by Sharon Shinn
Clearly this was a convocation assembled to address extremely serious matters.
“Gaaron! Come join us,” Adriel called when she spotted him in the doorway. He threaded his way through the tables, nodding and exchanging greetings with various powerful individuals as he passed them. Arriving at the table filled with angels, he paused to kiss Adriel on the cheek and then settled beside her in the chair that she had obviously reserved for him.
“I’m sorry I’ve missed breakfast,” he said. “I didn’t get in till late last night.”
“I’m surprised you’re here at all,” Neri said frankly. “The messenger came to Monteverde first, so we had a day’s head start on you, and we just got here yesterday afternoon. What, didn’t you stop at all?”
He spooned some cereal into a bowl and then smiled over at her. She was a dark-haired, fine-boned, intensely serious woman a few years older than he was, and she was just slightly competitive with him. She always swore she had never expected to be named Archangel, but Gaaron believed she had spent most of her years of leadership trying to prove that she would have been just as good a one as he would.
“At night I took a room that was so uncomfortable there was no need to linger,” he said, “and by day I paused for food that was so dull there was no need to savor. I was determined to get to Windy Point so I didn’t have to spend another night on the road.”
“I was hoping you’d bring Susannah,” Neri said. “I have yet to meet her.”
A little murmur went around the table as the other angels echoed this comment. “Even I have yet to meet her, and as Archangel, I would think I would have some claim to special consideration,” Adriel said humorously.
Gaaron kept his voice exceedingly pleasant, since he knew his words would sound sharp. As he meant them to. “I did not understand the nature of our gathering until just this moment, or I would have brought Susannah and Enoch and perhaps one or two others with me,” he said quietly. “As it is, I see Bethel is severely underrepresented, though I am happy that someone thought to pick up Mahalah on his way.”
Neri and her angels exchanged glances at that, but Adriel merely looked impatient. The Archangel’s square, worn face seemed just as tired as it had the last time Gaaron had been here. Perhaps even more tired. “Nonsense, Gaaron, we are not forming up a council to cast some kind of majority vote. I just called together as many people as I could think of so we could pool our information and decide what to do.”
There could only be one matter so pressing it merited the concern of the entire nation. “About the strange visitors who have been destroying settlements and camps?” he asked.
Adriel nodded. “We will all tell what we know, and perhaps, once we’ve shared our knowledge, we will have some kind of idea about how to proceed.”
“Are we expecting anyone else to join us?”
Neri glanced rather elaborately around the room. “I wonder who else you think might be missing?”
Gaaron gave her a brief smile. “One or two of the Edori, perhaps?” he suggested. “They, too, have been victims.”
Adriel nodded gravely. “Another reason we would have welcomed your Susannah’s counsel. It is very hard to keep track of the Edori, or to know who they consider their leaders. We will, of course, share with them anything we learn or decide in our sessions here.”
“Let me finish my breakfast, then,” Gaaron said, bending over his bowl. “And we can get straight to the discussions.”
As soon as the meal was done, they moved to a large conference room just down the corridor from the dining hall. Gaaron reflected that there must be many more formal discussions at Windy Point than there were at the Eyrie, where the only place big enough to hold all the residents at once was the open plateau.
It took some time for the visitors to sort themselves out and dispose themselves around the room. Gaaron made his way over to Mahalah, who had been carried here from the dining hall by one of Adriel’s angels. Away from her wheeled chair and the close, comfortable setting of Mount Sinai, she looked even more frail and ancient, and Gaaron could not help but feel a stab of worry as he approached her.
“Mahalah. It is good to see you, but my instincts tell me you should not have made this trip,” he said. He took the stick-thin hand she held out to him and waved aside her smile. “I’m serious. You look as fragile as a bundle of kindling.”
“You, on the other hand, look as offensively robust as you always do,” she retorted. “And I believe I can gauge for myself whether or not I am well enough to travel.”
“How did you get here? Had I known exactly who was convening here, I would have come for you myself.”
“Adriel sent one of her girls for me. We started the trip days ago and made it by easy stages, which I know very well you would not have,” she replied. “I was very well looked after, I assure you. But I am sorry you did not bring Susannah. Like the Archangel, I am disappointed that I have not had the opportunity to meet with her yet.”
“If you knew what my days have been like since I found Susannah, perhaps you would not be so anxious to scold me,” he said ruefully. “As it is, I could not bring her, because she is off on a journey of her own.”
“If we have time while we are here, you must tell me about her,” Mahalah said. “Do you like her? Has the god chosen well?”
“Yes, I like her very much, and I’m sure you will, too,” he said lightly. “Everyone who meets her does.”
Mahalah looked like she would like to ask more questions, but at that moment, Adriel called the meeting to order. Gaaron nodded to the oracle and made his way to the front of the room, where the other angels were sitting. Adriel was standing before them, in front of a large map of Samaria that had been hastily pinned to the wall.
“Let’s begin by identifying all the places where these strangers have struck,” Adriel said when she had finally gotten all of them to quiet down. “Perhaps we will be able to discern a pattern in where and when they appear.”
Gaaron raised his hand to get her attention. “Do you want to know only the places that they have destroyed, or are you interested in knowing also where they have made an appearance but caused no damage?”
A murmur went through the crowd at that. Gaaron turned to face those sitting behind him. “I know of two such incidents,” he said quietly. “But I do not know how they choose when to strike and when to refrain.”
“We’re the ones who need to learn how and when to strike,” someone snarled. Gaaron thought it was one of the Jansai speaking, but he could not be certain.
“We’ll get to that,” Adriel said, lifting her voice above the sudden swelling of commentary. “Gaaron, you know of several disasters. Why don’t you start? And, yes, please tell us of any encounter with these strangers, whether they featured violence or not.”
Gaaron’s stories were quickly told. The destroyed Jansai camp—the two visits by disappearing men—all three tales were met with a shocked silence that was generated not by surprise, he thought, but fear. They had all heard rumors of these events, told by a peddler who’d heard it from an Edori who’d passed on the news related by a distant kinsman; the stories had seemed far-fetched and easy to discount, he supposed. But hearing them again from a credible witness who had viewed a scene of destruction with his own disbelieving eyes made all of them feel tense and uneasy in their comfortable chairs.
“And Susannah has since told me of a leveled camp that she and her clansmen encountered down by Luminaux,” he added. “From the details she gave me, I can only assume the camp was burned by the same agent that burned the Jansai wagons I came across myself.”
“And this camp was—?” Adriel asked, hovering by her map.
“North of Luminaux,” Gaaron replied. “I’m not exactly sure.”
Neri had only one story to tell, though it was clear, from the details she gave, that the tragedy in Gaza was of human origin, a farmhouse burned by carelessness and not malice. On the other hand, Solomon could relate the details of three
massacres, and Adriel added a fourth story. The river merchants repeated tales told to them by freighters, of homesteads destroyed in the sparsely populated region of southern Jordana. All of these, even the unconfirmed reports, Adriel marked on her map.
What soon became clear was that all of the incidents had occurred in the southern half of Samaria, and that the highest concentration was to be found near the coastline.
“Well, that makes sense,” growled Moshe, Adriel’s angelico. He was a grizzled, strongly built man in his mid-sixties who looked capable, even now, of going out and wrestling down a full-grown tree without the aid of saw or ax. “If we are under siege from enemies, it is most likely that they would be attacking us from the sea. Landing somewhere along the Jordana coast, maybe, and making their way inward.”
“But—enemies coming from where?” Neri demanded. “There is no one on this whole world but us.”
“How do you know that?” Solomon shot at her.
“Because—it says—in the Librera—” Neri floundered. She looked over at the oracles, all three of them sitting together near the back of the room. “It tells how Jovah brought us here to this world, where we could live in peace and harmony for all our lives. And our children after us, and their children after them.”
Mahalah nodded. “Indeed, it does say that. And we have been on this world for more than two hundred years and never yet encountered anyone except those of us descended from those original settlers. But that does not mean that there were not, somewhere on this world, other people that we never knew existed. We have explored only this one continent, after all. Perhaps there are other stretches of land we have never seen. Perhaps these people live on Ysral or in some other place—”
There was a general murmur of dissent that drowned out anything else the oracle might have planned to say. “There is no such place as Ysral!” Solomon called. “That’s a fantasy of the Edori!”
“It is mentioned in the Librera,” Mahalah said mildly.
“In any case, I do not believe Jovah would have brought us here to begin with if this world was populated by other people,” Adriel said. “He intended this to be our world.”
“Then who are these people?” Constantine Lesh said reasonably. “If they are not us and they are not someone else?”
Adriel looked at Gaaron. “Are we sure they are not us? Some collection of rogue farmers or Jansai or Edori who have banded together to avenge some perceived injustice? Their skin is dark, you have said—as dark as an Edori’s? Perhaps—”
“I have not seen one,” Gaaron interrupted, “but my sister described one of the men very minutely. His skin was blacker than an Edori’s, she said, and his eyes were blue, his hair a copper red. That does not sound like any of the races we have established here.”
“And yet—a little hair dye, a little intermingling of bloodlines—such a look might be achieved,” Constantine Lesh suggested. “And after all, Miriam saw only one of them. The others might look less fantastical—more familiar, shall we say.”
“These attackers were not Edori,” Gaaron said coldly. “There has never, in the entire history of the race, been any hint of violence in the Edori lifestyle.”
“Jansai, then,” one of the river merchants said. “Many of them are dark-skinned as well, and they’re not above using force when it suits them.”
Solomon came heavily to his feet, his robes billowing around his bulky body and his gold necklace bouncing against his chest. The Jansai with him also hastily rose. “We came here today in good faith, to discuss the assaults that have troubled us all,” he said fiercely. “We will not stay to be maligned.”
“Sit down, Solomon, no one is maligning you,” Adriel said testily. “We are all agreed that the people responsible for these massacres must be outlaws that have been cast from their kin and their tribes. If they are Jansai, they are not abiding by Jansai codes. If they are Edori”—her troubled look swept over Gaaron—“then they have abandoned Edori ways. We cannot rule out anyone based on the respectable behavior of the other members of their group.”
“The Jansai are not violent and lawless,” Solomon said, still on his feet.
“No one said they were,” Adriel said. “Please. Sit. We need your counsel on this grave matter.”
Solomon stood a moment longer, as if debating, but he did eventually retake his seat. His companions once more followed suit. Gaaron had to admit privately that, if he were to pick any race from the scattered peoples of Samaria to spawn a band of violent renegades, he would first look to the Jansai. But this would not be the forum to say so.
Neri was the next to speak. “And still, I am not convinced such atrocities could be committed by anyone who has been raised, as we all have been, on the principles of harmony,” she said. “I would rather believe that outsiders have found a way to visit Samaria than believe that someone who has sung beside me on the Plain of Sharon could now turn to my friends and kill them with fire.”
“Yes, but if they are outsiders, where have they come from?” Moshe demanded. “I still say they have come by boat from across the water. Where else?”
“From the sky,” a voice said.
Heads all craned in the direction of the oracles, where Mahalah sat there placidly, nodding her white-haired head. The speaker had been Isaac of Mount Sudan, but apparently Mahalah didn’t think his comment was particularly outrageous.
Everyone else did. “What? The sky? Are you mad?”
“Flying? You think, like angels?”
“What do you mean, the sky? From where in the sky?”
“What did that crazy old fool say?”
Adriel held up a hand for silence and pointed at Isaac. “Oracle?” she said politely. “What did you mean?”
Mahalah was the one to speak. “We all know the story of how Jovah brought us here in his two hands,” she said. She laced her fingers together and held her hands before her, cupped as the god’s had been two hundred and forty years ago. “Perhaps others have been brought here the same way.”
“By Jovah?” Neri exclaimed. “To harm us?”
“Perhaps by some other means,” Mahalah said. “Or some other god.”
There was a furious outcry at this, a babble of dissenting voices so loud and so vehement that no one argument could be heard above the din. Adriel let the outrage run on for about ten minutes and then rapped the wall behind her for silence. It was granted only grudgingly, and a few mutters could still be heard in pockets around the room.
“This is not profitable,” the Archangel said. “Does it matter where these strangers have come from or who they are, whether our own malcontents or—or visitors who have been brought here from some other world? The true question facing us today is what can we do to stop them, or protect ourselves from their depredations, or both? Because so far, we and those we are sworn to guard appear to be helpless against them.”
This pronouncement was greeted by a silence that was as intense, in its way, as the debate that had immediately preceded it. “Perhaps we cannot protect ourselves,” one of the river merchants said. “Perhaps we can merely stay safe. The attacks seem to come only on isolated communities and small traveling bands. Perhaps we should look for safety in the cities.”
“Yes, fine for those of you who never leave the cities,” Solomon replied instantly. “But what about the Jansai, who spend more than half of their lives traveling in small bands across this continent? What would you say to them?”
“I’d say stay home, until we have found a way to protect you,” the merchant shot back.
“And where would you get the goods that the Jansai ferry from Luminaux to Castelana?” Solomon wanted to know. “How would you sell the products your artisans make in your cities?”
“Who would sell food in any market across the three provinces?” one of the Jordana landowners chimed in. Gaaron recognized him as James Hallomel, Adriel’s staunchest ally. “For that matter, who would grow grain and produce for all of you to eat? Since most farmers live on
isolated lands with fewer than twenty people within calling distance.”
“I understand that—but while this crisis holds—”
“You will all starve before you solve this crisis,” the land-holder said contemptuously.
“Please—some courtesy,” the Archangel murmured.
“We cannot cede the land, and we cannot huddle in our cities, afraid to step foot outside their boundaries,” Constantine Lesh said firmly. “We must devise weapons with which to fight back.”
This time the silence was even more profound.
James Hallomel slewed around in his seat to give the Manadavvi a piercing stare. “And just how, exactly, do you propose that we fashion weapons?” he asked in a voice of withering politeness. “Have you, during these two hundred years of peace and harmony, been secretly testing guns and missiles and bombs, and all the other forbidden technology that is specifically proscribed in the Librera? Have you so far forgotten your heritage that you have been experimenting with the creation of destructive weapons so powerful and so terrifying that our ancestors left their home planet to escape their dangerous presence? Have you—”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Lesh snapped. “Of course I haven’t.”
“Then how exactly do you propose to design any kind of weapon on an instant’s notice? Because it seems to me we will need to deploy any defense, or any attack, as soon as possible.”
“We are not stupid people,” Constantine Lesh said evenly. “And there are books that the settlers brought with them—books the oracles have the keeping of—that tell of things in our past. We might find in them blueprints for the technology we have need of. And from them, we might quickly be able to fashion these guns and bombs you speak of.”
This time the murmur from the crowd was speculative but, on the whole, approving.
“My father has an old book, it’s been in the family forever, there’s pictures in it—”
“But fire, though. Burning so hot. I don’t know of any fuel we use that can get that combustion level—”
“Who would make the weapons? Who would learn how to use them?”