Arachne tensed, listening to Felph without glancing. "What is it, Lord Felph?" she asked. He did not answer. Instead, Felph stared at the scene of his own murder and wondered at the weaver's prophetic abilities. If you are as wise as I think you are, then you already will know why I have come, he told himself.
"You test me?" Arachne asked when he didn't reply. "All right, then." She took a deep breath, stopped as if listening to the air. . . . "There has been a change in the population," she guessed, or seemed to guess, but she said the last word with conviction. Could someone have told her? Was she playing with him? Not likely, though his children enjoyed such mind games. Still, he could not fathom how she’d guessed. “Not a birth—Shira is not due yet for two weeks. A death?” she hazarded. Felph knew she wasn’t prophetic, that she was taking subtle clues from him, from the way he breathed, the intonation of his words, the position of his body relative to hers. She had sensitive hearing, could probably measure the beats of his heart. He wanted to give her no clues, so he tried to control his breathing perfectly, to maintain a steady rhythm, say nothing. “No . . . not a death, then.” She turned to him suddenly; a smile warmed her black eyes that stared through him. She knew he did not like gazing into her eyes—they were too wise, too probing—and he glanced away. “Visitors!” she said with delight. “We have visitors to our world. Tell me, Felph, who are they?”
“They’re landing now, out near Devil’s Bunghole. Four people, according to the ship’s logs, milady,” Felph said, smiling broadly in spite of his nervousness. Though he was her lord and her creator, Felph stood in awe of Arachne. The weaver woman had been made for this purpose, to comprehend mankind better than they comprehended themselves, to sift through subtle clues to the motivations and desires of others, then predict what they would do. Yet even as he’d designed her mind, trained and nurtured his creation, Felph had never imagined that Arachne would become what she had become. Felph felt immensely gratified with his creation. At the same time, he was humbled by her, frightened of her abilities. “Two-two of them are humans, a young man and a pregnant woman. The other two are genetically enhanced bears.”
“What class of starship do they command?” she asked.
“A TechKing Fleet Courier.”
“A fast ship. Expensive . . .” the waver mumbled. “They must be rich. But why would they come to Ruin? You say they’re landing at Devil’s Bunghole?”
She thought a moment. If they were tourists, they’d land at the salt pillars of Kloowee, or at the twelve towers of Sandomoon Breeze, or perhaps at the opal plains. If they were here to study Qualeewooh ruins, they’d have contacted Felph before landing. He was the foremost authority on such ruins.
Felph wondered what the weaver might be thinking. He enjoyed watching Arachne solve puzzles. “They are fugitives,” she said with finality. Turning back to her loom.
“I don’t know. They could be so many things—explorers, entrepreneurs, settlers,” Felph said. “Why do you imagine them fugitives?”
She did not bother to reply. She absently gazed at the tapestry taking shape on her loom. “There is something you’re not telling me?” she accused.
Had she heard an unusual silence after his last question, an expectant undertone?
“There is one thing,” Felph admitted. “According to his ship’s log, the man is a Lord Protector, and his wife is a Lord Technologist. I’m thinking of hiring them. The Lord Protector could teach Herm and Zeus a few things—tactics and self-defense—”
“—And you hope he can find the Waters for you . . .”
“Well, yes,” Felph said. “I’d thought of that.”
“And little else,” Arachne said. “Certainly you’ve considered little else.” The damning tone of her voice said that she was already considering ramifications that were far beyond Felph’s ability to comprehend.
“I—I thought the woman might help in my creations,” Felph said, to prove that he’d indeed been considering the possibilities. “Hephaestus is coming along fine.”
“It’s Aphrodite you want to make next. Why don’t you just finish her?” It was not really a question. The weaver’s tone suggested dismissal. Felph stood, stroking his short gray beard. Arachne was lost in her own thoughts, but mumbled, “So, a Lord Protector. . . . We have powerful refugees then. Running from the Dronon.”
“I doubt it. The Dronon have been vanquished—”
“Temporarily!” Arachne sighed, as if weary of Felph’s stupidity. I must seem simpleminded to her, Felph thought for the thousandth time. She turned at her work. “Have you considered the danger of bringing them here?”
“Danger?” Felph asked. “What danger? They won’t harm us.”
“I’m not afraid of what they’d do to us. It’s what we’ll do to them.”
Arachne turned to Felph, head cocked toward the sunlight, as if straining to hear distant music from outside the window. Suddenly she grunted in surprise at a thought that occurred to her. “I want to meet them, immediately,” she said, ordering him to fetch the off-worlders.
“Well, uh, yes. Of course,” Felph said. “I’ll plan a dinner party, tonight. I’ll invite the whole planet.”
The whole planet wasn’t many. A few odd hermits, a couple of xenobiologists, five dozen ill-bred refugees who performed various odd jobs for Felph.
“Perfect.” The weaver woman took a small pick from the workbench beside her chair and began plucking yarn from her tapestry, destroying the image of Felph’s murder. She muttered under her breath, “New people on the planet. This changes the weave, this changes everything. . . .”
It annoyed Felph that Arachne prophesied his demise. If he were to be murdered, it would be a nuisance—having his memories downloaded into a new body, making all those minor adjustments that come with your unanticipated death.
But somehow it annoyed him that the murder was off. “Wait,” Felph shook a finger at her. “Are you telling me that a dinner party is all it will take to win this reprieve? You think Zeus won’t kill me, if I arrange a party?”
“At least for now,” she said. “Zeus is easily distracted. A young woman to ogle, especially a pregnant one, will intrigue him. I assume she is pretty—a Lord Protector would not likely marry an ugly woman. Go tell Zeus to help prepare for the party, and it will drive all thoughts of murder from his mind—for two or three days, at least.”
Felph chuckled softly, shaking his head. “So, Zeus plots against me, and you would do nothing to stop him?”
“Zeus takes no counsel from me—or anyone else,” Arachne said. “He’s stubborn.”
Felph considered. His son, Zeus, was a brilliant young man, prone to ruthlessness. The young man wore a Guide that was supposed to control him, keep him from acting on his violent impulses. But Zeus had managed to remove the Guide three years past, and might do so once again. On that occasion, Zeus had tried to murder Felph. He’d first crept into the revivification chamber and tried to erase all records of Felph’s genetic mapping, along with certain other security programs. Only a minor error had kept Zeus’s plot from reaching fruition.
Felph nodded slightly to Arachne, thinking, Well, if my son plots against me, perhaps I need a Lord Protector at my side.
Chapter Four
Maggie was not impressed by Felph's palace, nor was she impressed by the local mode of travel. The florafeem she, Gallen, and the bears rode thundered over a redrock ridge the color of flame; the roaring clack of the thousands of fanlike wings on the florafeem's underbelly had dulled her hearing. The beast handler, who rode beside her, was a man named Dooring. He spoke loudly.
Dooring had explained to her that the florafeems were native to Ruin, strange creatures that sucked nectar from the dew trees out in the tangles. Big animals. In shape they resembled some strange flower, with four "wings" shaped like petals, but the wings did not flap. Instead, thousands of bony fanlike appendages under the creature's rigid surface fluttered at a tremendous speed, creating enough upward force to keep a florafeem a
loft. On top, the creature's skin seemed to be only a thick membrane over an upper frame of cartilaginous bone. That membrane was covered over by grasslike purple hairs, and small creatures lived on it.
The florafeem measured some fifty meters in diameter. This beast had a saffron-colored silk pavilion erected on its back .
Dozens of blue-scaled birds swooped and dived around the florafeem, feeding off insects that lived on its back, giving high, croaking calls. In the pavilion behind her, Maggie was vaguely aware of Gallen, resting his hand on her back, sometimes massaging her weary muscles.
The bears, Orick and Tallea, both lay on their paws, staring ahead, tired.
The journey to Felph's palace had taken nearly three hours, and Maggie's back felt stiff from sitting. Though she was past the point in her pregnancy where she should have felt morning sickness, she'd been fighting nausea for the past two hours. A dozen times she wished that she and Gallen had refused to travel by florafeem. The idea had seemed quaint upon invitation, yet she hadn't known how unbearable the journey might be. Still it was not the discomfort of the journey that unsettled her on the final approach. It was Felph's palace.
As she topped the cliff, she saw it shining among the fields ahead like something from a fairy tale, yet utterly unlike anything so ... insignificant. Felph's palace was enormous--all carved from rose-colored sandstone on three sides of a mountain. The palace gleamed like a moon, for all along the base of it, thousands of brilliant lights shone, illuminating even the dusty skies above. The walls of the palace rose perhaps a thousand meters high, and it was impossible to imagine how thick they might be. The walls weren't perpendicular, for stone piled so high could not have supported the structure; instead the walls climbed at a steep slope, and every fifty meters would be a small road or trail carved along the exterior of the castle.
An ornate fence made of stone pillars bordered each road. On the walls above each road, gargoyles and angels were carved in bas-relief, engaging in scenes hellish and heavenly. Water cascaded over the walls in dozens of places-from a pot held by a gaggle of demons, from a cloud that served as a stool for a thoughtful angel. The water was captured and reused hundreds of times to utterly astonishing effect, for as the lights shone on the palace, the falling waters cloaked the stone in shimmering wonder.
The beast handler next to her, Dooring, had been talking almost nonstop until a few moments earlier. She almost thought of him as some artificial intelligence, its processors broken, verbally spewing out everything it knew. Maggie realized he had quit speaking so she wouldn't be distracted by his voice on first sight of Felph's palace. Now he stood, gesticulating wildly at the pillars and verandas, the glorious towers and the glittering stained windows.
"Look at that! They've got the lights on for you--and even the waterfalls. What a treat! Have you ever seen anything like it? Look at that statue! Incredible!"
"How many people live in the palace?" Maggie asked.
She imagined that this palace could easily house a million souls.
"Six," Dooring shouted. "And a handful of us servants. Felph hardly ever sleeps in the same room twice! Oh, would you just look at that! And here comes Brightstar over the mountains behind it. Incredible!" He slapped his forehead, continuing his monologue.
Indeed, Ruin's small dark sun was setting, and its twin star, which the locals called Brightstar, was rising gloriously over the hills.
At the base of the mountain Maggie spotted a cloud of dust. Golden worker droids shone among the dust like beetles, scurrying about. Maggie counted hundreds of droids that must have been carving these rocks for centuries.
Dooring the beast handler kicked the creature with his heels, just above its huge central eye. The florafeem thundered down. A single vaulted opening at the base of the mountain provided an entrance hundreds of meters high and at least three hundred wide.
There, in the sky, flapping his wings, was Felph's handsome son Herm, who had come personally to Maggie's camp to invite them to dinner, giving vague hints of a possible offer of employment. He hadn't said what the job would consist of. Apparently to discuss such matters prematurely would flout local customs.
Herm flew just ahead of the florafeem, a brilliant glow globe in hand, and led them through the air.
Maggie felt ... annoyed. All this ostentation. All this waste. On the two dozen worlds she'd visited, Maggie had never seen anything like it.
Felph was obviously vain, possibly mad. Dooring had told Maggie that Felph relied almost solely on droids for servants. Though Dooring worked for the old man, he hadn't personally seen Felph in a dozen years. Instead, Felph's passions in life seemed to be the study of history, and engineering his own genetically upgraded children.
If Herm, with his wings, was an example of Felph's handiwork, she wondered at his purposes. Herm, a painfully thin man, had hair of darkest brown that framed a handsome face, and his eyes were like twin pieces of palest green ice. But most curious about him was the enormous wings, sweeping up from his back, all feathered in beer brown with splotches of white. He wore a pair of clean blue tights, and had on a nice white tunic, stiff with embroidery about the neck, cuffs, and waist. Herm seemed bright, energetic, intelligent, and he affected a slightly superior smile. He seemed to be only a slightly altered human.
But from her work with the aberlains of Fale, Maggie knew better. He'd have to be incredibly strong to fly with such mass. His bones would have to be hollow, which meant that his immune system might be vastly different from a human's. She suspected that Felph would have simply resorted to a nanotech analog for that immune system, but she didn't know.
More troubling than Felph's engineering his own children was the fact that Lord Felph made Herm wear a Guide.
Maggie had worn one once, only for a few days; the memory horrified her. The artificial intelligence in the Guide linked directly to the brain, so that when Maggie wore one, she could not control her own muscles. The Guide even controlled her desires, at times, when her master wanted.
Maggie could imagine nothing a father could do that would be more cruel than to enslave his children in their own bodies.
Maggie suspected she would detest Felph. The vanity of such a man.
Yet as they thundered through the first set of walls, then rose up to one of perhaps a hundred gorgeous verandas where the spraying fountains shone, Maggie recognized one important fact: Lord Felph had money, enough money to ensure that she got the best medical help possible when she delivered her child.
So she had to wonder. Could she endure working for a man she would hate?
The florafeem thundered to the ground in a broad veranda, settling next to four other florafeems. Apparently some other guests had already arrived.
Maggie dismounted shakily, walking to the edge of the creature's broad, gravelly back, then glancing down. It was a good three-foot drop., and in her tender condition she didn't want to jump. She looked over her shoulder, saw half a dozen other florafeems floating over the valley. They looked like giant flowers blown on the wind, the tall pavilions gleaming like crimson and golden stamens at their centers.
Herm himself walked up and took Maggie's hand, helped her from the beast.
Herm spoke a gracious welcome and bid the guests enter, waving under the wide stone arches toward a glittering chamber. Enormous tables held piles of food among dozens of candelabras, and several other guests had begun snacking near those tables.
Herm guided Maggie, Gallen, Orick, and Tallea to the center of the great hall, nodding as he walked toward various small knots of people. A ragged foursome of men appeared, from their dirty and tattered tan outfits and numerous weapons, to be soldiers fresh from the tangle. The group looked toward Maggie, and she inwardly cringed. Something about their eyes, their unblinking eyes, unsettled her.
"Poachers," Herm whispered.
"What do they poach?" Maggie asked.
"Qualeewoohs," Herm said. Maggie thought it repugnant that anyone would resort to eating a sentient alien species.
As if reading her thoughts, Herm whispered. "They kill them for their spirit masks--and for any artifacts they might be carrying."
He nodded toward a knot of men and women talking at another table, people who looked almost as dirty as the poachers. "Xenobiologists and paleontologists."
Most of the rest of the people milling about--perhaps a dozen or two--all wore the same black tights and golden tunics that Dooring wore. Maggie recognized it as something of a servant's uniform.
"How many people on planet?" Gallen asked.
"Maybe a hundred," Herm answered. "At least it was close to that at last count, though doubtless some have died. Most are like those you see. Lord Felph employs a few workers, and we have some scientists and treasure hunters. Some are just recluses and madmen."
Maggie hadn't imagined that so few people would live on a whole planet. True, they were in the Carina Galaxy now, having fled the Milky Way, and true, Ruin was on the far frontiers even of the Carina Galaxy. But a hundred people?
Outside, the other florafeems began to land, and people off-loaded. Most were dirty hunters and field scientists. Maggie took a quick guess, and imagined that eighty or ninety people must have already arrived.
A small gaggle of locals crowded around to meet Gallen's group. The four were, apparently, the first strangers to visit Ruin in several years. Their appearance caused a stir.
Maggie took .a place to one side of the great hall, waiting for locals to come by so Herm could make introductions. Here, in this stately palace, the crowds looked out of place. They were a sweaty, begrimed lot. No charitable sentiment on Maggie's part could disguise the fact that most of these folks didn't need introductions to Maggie so much as they needed introductions to a bar of soap.
Tentatively, the people of Ruin introduced themselves. From the far side of the room Herm spotted a fellow and waited for him to approach. "I fear," Herm whispered, "that you're about to discover why my father doesn't appreciate visitors."
Lords of the Seventh Swarm, Book 3 of the Golden Queen Series Page 4