations we have no names for?”

  “Mmm,” said Yarden, “stars should have names. We could make some up.”

  “It wouldn’t be official.”

  “Why not! Ours would be as good as anybody else’s.”

  “Okay, see that wobbly string of stars just above the horizon, with that bright one at the head? We’ll call that one Ophidia—the snake.”

  “How about that one with the brightest star directly overhead? It looks like a bird—there’s the head, and those stars sweeping down on either side are the wings. A pretty bird—a nightingale, I think.”

  “Make that one Luscinia, then.”

  “Ophidia and Luscinia,” said Yarden softly. “I like those. You’re good with words.”

  “I’m a writer—or used to be.”

  “Used to be? What are you now?” she asked lightly. Treet could feel her eyes on him, but kept looking at the sky.

  “I don’t know what I am. Right now I seem to be an explorer.”

  “Yes, I see what you mean. None of us are exactly playing our usual roles.” She lay back on an elbow. “I know I never will again.”

  “Fatalism?”

  “No, I don’t think so. More like realism. It’s a feeling.”

  “Like the feeling you had about taking off our helmets?” Treet turned to look at her, noting her reaction.

  “Something like that. Why did you do it? Pizzle and Crocker wouldn’t, I knew that.”

  “I guess I’m easily influenced.”

  Yarden laughed, her voice still hoarse. “You are many things, Orion Treet. Easily influenced isn’t one of them. I’m serious—why did you do it? Crocker is right; it could have been dangerous.”

  “Maybe I just wanted to be free of that blasted bubble.”

  “Your freedom is important to you.”

  “It is, now that you mention it. I guess that also explains why we’re out here scooting across these God-forsaken hills.” Treet pushed himself up on one elbow to face her. “I answered your question, but you still haven’t answered mine.”

  “Which question was that?”

  “The one I asked earlier: why you think you’re not going back to the colony.”

  “You never asked me that,” she said, giving his arm a push. It was the first truly spontaneous gesture Treet had ever seen her make.

  “I thought about it—which is the same thing with you, isn’t it?”

  “I told you it doesn’t work like that—I can’t read minds. I just get thought impressions, that’s all.”

  “You’re evading the question.”

  She looked at him intently, eyes luminous in the dying light, and said, “Empyrion is an evil place. I won’t go back there.”

  Her answer surprised him. He replied, “I’ll grant it could be better, but evil? It’s not that bad.” The look she gave him told him the subject was not open for debate, so he tried a different tack. “You were pretty shook up when they brought you to Tvrdy’s kraam. What happened?” When she did not answer, he added, “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want.”

  “It isn’t that. I’m afraid you won’t understand—I’m not sure I understand it all myself.”

  “I know that feeling, at least.”

  “Yes. Well, for me it was like this,” she said, and began relating all that she remembered of her captivity among the Chryse. She told of the plays they’d performed and of the flash orgy and finally of the Astral Service. When she described the Service, Treet noted her voice growing smaller, fainter.

  “If this hurts, we don’t have to talk about it. Forget I said anything,” offered Treet.

  “I don’t want to forget. I want to remember how close I came to giving in. I don’t ever want to get that close again.”

  “Giving in?”

  “To the evil of Empyrion.” Her tone became intense, insistent. “I felt it in that Service, as I have never felt it in my life until that time—an overwhelming presence of inestimable hate, a force of pure, unremitting malevolence. Trabant, they call it—the name chills me! And this thing, this being is the essence of evil. It wanted me—demanded me. I resisted. If the Service had lasted any longer, I would not have been able to hold out.”

  “But you did hold out.”

  “Yes, and I never want to be tested like that again.”

  Treet looked at her a long time, considering her words. “You saved Calin’s life this morning. I still can’t figure out what happened to her.”

  “The same thing that happened to me.”

  “You lost me there.”

  “Fear.”

  “She said she was scared. I thought she meant scared of what we were doing.”

  “Put yourself in her situation. They have lived for untold generations under that dome of theirs. They never leave it for any reason—they view the outside world as an enemy. How would you feel if you lived your whole life believing that and were suddenly thrust out? The land is so big, so empty. It must have terrified her, and that terror worked on her mind until finally she just snapped.”

  “The same thing might have happened to you in the Service.”

  “Exactly.”

  They fell silent after that and just lay quietly in each other’s company until Yarden got up and started toward her tent. Treet watched her go, called “Good night” after her, but received no reply. He glanced heavenward and saw that Ophidia had risen higher in the night sky, then he got up and went to his tent and fell asleep pondering all Yarden had told him.

  Early the next morning the company came in sight of the river. Yarden, with Calin riding behind her, was the first to spot it. She sped up and pulled the skimmer to a halt on the crest of a hill, allowing the others to catch up.

  “Do you see it?” she asked.

  “See what?” asked Treet. Pizzle and Crocker pulled up and sat staring from inside their helmets, looking at the others.

  “The river. See? Down there beyond those hills. You can just see a little sliver of it shining through there.” She pointed, and Treet followed her elegant finger to see a glittering spangle threading through the hills.

  “Jackpot!” said Calin with a smile. She seemed wholly recovered from her ordeal of the day before—almost a completely different person. Yarden had apparently had a most beneficial effect on her.

  “Yes, jackpot.” Treet turned to Pizzle and Crocker, shouted at the top of his lungs, and pointed out the river. They looked and responded by nodding vigorously and giving him the A-OK sign. He squinted his eyes and estimated that the river lay at least four kilometers away. “We can be there in five minutes. Let’s go. It’ll be time for a rest stop when we get there.”

  They pushed off again and rode the hill swells to the river’s edge. There they stopped and looked out over a broad expanse of flowing water, silver blue in the sunlight, its gentle, gurgling music a welcome relief from the skimmers’ scream.

  They dismounted and walked down to the water’s edge. Treet squatted, stretched out his hands, and plunged them in. The water was cool and clear, the bottom fine-grained sand. He cupped his hands and raised a mouthful to his lips, sipped cautiously, tasted, and then swallowed. The water had a slight astringent quality, but tasted as fresh and clean as its sparkling clarity promise
d.

  “I say it’s okay,” said Treet over his shoulder to the others watching him. “See what you think.” He dipped his hands and drank again and again and was immediately joined by Calin and Yarden. When he had drunk his fill, Treet rose, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and beckoned to Pizzle and Crocker, who stood looking on like poor relations at a posh family picnic.

  He pantomimed taking off a helmet and pointed at them. They stared doubtfully back at him, but made no move to remove the bubbles. Treet shrugged and turned back toward the water. The river stretched a good sixty meters across, flowing southward in unhurried ease, shimmering like quicksilver beneath a blue-white canopy. Although the channel appeared to deepen quite gradually, Treet estimated from its width that at midstream the water would be well beyond a skimmer’s ability to navigate—even if the heavy machines had not already foundered in the soft river bottom.

  Getting their transportation across would be a trick, no doubt about that. Just how it might be accomplished he could not imagine—until his gaze fell upon Calin, kneeling at the water’s edge, drinking.

  “We’ve got a problem, ladies,” began Treet, settling beside them. “We have to find a way to get our vehicles across. I don’t think they’re made for underwater. Got any ideas?”

  “A bridge?” began Yarden, then waved aside the idea at once. “Forget I said that.” She looked at the desolate hills across the water. “That side is just as barren as this. We’ll just have to look for a fording place.”

  “I guess so—unless Nho can help us out.” He looked at Calin directly. “What about it?”

  “Treet, no.” Yarden put a restraining hand on his arm.

  “Calin? Can your psi do anything?”

  She considered this for a moment and then nodded. “It would be possible to carry them across perhaps. But I cannot—what is the word?”

  “Swim?”

  The magician nodded again quickly. “Yes. Swim.”

  “That is a problem,” agreed Treet.

  “You can’t make her do it,” said Yarden. “Do you have any idea what using psi power does to a person?”

  “Not really,” admitted Treet. “But we’ve come to a dead end, Yarden. I’m open to suggestions, but unless you know of a good ferry anywhere around, I don’t know what else we’re going to do.”

  “Couldn’t we at least look for a place to ford? We might find one, which would make crossing a whole lot easier and simpler.”

  “True. Okay, we look. Here’s what we’ll do. You and Calin go south and I’ll go north—say, for twenty kilometers.”

  “Thirty.”

  “All right, thirty. We’ll meet back here and share what we’ve found. How’s that?”

  Both women agreed, so Treet pushed himself up and went to his skimmer, then donned a helmet briefly to speak to Pizzle and Crocker. “Look, you guys are going to have to get out of those hats. You’re missing all the fun.”

  “What’s going on?” asked Crocker.

  “Well, we’re trying to find a way to get across. Any ideas?”

  Crocker glanced at the skimmers. “They’re much too heavy to lift that’s for sure. A ford, I’d say.”

  “That’s what we decided. Yarden and I are going to split up and take a quick look both ways along the shore. You and Pizzle stay here with the other machine. We’ll meet back here in an hour.”

  “Sounds good,” said Pizzle.

  “In the meantime, why don’t you two work up your nerve and take off your helmets? As you can see, the air is fine. We’re thriving. In fact, I think the oxygen content of the atmosphere is higher than Earth’s. There’s only a momentary discomfort, but that doesn’t last.”

  “Momentary discomfort? Is that what you call rolling around on the ground screaming your heads off? No thanks,” said Pizzle.

  “Suit yourself. You’re going to have to take them off sooner or later. Stay put. We’ll be back soon.”

  Treet, Yarden, and Calin left, driving along the bank, following the slow curves of the river. It wound easily through the hills, and Treet noticed that the river valley was a narrow band on either side, which meant that the water course was relatively recent, geologically speaking. The river had not had time to cut away and flatten the hills along its sides.

  Staying close to the bank, he steered the skimmer northward and noticed a ridge ahead which advertised a clear view of the waterway below. Treet left the bank and made for the ridgetop. The promontory did indeed offer a good survey of a fair stretch of river, and nowhere did he see any variation in its width which might indicate shallows. It rolled on placidly beneath the white sun and eventually disappeared beyond a ruffled row of hills away to the north. Though the skimmer’s odometer read only fifteen kilometers, Treet decided to turn back, knowing that were he to proceed further he would find only more of the same.

  Yarden and Calin were waiting for him when he returned. “There’s a shallow place about twenty kilometers from here. It’s real rocky and the river spreads out pretty wide, but it doesn’t look like it gets more than knee deep,” Yarden said, her face glowing with the excitement of discovery. “Did you see anything?”

  “Nope. Let’s go.”

  It was as Yarden had said. The river widened and flattened as it ran over a rocky shelf which it could not cut through as easily as the soft, earthy hills. As the others looked on, Treet waded out a few meters into water that came to just over his knees and announced that it appeared not to get much deeper. He sloshed his way back and stood before Calin.

  “Well, shall we give it a try?”

  Yarden spoke up. “There are a lot of rocks around; maybe we could—”

  “What? Build a bridge? Yarden, for crying out loud, we’d be here for months. Be reasonable.”

  Calin stopped any further discussion. “I will do it.” She pressed Yarden’s hand, and Treet noted the gesture. An understanding of some sort, a sisterhood, had bloomed overnight between the two women—which was only natural, he supposed. They were, after all, the only females on this expedition, and they were entitled to their own company. But there was something besides the sisterly concern—a harmony between them. Perhaps the gifts they possessed drew them together in a unique way.

  “I think it would be best for two of us to go with you. I could go on one side and Pizzle on the other—to steady you in case you slipped or something.”

  Calin nodded once. She had, Treet noticed, already begun retreating back into herself. Her dark, almond-shaped eyes dulled as her consciousness shifted to that other place where her power lay. She stared straight ahead for a moment, her body very still. Then she moved stiffly to the nearest skimmer, bent to place her hands lightly on its side just above the runner, and straightened. The vehicle floated into the air and hovered.

  Pizzle and Crocker stood with mouths agape, and Treet chuckled to himself. He hadn’t warned them about what they intended doing; the spectacle no doubt astounded them down to their toenails.

  Treet stepped to Calin’s side and gestured for Pizzle to do likewise. Pizzle only stared in uncomprehending amazement, so Yarden said, “I’ll go with you.” She put her hand on the magician’s shoulder, and together they walked out into the water.

  The river had worn the rock shelf smooth, but it was not slippery. Still, they carefully placed each step, moving slowly out into deeper water to midstream. Even at its deepest point, the water was clear enough to see the bottom, allowing Treet to steer them around the few holes he saw. Soon the water grew shallower again, and they were climbing back out on the other side.

  Treet guided them to a flat place near the shore, and Calin put the skimmer down. She straightened, her eyes still dull, her face expressionless. “Do you want to rest or anything?” asked Treet.

  Calin shook her head, so he said, “Okay, only two more to go. Let’s take it slow and easy; we’re doing great.”

  The second crossing, went as easily as the first, but when Calin released the machine, it slammed down heavily, bouncing on its s
uspension. Yarden’s wrinkled brow showed concern; she threw a quick, imploring look to Treet which said. Do something!

  “I think we should rest for a second, Calin,” he said. “There’s no hurry. We’re almost finished.”

  But the magician turned and started back across the river once more. Yarden’s worried expression accused Treet. “I tried to stop her,” he said weakly.

  The third crossing began like the first two, and proceeded without incident until they reached midstream. Treet noticed trouble when the skimmer began to waver in the air. Calin stopped abruptly,

  “Cal—” began Treet. The skimmer dipped dangerously toward the water.

  “Shh! Don’t disturb her,” whispered Yarden harshly.

  Calin became a portrait of exertion: eyes closed tight, sweat beading on forehead, features darkening with strain, knotted veins standing out on her neck. The skimmer hobbled, its bulk rocking wildly as if slipping through her grasp. One runner touched the water.

  “Concentrate,” cooed Treet. “You can do it. Go slow. Just a little farther; we’re almost there.”

  They took one more step.

  “Ahh!” Calin cried, falling back. The skimmer twisted in the air and plunged into the river with a tremendous splash.

  FORTY-TWO

  Water showered over them as the machine crashed down. The resulting wave knocked them backwards off their feet to flounder helplessly in the backwash. Treet, aware that Calin had fallen, blindly reached out for her, snagged her collar, and held on.

  Though the current was not swift, it was strong and Treet was pulled downstream. He flailed his arms and kicked his legs as he fought for a foothold. Finally he managed to get his feet under him and stood, staggered as the water pressed against him, but stayed up. He felt hands on him and cried, “I’m okay! Help me get her out!”