Harmony

by C. F. Bentley

  Not a bad idea. Then he groaned at the amount of work required to get that to happen. Unless he found a back entrance into the chamber. Jake had suggested the corridor outside the archive basement.

  Penelope ran her fingers through his hair.

  The Covenant Stones had been hidden away for centuries. They’d wait another day.

  “Be careful, Bethy,” he warned, very uneasy in his mid region. “This is dangerous information. The ‘no bones’ cult might take this as a license to make Discord an equal to Harmony.”

  “I know, Daddy. That’s why Laudae Sissy doesn’t want us talking about it to anybody. So you’d better not tell anyone either. Even Laud Gregor, until Laudae Sissy says so.”

  “Our lips are sealed, Bethy. Watch your step and your back. You never know who up there has a different agenda from Laudae Sissy.”

  “I need your help,” Colonel Jeoff da George pa Law Enforcement HQ H Prime whispered in Jake’s ear.

  Jake pretended to startle out of a light doze. He never slept hard, less so now that he guarded Sissy day and night, taking what rest he could on a cot placed across the door to Sissy’s bedroom. He’d charted Jeoff’s quiet footsteps from the moment he entered the residence wing of the Temple.

  Jeoff’s hand covered his mouth, just enough to keep him from crying out.

  “What?” Jake mouthed against the hand.

  Jeoff motioned Jake to follow. On silent stockinged feet they threaded their way through Sissy’s sitting room crowded with sleeping acolytes. Jake carried his boots.

  Once outside the residence, Jeoff sat on the stoop to pull on his own boots. Jake sat beside him to do the same. Chill mountain air cut through the thick cloth of his uniform, sending goose bumps up his arms. He yawned and shivered slightly, more to put the colonel off guard than to express his own discomfort.

  Jeoff was young for his advanced rank. Not more than mid-forties. Still vigorous and strong, with a full head of tight sandy-blond curls and only the beginnings of a middle-aged spread around his gut. This guy worked in the field as much as at his desk. Someone to be wary of.

  “What?” Jake asked again, this time aloud.

  “I need a closer look at some of those bones, without mind-blind Temple enthusiasts peering over my shoulder.”

  “So go look. Who’s stopping you. It’s three in the effing morning.” Another yawn. This one real.

  “I can’t do it alone. I need good lights and someone to hold them for me. Someone to bear witness that I’m not tainting the evidence I find.” Jeoff heaved himself upright.

  Jake continued sitting, playing with getting his boots on just right. Stalling for more information. “What do you expect to find?”

  “That the oldest bones, everything over five hundred years, are not human. And that those at the five hundred mark were slaughtered. By human weapons.”

  “Let’s go.” Jake smiled. At last. Someone more interested in the truth than faith. His agenda just took a baby step forward. The next step would be to convince Sissy. “You might also want to date the paint on that controversial mural.”

  “Started the chemical analysis an hour ago. Do you know something I should know?”

  “Don’t want to taint your tests. Let the facts speak for themselves.”

  “You aren’t just a bodyguard.”

  “I am a bodyguard. Now.”

  “And before?”

  “Law Enforcement HQ H Prime, before that on H6.” He didn’t add that he’d only been on H6 three weeks before coming here.

  “There is something more you are not telling me. I’ll figure it out. I always figure it out. I have a one hundred percent success rate at solving crimes based upon forensic evidence.”

  “Then look at the evidence and let it tell you everything you need to know.” Jake hoisted to his shoulder a battery operated light bar from Jeoff’s pile of equipment and headed uphill.

  The local clergy weren’t happy about all the electric equipment going in and out of the caves. Sissy’s command to give the scientists every tool available overrode their objections. Barely.

  Something about desecrating the dead. Not fanatical “no bones” but worth watching. He had Morrie da Hawk doing background checks on them from the city data banks.

  Jeoff followed Jake with a big black suitcase and another light bar. He handed Jake the suitcase that measured nearly a meter square. “I outrank you. I think. At least play at being my subordinate. And I’ll run a DNA test on you in the morning. Just to make sure you are as human as I am.”

  “I can guarantee you that I am as human as you are,” Jake said behind a smile.”

  Gregor parked the little dark blue electric car in front of the comm tower. The spot was reserved for the colonel, but he wasn’t about to need it at three in the morning.

  A single light glimmered in an upper-story window. His listener was hard at work, deciphering the coded messages recorded throughout the day.

  The CSS tried hard to mask their signals. They changed codes and frequencies often. Gregor’s technician was only half a step behind them. He always caught up. And he was an absolute genius cryptographer. He’d even broken the Maril language. Something the CSS had yet to do.

  Gregor used the top secret code on the keypad beside the door to unlock it and deactivate the alarms. He wasn’t supposed to have that code.

  Who would question the HP of all Harmony? He had a right to every secret in the empire. He had the right to keep some of them secret, too.

  At the foot of the stairs Gregor slipped off his shoes. As a top military facility this building warranted the energy expenditure of an elevator. He chose the stairs, up to the tall seventh story. No sense alerting his listener to his presence with the sounds of mechanics.

  Counting every step as if his life depended upon keeping track, Gregor pulled himself slowly upward, pacing himself. At the fourth floor he began to sweat. By the fifth he breathed hard. At the sixth he had to stop and wait for his lungs and heart to catch up with him. He hated getting old. No matter how fit he kept himself, the years kept taking their toll. A little here and little more there. Pretty soon the Temple would begin to whisper he had outlived his usefulness as High Priest.

  Not yet. He had too much to do before he retired or died.

  But the cryptographer had outlived his usefulness.

  If Gregor could just get the HC to agree to his plans, he’d have the Lost Colony back under control, the frontier secured, and life could continue on Harmony as it had always done: with a High Priestess with Harmony’s gift of prophecy and every member of every caste firmly in place, obedient to the Temple and Harmony’s Covenant.

  Then he could rest, retire gracefully to a beach cabin on the Southern Continent and spend his days sailing and fishing. No exile to the archives for him. He’d not finish his days as a ghostly husk wandering those dusty halls.

  Time to get moving, before the city awoke.

  He climbed the last set of stairs and listened at the insulated door. No sounds penetrated. He pushed it open, muffling the sound of its heavy closing behind him with a handkerchief. Almost as an afterthought he retrieved the square of white cloth.

  He stepped into a narrow corridor lined with offices. Light shone beneath the door at the corner room. This time he loosed the thin blade from his belt sheath before opening the door. Electronics bleeped and blinked. His listener sat hunched over a computer screen humming lightly to himself.

  The tune grated on Gregor’s nerves. Sissy’s hymn of thanksgiving that she sang at the closing of her brother’s wedding ritual. He hated that tune.

  Two more silent steps and he whipped the knife across the man’s throat.

  Blood spurted forward and sideways. The listener slumped into lifelessness. Gregor remained behind him, until the blood finished spraying. He couldn’t have any trace on himself or his clothing.

  “You couldn’t keep your mouth shut. You had to tell someone what you overheard on CSS chatter,” he sneered at the dead man.
“No one, absolutely no one, can know that we are of the same blood stock as the CSS. Human life arose on this planet, with Harmony’s Covenant intact, and nowhere else,” he muttered.

  Out of long habit he spoke a prayer for the departing soul as he printed out all of the latest reports. Then he removed all traces of the long-distance listening and his name from the man’s equipment.

  He wiped the military issue knife clean of his fingerprints and pressed it into the listener’s hand. A cursory examination would look like suicide. If they decided murder, and they had a way of tracing the weapon, they’d find it came from Laudae Estella’s bodyguard. But all those Military knives were alike.

  Then he typed a note of regret into the man’s computer, turned out the light, and returned to the elevator. His need for silence was gone. No sense in taxing his body further by walking down the stairs.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  SISSY TOSSED AND TURNED with endless nightmares of Discord popping up and poking his bony fingers into her back, tangling in her hair, tickling her feet. And with every touch came sharp electric shocks through her body that reflected the disruption and chaos throughout Harmony. She flinched, and factories closed. Workers were thrown out of work. She cried in pain, and riots erupted over a shortage of food. On and on until Discord ruled Harmony.

  Sissy/Harmony could no longer spread her wings to fly away or give blessings.

  A noise brought her out of the depths of her dreams in a cold sweat.

  Bleary-eyed and anxious, she heard Jake tiptoe away from her door.

  Something in the furtiveness of his step chased away the dream fog of unreality. She followed him and Colonel Jeoff up the hill.

  “What are you doing, Jake?” Sissy asked when she caught up with them.

  Jake jumped away from his crouch over one of the niches in the newest cavern. The one with the disturbing mural that had interrupted her sleep with nightmares.

  It looked like they were desecrating some of the oldest bones in the complex, dismembering them under the unholy blaring lights.

  “Crap,” Jake sputtered. He stood straight and tried to stand between Sissy and whatever Jeoff was doing. “Laudae, what are you doing up?”

  “I couldn’t sleep. Apparently neither could you. What are you doing? I will not tolerate disrespect for our ancestors.” She moved forward, fists clenching and unclenching.

  How could Jake do this? She had trusted him with her life! Now he betrayed that trust by . . . by . . .

  “These aren’t our ancestors,” Jeoff said, rising slowly from his stooped examination. He held up a long slender bone, no thicker than one of her crystal wands. Much too skinny compared to other bones of that length she had blessed and relocated over the past month.

  “Put that back!” Sissy demanded.

  “Why? It’s just the wing finger bone of a juvenile animal,” Jeoff shrugged.

  “Something akin to a Maril,” Jake added. “The only ones we’ve seen . . . out on H6 at the edge of civilization, have wings that are just long flaps of skin beneath their arms, no longer needing the elongated fingers to support them. But that’s the warrior class that travels off planet. Who’s to say the ones they left at home don’t have fully developed wings.”

  “This can’t be true! Why would our ancestors bury aliens in their sacred ground?” Sissy felt faint with outrage.

  “Because our ancestors weren’t even here a thousand years ago,” Jake said quietly. “We came from somewhere else and settled this place. There were only a few Marils here. We conquered them and made the place our own.”

  “No. No, no, no, no.” Sissy sat down hard upon the uneven cave floor. Her entire world rocked. She couldn’t focus her eyes or her thoughts.

  And yet that disturbing mural showed Harmony with arms raised, her gown flowing away like wings . . .

  “Have you got enough evidence, Jeoff?” Jake asked even as he bent over Sissy, testing her pulse and handing her an inhaler, if she needed it.

  Sissy slapped his hand away. “How can this be?”

  “Don’t know. But it is. There are no human bones anywhere in this cave older than five hundred years,” Jeoff said. He carefully placed an entire skeleton into a special box, bone by bone.

  “The other caves . . .”

  “I doubt you’ll find anything different there,” Jeoff said.

  “Our civilization is older than five hundred years . . .” Sissy insisted.

  “Is it?” Jake asked quietly. He remained kneeling beside her, ready to assist her in any way she wanted. Except in giving her the answers she wanted.

  “You’ve never lied to me before, Jake.”

  He remained silent.

  She searched his face and posture for clues. “You aren’t lying to me now. You truly believe this.”

  “Yes, My Laudae.”

  Was there a special significance to the way he said her title, almost like he caressed the words with his mouth?

  “If you have scientific proof of what you say, Jeoff . . .”

  “I do, Laudae. Or I will as soon as I can get to my lab in the city.”

  “I will see this proof. None of us are to utter one word of this discovery to anyone. I’ll have your heads if I hear the faintest whisper of a rumor.”

  “I will need three days for the analysis,” Jeoff said. And I do believe that mural is a fake. I’m running the chemicals to date the paint.”

  “If the mural is a fake, or has been altered, then someone is manipulating you, Laudae,” Jake added.

  “Someone wants me to decree that Discord is equal to the other gods and not just a demon. Why, Jake? To what purpose?”

  “I don’t know, Laudae. But the answers do not lie here.”

  “They lie in the stone tablets beneath the altar in the Crystal Temple.” She sat a moment longer, thoughts skittering here and there like a kitten chasing a dust ball. “We leave at dawn.”

  “I’ll notify . . .”

  “Tell no one. The girls can follow us later in the day. I want this mission to continue. Laudae Shanet can bless the transfer and consolidation of bones. Whoever is trying to alter our faith needs to be surprised by my return to the Temple.” And this new theory about Marils needed to be kept secret.

  “Laudae Sissy wished me to inform you that she has returned to Crystal Temple,” Guilliam intoned from the doorway of Gregor’s office.

  The need for sleep tugged at Gregor’s muscles as the hour neared afternoon refreshment. But he jumped and started at every sound, too nervous to settle until he’d heard through normal media channels an official verdict on the death at the Military facility. No evidence existed to trace back to him. Yet the Military forensics teams had made enormous strides in solving the increasing number of murders and other violent crimes throughout the empire.

  How? Why had violence become a normal part of their society in the last twenty-five years?

  So violent had they become that he doubted he could mention in public an offer of peace and trade from the CSS.

  “Laudae Estella was supposed to inform me six days before leaving the mountains,” Gregor frowned at his acolyte in disapproval.

  “She didn’t. She’s here.”

  “Why?”

  “You’ll have to ask her.”

  “So I shall. Bring her here.”

  “Um . . . I don’t believe I can do that.” The man looked too damn smug. He knew something. Gregor needed to know what. Right now.

  “Why not?” Anger boiled in Gregor. He fought it down. He couldn’t allow his fatigue and nervousness to color his actions.

  “Because she has ordered a construction team to open the High Altar.”

  “What!” Gregor exploded upward, covering the distance to the doorway in three long strides. He resisted the urge to throttle Guilliam with his bare hands. The man cowered away from him. That was enough to satisfy him. It had to be.

  One murder he could get away with. Could explain away to soothe his conscience. Two he could not just
ify. To himself, to the world, or to the gods.

  “The High Altar is sacred space. It may not be violated by anyone. Not even the High Priestess.”

  “Laudae Sissy seems to think otherwise.”

  “Then you will have to change her mind.”

  “Not in the mood she’s in, My Laud. It’s not worth my life. But if you would sign my transfer to one of the outer colonies, I’ll consider talking to her.”

  “Your life isn’t worth the trouble.” Gregor stomped past his assistant. “Summon every priest and priestess in the place. And all of their acolytes. I want witnesses to this.”

  “Laudae Sissy has already done so, My Laud. A crowd of Workers and Professionals has gathered around the fence to watch. I’ve spotted three hover cams inside the fence and two more outside.”

  Gregor chilled as all of his blood rushed away from his head and his hands into his feet. He couldn’t allow his plans to come to naught all for a headstrong girl.

  A girl he had elevated to the highest position in all of Harmony.

  He’d raised her. He would bring her down if he had to.

  “I’s sorry, My Laudae,” Shan da Gan pa Darrell of the Worker caste said quietly. He shuffled his feet and held his soft cloth cap in his hands. With every word he rotated the cap, as if studying the brim would ease his burden. “I can’t do as you ask. I’s sorry.”

  “Why not?” Sissy wanted desperately to hold on to her anger. In the face of the man’s misery she could only empathize with his plight. With half of Harmony City watching through the fence, and the other half through the hover cam that circled the altar, she needed to maintain an aura of calm and Nurture. She wore her majestic robes, but had left off her masking headdress, wanting no doubt in anyone’s mind who had ordered the altar opened.

  “T’aint right, My Laudae. The High Altar, she be sum’at special. To tear her apart . . . cain’t do it.”

  “I’m not asking you to tear it apart. All I want is access to the stone tablets beneath it.” Sissy tapped her foot impatiently. Surely there was some way around this man’s superstition.