Gilliam collected himself, smoothing back his flaxen hair as he stood straight as he would go. He spat, made a warding gesture. “Don’t you dare insult my mother again, boy, or I’ll have you thrown naked into those fighting pits of yours.”
I knew better than to respond.
CHAPTER 55
THE QUIET
I STOOD WATCHING MY feet, long fingers clutching the bottle of Kandarene red Dorian had helped me smuggle from the castle cellars. Standing there I became acutely aware of the blood beating in my ears and of something small and niggling in my left boot. Uncomfortable in stillness, I fidgeted, shifting the bottle so that I clutched it behind my back. After a mere half minute, when it seemed all the stars had burned out and the universe had gone cold, the door locks cycled with a metallic whine, the latch rattled, and rose-gold light spilled into the hall, slicing a wedge across the intricately patterned wooden floor.
A naked man, handsome and gray-eyed, looked out at me, blinking, trying to conceal his genitals with a plaid blanket. I stammered an apology. “I’ve the wrong room, messer. Forgive me.” I was sure I did not have the wrong room. Averting my eyes politely, I said, “I thought I had the Tavrosi diplomat’s room. Has she been moved?”
“M. Gibson?” The voice rose from deeper in the room behind the naked man. “What is it?”
My heart—I cannot tell you what happened to it. It did not sink but rather left my body entirely and plunged toward the planet’s core. I glanced briefly at the muscled young man in the doorway. Plebeian, by the slight asymmetries in his otherwise perfect face, but beyond that I could not say if he was a courtier or a servant. It mattered not. He was her lover, and she had forgotten about our meeting. She swung into view, languorous and light-footed as a cat, those golden eyes bright in the scant light of her chamber. She had pulled a long shirt hastily over her head, and her red-black hair tumbled in wild disarray. A flush glowed on her pale cheeks, but there was no embarrassment in her. Before I could stop the silent screaming in my soul and articulate a response, she gasped, “We had a meeting!” She pressed a hand to her cheek, remembering, and pressed the other against the back of the man in the doorway.
“We did.”
“What time is it?” she asked, glancing from me to her lover. I told her, and she hissed between her teeth, then said, “Out then. Out you go.”
Crestfallen, I swept into a bow, doing my best to conceal the incriminating bottle of wine. “Of course, my—Doctor.” I’d almost used the wrong address again, and it made me scowl. “I’m so sorry.”
“No, not you!” She snapped fingers at the man. “What was your name? Mal?”
“Malo,” the man said in honeyed tones, moving to wrap an arm about her slim shoulders. I wanted to scream, but Valka brushed him off. Scowling in turn, the other man slid out past me, not concerned in the least about his nakedness. One of the pleasure servants kept for the guests of the palatinate? Mother’s harem sprang to mind. Surely the count kept his own such harem, if only as a symbol of his lordly authority. “Dial in if you need me again, Doctor.”
Valka flashed a brittle smile and slapped the man’s backside. He jumped and hurried down the hall naked—but it was not uncommon to see one of the palace bedworkers so unclothed. I winced. Her smile collapsed the minute Malo vanished. I watched him go, then bowed to Valka again, more coldly formal. “Doctor Onderra.” I found my mouth suddenly dry, my words breathless. “If I should come back at another time . . .”
“No, no!” She scratched her fingers through her hair. “Not at all. Do come in.” She held the door open for me. “It’s my fault—the time got away from me.” She bit her lip. “Would you like something to drink?”
Anxious, hesitant, I revealed the green glass bottle from behind my back. “Actually I brought something, if you’d like.” There was a kitchenette in one corner with tiled counters and gas burners, every device of cold, brushed steel. I moved toward the couch—strewn with tangled blankets and the scattered remains of Valka’s clothing . . . and Malo’s. I do not know why the fact bothered me like it did. I might have availed myself of the palace body servants had I a mind, same as her. I never did. The two high windows dripped with dark hangings, occluding the bruised and twilit sky, admitting only scarce light. The artificial lights were similarly dimmed, glowspheres gone faint as moonlight through cloud, hanging sensuously in the air like paper lanterns.
Valka eyed the Kandarene bottle and gestured to a cupboard near the small kitchenette in the far corner of her small quarters. “You pour. I’ll find my things.” She sauntered off through an arched portal to the back room while I found a corkscrew and glasses. I confess I watched her go—the sway of her—with the bemused candor of all young men who believe their attentions unnoticed.
“The capital agrees with you, I see,” I called from my place by the tiled counter.
“What’s that?” Valka’s bright-edged voice trilled from the other room, strained a bit with the effort of searching.
“I said, the capital agrees with you!”
The doctor emerged some time later, carrying her wrist terminal and a series of data crystals. Setting the accouterments down on a low table by the settee, she said, “I wouldn’t say that.” She had sonicked herself clean and sorted her hair, though she still wore her loose, flowing shirt. The front and left sleeve were printed with ghostly human skulls wreathed in smoke above the logo of some Tavrosi musical group, and she’d donned trousers of some elastic weave of the sort often worn for exercise. They suited her.
In the pressuring way many young and foolish men believe passes for subtlety, I said, “I meant your companion.”
“What?” She plugged one of the crystal flakes into a read slot on the terminal, squeezed the projector. “Oh, Malo!” she snorted. “He’s just . . . well, he’s all right.” I felt a little better as I passed her the wine, which she took with a grateful bow just as the holograph phased into laser clarity. Long legs up on the table, Valka raised her glass and said, “I didn’t mean to keep you waiting.” She reached out and lay a warm hand on my arm. “I’m sorry.”
I bobbed my head, swallowing the little wine I’d sipped. “It’s all right.” I tried not to think about her gentleman companion, palace servant or no. “We all forget things.”
“I don’t.” She spoke without boasting but said this as if it were only a fact. “I must have lost track of the time . . .” Here she glanced wryly at her lap, as if to indicate that it was a bit late for such mannered consideration. I struggled not to blush, steeled myself with thoughts of Cat that arrested my desires quite handily and replaced them with a sick, yawning guilt. “How goes it with you?” We continued in this vein for a couple of minutes, Valka gathering a blanket from the back of the settee to cover herself.
During the first lull in our conversation, I said, “There’s something that’s been bothering me.”
One eyebrow arched teasingly. “Just the one?”
I sniffed bemusedly. “For the moment!” We exchanged private smiles, and I hid myself behind the rim of my wine cup. “You said Calagah was made of stone, but while we were at Ulakiel . . . The Umandh, well . . . they hardly seem capable of anything so complicated as masonry.”
Valka sat stone-still a moment, watching me. Then, like a spider stirred to sudden movement by the vibration of a string, she stood, blanket falling to the floor. “I haven’t shown you my holographs!” She hurried to her room again, then returned carrying a tablet terminal, which she deposited on the drinking table before the couch. “I’ve been meaning to show you . . .” She toggled through a couple of settings on the small screen, then clicked a hardware switch on the device’s frame. “This is Calagah.”
The image projected in a concave sweep of laser light before us showed satellite images of a complex built into a deep cleft between cliffs of columnar basalt, vestiges of Emesh’s ancient and long-since-ended volcanism. Valka described its l
atitude and the dimensions of the site in question, cycling through image after image with languid waves of her free hand. She recited facts and figures with a casual offhandedness that belied a level of memorization even the scholiasts would respect.
At last she cycled to ground images, revealing a geometry more precise than the natural shapes of the basalt pillars—flat faces of black stone like obsidian, pillared and arched like a mathematician’s fever dream. It looked . . . how can I put this? The ruins did not seem to be a part of the surrounding rock face. Rather it was as if some immense artist had inserted them into the landscape by some malfunction of computer programming, a fault in the process of rendering that had clipped the facade through the cliff face.
“It’s beautiful,” I breathed at last. Surely here was one of the Ninety-Nine Wonders of the Universe, or the unlisted hundredth. “When did you say it was built?”
Valka’s eyes sparked as she leaned back against the settee. “Now, that is an interesting question. ’Tis difficult to date. The material the builders used shares some similarities with obsidian, but hydration dating is out due to the site’s history of flooding. But that would only date the material in any case, and there’s no mortar or organic material on-site. No paints or pigments. No graves.”
“But you have a guess?” I asked.
“We do. Based on the age of the surrounding strata.” She smiled and encouragingly asked, “How old would you think?”
As a young boy, I had gone with my uncle Lucian to see an old stone town some of the first colonists had built on Delos in the first centuries of settlement. They had been poor, and but for a couple of prefabricated structures, they had quarried the native granite. The stone for Devil’s Rest came from the same place, you know, he had said. The quarry’s up in the mountains. But the stone of that town was poorly cut and worse jointed, and though it was a protected site by order of the viceroyalty, it was showing its age. These alien ruins reminded me of that dilapidated town, thick with the caul of history and the ghosts of all that time.
“Five, six thousand years?” I said, adding in another couple of millennia for good measure.
The xenologist shook her head. She pushed her hair back before she answered, “No.”
“More?” I asked. “Surely no more than ten . . . twelve thousand years?”
Her grin widened. “No.”
“Twenty?”
“Hadrian.” She said my name like it was a child’s name—like I was a child. “These ruins are more than seven hundred thousand years old. Maybe so much as a million.”
I gasped fishlike for a good ten seconds. “What?” I couldn’t even begin to articulate all my questions. How could something possibly endure so long? What exactly was it built of? How had it survived seasonal flooding for all those uncounted eons? I spoke without thinking, so absorbed that for a moment I was heedless of my surroundings. “The Umandh couldn’t have built this. That would make them . . . so much older than we are. They should have advanced past us.” But the raw truth was staring at me out of the laser light. “They couldn’t have built anything like this. They don’t have the technology!”
Valka stopped my roll. “And so we come back to Philemon and Unnatural Grammars.”
“You’re not seriously proposing that the Umandh have been a static culture for the better part of a million years? We’re just over a quarter of a million years old ourselves, and . . .” I held up my hands, indicating the vast expanse of human civilization, as if my spread fingers could encompass all those stars and planets and the Dark between them. Frustratingly, Valka shrugged. She looked away, playing with the hem of her shirt. Not for the first time, I felt there was something she wasn’t saying. I remembered our encounter with Engin the slave trader and spoke again. “Take the Cavaraad, for example. Hemachandra’s ethnography—what was it called?” I could not remember the name of the volume and gave it up. “He describes the Cavaraad in Mattar Prefecture on Sadal Suud as approximating the late Bronze Age in their development. That’s why he pushed to get the planet protectorate status when House Rodolfo sought to stake its claim.”
“Claim . . .” Valka repeated, taking a sour sip of her wine.
“But as a species, the Cavaraad are only about fifty thousand years younger than we are!” I protested. “Surely you’re not going to pin that delta solely on the fact that they speak.”
“Sing, actually.” Valka slammed back the remainder of her wine with an agility that made me wince—the vintage was worth the price of a flier. “They have no lips—they work their diaphragms like bellows. Changes the pitch.” She made a gesture with her free hand, pressing on the air as if on a bladder. It made me think of bagpipes. An apt comparison, that, if you have never heard the Cavaraad sing.
“You’ve seen them?” I sat forward with greater interest, as she had touched upon this great obsession of my youth. “The Cavaraad?”
White teeth flashed in the dimness. “I spent a summer on Sadal Suud, actually.” Valka reached out for the bottle, refilled her glass. “What is this, by the way? ’Tis quite good.”
“Archduke Markarian’s finest bouillir. The ’969, I think?” I wrested the bottle from her, rotating the label. “Yes!”
“Markarian?” Her eyes widened. “This must be worth a fortune!”
“Lord Dorian acquired it for me from his fathers’ cellars.” When Valka’s eyes did not contract, I dismissed the enormity signified by the vintage. I had hoped to have another conversation that night, so I said, “I told him it was for a lady.” Her face darkened, and I added, “I didn’t say it was for a doctor.”
I looked away, covering my new embarrassment with a long drink. We fell into silence, unsettled, uneasy. The only sound that remained was the faint, edge-of-hearing whine of the holograph projector in Valka’s terminal. My nerves finally overpowered my patience. Eager to get back on track, I began, “On Sadal Suud, did you see the Marching Towers?”
In answer she bent over her terminal and keyed in a couple of commands. A moment later the image in the air dissolved, replaced by a flat image of a smiling Valka standing on a ridge line, gripping the straps of a knapsack on her shoulders. Behind her a series of black stone towers rose from the next ridge line like spines on the back of a dragon. “I hiked the old stone road with a caravan from Mattar to Port Shiell.” She toggled the image, showing a series of ox-drawn wains. “I can’t believe you people still make animals do things like that.”
“That’s why they were domesticated on Earth,” I said, brushing this jibe away. “That must have been a wonderful trip. Can you go inside the towers?” I’d never seen holographs of the alien towers before, and the accounts I had read as a boy were mostly apocryphal.
“Oh no,” Valka said. “They’re more obelisks than towers. The Cavaraad used to drag these massive stones from the lowlands to line the ridge.” I saw one of the Giants in her next holograph. It must have been thirty feet high, its gray flesh like wet clay, its face a featureless black pit. How it saw with only that gaping hole for a face, I did not know. The holograph moved, and the huge creature lumbered off into the fungal forests, dwarfing the treelike mushrooms. The holographs began to toggle then, flipping through images of Valka’s trip. A close-up of one of the towers dominated the field in one. It was like a piece of night, black as the stones of my home, so dark I could not make out any features. That bothered me, but I had another thought pressing at my teeth.
Coming back round to the topic, I said, “Much as I like Tor Philemon, I’m not sure his hypothesis explains everything. If Calagah is really so old as you say, then there’s something . . . something very wrong . . .” I was about to say with the Umandh, but I had just seen the obvious fact. When next I spoke, it was in a voice with all the juice pressed from it: flat and lifeless, full of fear. “The Umandh didn’t build Calagah, did they?”
Valka’s expression was completely unreadable. I’d like to fl
atter myself and think that she was surprised, but the woman has always remained one part mystery to me. She seemed far away, as if focusing on a noise in a distant room. At last she stirred and shook her head, reaching for the bouillir as she did. “I don’t think so.”
“You don’t think so?” I echoed, pressing.
“No,” she said more firmly. “The Umandh are only perhaps half a million years from the evolutionary womb.”
My problem with her holograph of the Marching Towers snagged suddenly like a cloak on the sharp edge of my mind, and I sat straighter. “It’s all the same!”
Valka did look surprised then. “What?”
“The Towers, Calagah—I bet even the Temple of Athten Var on Judecca. It’s supposed to be all black stone too.” I stalled out, then pointed at her. “You’ve been to Athten Var! You don’t study the Umandh or the Cavaraad. You study . . .” I trailed off, staring through the image of one of the Marching Towers of Sadal Suud, standing defiant against a binary sunrise. Momentarily unaware of the heresy I spoke, I breathed, “It’s all one culture, isn’t it? One species.” I sat in a kind of fugue, in a sort of religious transport. It is said that our forebears looked up from Earth’s face and into the Dark and asked if we were alone in the universe. We were not. But this. This.
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