by Neil Clarke
“Is Gaffurius like this?” Merlin asked, as Renouncer cleaved its way to ground, Tyrant matching its course with an effortless insouciance.
“Gaffurius?” Baskin asked, a fan of wrinkles appearing at the corner of his eyes. “No, much, much worse. At least we still have a few surface settlements, a few areas where the atmosphere is still breathable.”
“I wouldn’t count that as too much of a triumph.” Merlin’s mind was flashing back to the last days of Lecythus, the tainted rubble of its shattered cities, the grey heave of its restless cold ocean, waiting to reclaim what humans had left to ruin. He remembered Minla taking him to the huge whetstone monument, the edifice upon which she had embossed the version of events she wished to be codified as historical truth, long after she and her government were dust.
“Don’t judge us too harshly, Merlin,” Baskin said. “We don’t choose to be enmeshed in this war.”
“Then end it.”
“I intend to. But would you opt for any ceasefire with the Huskers, irrespective of the terms?” He looked at Merlin, then at Teal, the three of them in Renouncer’s sweeping command bridge, standing before its wide arc of windows, shuttered for the moment against the glare of re-entry. Of course you wouldn’t. War is a terrible thing. But there are kinds of peace that are worse.”
“I haven’t seen much evidence of that,” Merlin said.
“Oh, come now. Two men don’t have to spend too much time in each other’s company to know each other for what they are. We’re not so different, Merlin. We disdain war, affect a revulsion for it, but deep down it’ll always be in our blood. Without it, we wouldn’t know what to do with ourselves.”
Teal spoke up. “When we first met, Prince Baskin, you mentioned that you hadn’t always had this interest in languages. What was it you said? Toy soldiers and campaigns will only get you so far? That you used to play at war?”
“In your language—in Main,” Baskin said, “the word for school is ‘war-creche.’ You learn war from the moment you can toddle.”
“But we don’t play at it,” Teal said.
The two ships shook off their cocoons of plasma and bellied into the thicker airs near the surface. They levelled into horizontal flight, and the windows de-shuttered themselves, Merlin blinking against the sudden silvery brightness of day. They were overflying a ravaged landscape, pressed beneath a low, oppressive cloud ceiling. Merlin searched the rolling terrain for evidence of a single living thing, but all he saw was desolation. Here and there was the faint scratch of what might once have been a road, or the gridded thumbprint of some former town, but it was clear that no one now lived among these ruins. Ravines, deep and ominous, sliced their way through the abandoned roads. There were so many craters, their walls interlacing, that it was as if rain had begun to fall on some dull grey lake, creating a momentary pattern of interlinked ripples.
“If I need a planet looking after,” Merlin mumbled, “remind me not to trust it to any of you lot.”
“We’ll rebuild,” Baskin said, setting his hands on the rail that ran under the sweep of windows. “Reclaim. Cleanse and resettle. Even now our genetic engineers are designing the hardy plant species that will re-blanket these lands in green and start making our atmosphere fit for human lungs.” He caught himself, offering a self-critical smile. “You’ll forgive me. Too easy to forget that I’m not making some morale-boosting speech at one of our armaments complexes.”
“Where do you all live now?” Teal asked. “There were surface cities here once . . . weren’t there?”
“We abandoned the last of those cities, Lurga, when I was just out of boyhood,” Baskin said. “Now we live in underground communities, impervious to nuclear assault.”
“I bet the views are just splendid,” Merlin said.
Baskin met his sarcasm with a grim absence of humour. “We endure, Merlin—as the Cohort endures. Here. We’re approaching the entry duct to one of the sub-cities. Do you see that sloping hole?” He was nodding at an angled mouth, jutting from the ground like a python buried up to its eyes. “The Gaffurians are good at destruction, but less good at precision. They can impair our moons and asteroids, but their weapons haven’t the accuracy to strike across space and find a target that small. We’ll return, a little later, and you’ll be made very welcome. But first I’d like to settle any doubts you might have about the syrinx. We’ll continue a little way north, into the highlands. I promise it won’t take long.”
Baskin was true to his word, and they had only flown for a few more minutes when the terrain began to buckle and wrinkle into the beginnings of a barren, treeless mountain range, rising in a series of forbidding steps until even the high-flying spacecraft were forced to increase their altitude. “Most of our military production takes place in these upland sectors,” Baskin said. “We have ready access to metallic ores, heavy isotopes, geothermal energy, and so on. Of course it’s well guarded. Missile and particle beams will be locking onto us routinely, both our ships. The only thing preventing either of them being shot down is our imperial authorisation.”
“That and the countermeasures on my ship,” Merlin said. “Which could peel back these mountains like a scab, if they detected a threat worth bothering with.”
But in truth he felt vulnerable and was prepared to admit it, if only to himself. He could feel the nervous, bristling presence of all that unseen weaponry, like a migraine under the skin of Havergal.
Soon another mouth presented itself. It was wedged at the base of an almost sheer-sided valley.
“Prepare for descent,” Baskin said. “It’ll be a tight squeeze, but your ship shouldn’t have any difficulties following.”
They dived into the mouth and went deep. Kilometres, and then tens of kilometres, before swerving sharply into a horizontal shaft. Merlin allowed not a flicker of a reaction to betray his feelings, but the fact was that he was impressed, in a grudging, disapproving way. There was expertise and determination here—qualities that the Cohort’s military engineers could well have appreciated. Anyone who could dig tunnels was handy in a war.
A glowing orange light shone ahead. Merlin was just starting to puzzle over its origin when they burst into a huge underground chamber, a bubble in the crust of Havergal. The floor of the bubble was a sea of lava, spitting and churning, turbulent with the eddies and currents of some mighty underground flow which just happened to pass in and out of this chamber. Suspended in the middle of the rocky void, underlit by flickering orange light, was a dark structure shaped like an inverted cone, braced in a ring and attached to the chamber’s walls by three skeletal, cantilevered arms. It was the size of a small palace or space station, and its flattened upper surface was easily spacious enough for both ships to set down on with room to spare.
Bulkily suited figures—presumably protected against the heat and toxic airs of this place—came out and circled the ships. They attached a flexible docking connection to Renouncer.
“We call it the facility,” Baskin said, as he and his guests walked down the sloping throat of the docking connector. “Just that. No capital letters, nothing to suggest its ultimate importance. But for many centuries this was the single most important element in our entire defence plan. It was here that we hoped to learn how to make the syrinx work for us.” He turned back to glance at Merlin and Teal. “And where we failed—or continue to fail, I should say. But we had no intention of giving up, not while there was a chance.”
Teal and Merlin were led down into the suspended structure, into a win-dowless warren of corridors and laboratories. They went down level after level, past sealed doors and observation galleries. There was air and power and light, and clearly enough room for thousands of workers. But although the place was clean and well-maintained, hardly anyone now seemed to be present. It was only when they got very deep that signs of activity began to appear. Here the side-rooms and offices showed evidence of recent use, and now and then uniformed staff members passed them, carrying notes and equipment. But Merlin detecte
d no sign of haste or excitement in any of the personnel.
The lowest chamber of the structure was a curious circular room. Around its perimeter were numerous desks and consoles, with seated staff at least giving the impression of being involved in some important business. They were all facing the middle of the room, whose floor was a single circular sheet of glass, stretched across the abyss of the underlying lava flow. The orange glow of that molten river underlit the faces of the staff, as if reminding them of the perilous location of their workplace. The glass floor only caught Merlin’s eye for an instant, though. Of vastly more interest to him was the syrinx, suspended nose-down in a delicate cradle over the middle of the glass. It was too far from the floor to be reached, even if someone had trusted the doubtful integrity of that glass panel. Merlin was just wondering how anyone got close to the syrinx when a flimsy connecting platform was swung out across the glass, allowing a woman to step over the abyss. Tiptoeing lightly, she adjusted something on the syrinx, moving some sort of transducer from one chalked spot to another, before folding the platform away and returning to her console.
All was quiet, with only the faintest whisper of communications from one member of staff to another.
“In the event of an imminent malfunction,” Baskin said, “the syrinx may be dropped through the pre-weakened glass, into the lava sea. That may or may not destroy it, of course. We don’t know. But it would at least allow the workers some chance of fleeing the facility, which would not be the case if we used nuclear charges.”
“I’m glad you’ve got their welfare at heart,” Merlin said.
“Don’t think too kindly of us,” Baskin smiled back. “This is war. If we thought there was a chance of the facility itself being overrun, then more than just the syrinx would need to be destroyed. Also the equipment, the records, the collective expertise of the workers . . . ”
“You’d drop the entire structure,” Teal said, nodding her horrified understanding. “The reason it’s fixed the way it is, on those three legs. You’d press a button and drop all these people into that fire.”
“They understand the risks,” Baskin said. “And they’re paid well. Extremely well, I should say. Besides, it’s a very good incentive to hasten the work of understanding.”
Merlin felt no kinship with these warring peoples, and little more than contempt for what they had done to themselves across all these centuries. But compared to the Waymakers, Merlin, Teal, and Baskin may as well have been children of the same fallen tribe, playing in the same vast and imponderable ruins, not one of them wiser than the others.
“I’ll need persuasion that it’s real,” he said.
“I never expected you to take my word for it,” Baskin said. “You may make whatever use of the equipment here you need, within limits, and you may question my staff freely.”
“Easier if you just let me take it for a test ride.”
“Yes, it would—for you.” Baskin reached out and settled a hand on Merlin’s shoulder, as if they were two old comrades. “Shall we agree—a day to complete your inspection?”
“If that’s all you’ll allow.”
“I’ve nothing to hide, Merlin. Do you imagine I’d ever expect to dupe a man like you with a fake? Go ahead and make your enquiries—my staff have already been told to offer you complete cooperation.” Baskin touched a hand to the side of his mouth, as if whispering a secret. “Truth to tell, it will suit many of them if you take the syrinx. Then they won’t feel obliged to keep working in this place.”
They were given a room in the facility, while Merlin made his studies of the syrinx. The staff were as helpful as Baskin had promised, and Merlin soon had all the equipment and records he could have hoped for. Short of connecting the syrinx to Tyrant’s own diagnostic systems, he was able to run almost every test he could imagine, and the results and records quickly pointed to the same conclusion. The syrinx was the genuine article.
But Merlin did not need a whole day to arrive at that conclusion.
While Baskin kept Teal occupied with endless discussions in Main, learning all that he could from this living speaker, Merlin used the console to dig into Havergal’s history, and specifically the background and career of Baskin’s long-dead ancestor, King Curtal. He barely needed to access the private records; what was in the public domain was clear enough. Curtal had come to power within a decade of the Shrike’s visit to this system.
Merlin waited until they were alone in the evening, just before they were due to dine with Prince Baskin.
“You’ve been busy all day,” Teal said. “I take it you’ve reached a verdict by now?”
“The syrinx? Oh, that was no trouble at all. It’s real, just as Baskin promised. But I used my time profitably, Teal. I found out something else as well—and I think you’ll find it interesting. You were right about that portrait, you see.”
“I know you enjoy these games, Merlin. But if you want to get to the point . . . ”
“The man who became King Curtal began life called Tierce.” He watched her face for the flicker of a reaction that he knew she would not be able to conceal. The recognition of a name, across years or centuries, depending on the reckoning.
Merlin cleared his throat before continuing.
“Tierce was a high-ranking officer in the Havergal military command— assigned to the liaison group which dealt with the Shrike. He’d have had close contact with your crew during the whole time you were in-system.”
Her mouth moved a little before she found the words. “Tell me what happened to Tierce.”
“Nothing bad. But what you might not have known about Tierce was that he was also minor royalty. He probably played it down, trying to get ahead in his career on his own merits. And that was how things would have worked out, if it wasn’t for one of those craters. A Gaffurian long-range strike, unexpected and deadly, taking out the entire core of the royal family. They were all killed, Teal—barely a decade after you left the system. But they had to maintain continuity, then more than ever. The chain of succession led to Tierce, and he became King Curtal. The man you knew ended up as King.”
She looked at him for a long moment, perhaps measuring for herself the reasons Merlin might have had to lie about such a thing, and then finding none that were plausible, beyond tormenting her for the sake of it.
“Can you be sure?”
“The records are open. There was no cover-up about the succession itself. But the fact that Tierce had a daughter . . . ” Merlin found that he had to glance away before continuing. “That was difficult. The girl was illegitimate, and that was deeply problematic for the Havergal elite. On the other hand, Tierce was proud and protective of his daughter, and wouldn’t accept the succession unless Cupis—that’s the girl’s name—was given all the rights and privileges of nobility. There was a constitutional tussle, as you can imagine. But eventually it was all settled in favour of Cupis and she was granted legitimacy within the family. They’re good at that sort of thing, royals.”
“What you’re saying is that Cupis was my daughter.”
“For reasons that you can probably imagine, there’s no mention that the child was born to a Cohort mother. That would be a scandal beyond words. But of course you could hardly forget that you’d given birth to a girl, could you?”
She answered after a moment’s hesitation. “We had a girl. Her name was Pauraque.”
Merlin nodded. “A Cohort name—not much good for the daughter of a king. Tierce would have had to accept a new name for the girl, something more suited to local customs. I don’t doubt it was hard for him, if the old name was a link to the person he’d never see again, the person he presumably loved and missed. But he accepted the change in the girl’s interests. Do you mind—was there a reason you didn’t stay with Tierce, or Tierce didn’t join you on the Shrike?”
“Neither was allowed,” Teal said, with a sudden coldness in her voice. “What happened was difficult. Tierce and I were never meant to get that close, and if one of us
had stayed with the other it would have made the whole affair a lot more public, risking the trade agreements. We were given no choice. They said if I didn’t go along with things, the simplest option would be to make Pauraque disappear. So I had to leave my daughter behind on Havergal, and I was told it would be best for me if I forgot she ever existed. And I tried. But when I saw that portrait . . . ”
“I can’t imagine what you went through,” Merlin answered. “But if I can offer anything by way of consolation, it’s this. King Curtal was a good ruler— one of the best they had. And Queen Cupis did just as well. She took the throne late in her father’s life, when Curtal abdicated due to failing health. And by all accounts she was an honest and fair-minded ruler who did everything she could to broker peace with the enemy. It was only when the military computers overruled her plans . . . ” Merlin managed a kindly smile and produced the data tablet had been keeping by his side. It was of Havergal manufacture, but rugged and intuitive in its functions. He held it to Teal and a woman’s face appeared on the screen. “That’s Queen Cupis,” he said. “She wasn’t one of the portraits we saw earlier, or you’d have made the connection for yourself. I can see you in her pretty clearly.”
Teal took the tablet and held it close to her, so that its glow underlit her features. “Are there more images?” she asked, with a catch in her voice, as if she almost feared the answer.