Ancient Light

by Mary Gentle

I pitched in again: ‘No doubt the Hexenmeister recalls offworlders from when I visited him before – unless there’s a new holder of the title. Ah, I forgot. That wouldn’t make any difference, would it?’

  I wanted this faceless young Kasabaardean male to respond to that needling tone, but only Molly Rachel got irritated.

  ‘Lynne, if you don’t mind!’

  Annekt said, ‘No, shan’tai, the Hexenmeister will still remember offworlders. Memory dies not, though we are mortal, and there is always a Hexenmeister in the Tower.’

  There was a loud crash. Haldin Damory threw down a ceramic bowl. In a high, tight voice she said, ‘No! The Hexenmeister has no past-memory, no true past-memory, only some heresy brought about by Witchbreed engines and devices –’

  My stomach went tight at the tension of the silence that followed. For a mercenary to lose control – she and the masked young trader stared at each other, poles of power and tension, until at last she turned, spat, and walked out, her boots loud on the chiruzeth floor. She curtly directed one of her mercenaries to guard the outer door, and strode off out of sight.

  ‘Shan’tai Annekt, I can only apologize.’ Molly passed a hand through her tangled black hair, and glanced at Pramila and David. ‘If we could perhaps continue this discussion in a calmer frame of mind …’

  ‘Of course,’ the Kasabaardean male said. He reseated himself. One of the other traders signed something on claw-nailed fingers that made him smile.

  How far can I push this? I thought. Ah, since Molly’s trying to get me out anyway, I doubt it matters what I say now.

  ‘Shan’tai Annekt.’ I got his attention. ‘What does the Hexenmeister want with us? Is it merely curiosity?’

  The male didn’t answer for a moment. Then he reached up with both six-fingered hands and undid the lacings of the mask. He put it on the table, and wiped his face – a thin-featured face, under that shaven white mane, with green eyes brilliant against the pallor of his skin. He smiled.

  ‘Shan’tai, if you’re so well informed, tell me why it should be anything else except simple curiosity.’

  Doug Clifford leaned forward, resting his clasped hands on his knees, unexpectedly coming to my rescue. ‘It’s in our Service records that the Tower’s influence stopped a war, once. As I understand it, the Tower threatened to use its influence and cut Kel Harantish off from trade with the rest of the Coast – Starve them, in fact. Kasabaarde seems well placed to control the flow of trade.’

  The green-eyed male blinked. That shaven mane accentuated the alien proportions of his face: broad forehead, narrow jaw. He said, ‘Stopped a war? An exaggeration, shan’tai.

  I said, ‘If not a war, certainly a very nasty hostile incident.’ And why not mention it all? I thought. There’s no one in this room now who’ll be offended. ‘You may not recall, Annekt. It was some eight years ago. The Harantish Witchbreed were financing rebellious factions in the Hundred Thousand telestres – SuBannasen, Charain, Orhlandis.’

  The male shrugged thin shoulders, looked at me helplessly. ‘Shantai, I’m only a trader. If I carry word to the Hexenmeister’s brown-robes … well, all Coast traders do that. I know little. There will be word sent to you, I doubt not, if the Hexenmeister of Kasabaarde would hear more of you.’

  David and Pramila had their heads together, muttering. Doug Clifford appeared to be examining, with absent-minded interest, the patterns of reflected mirror-light on the shabby walls.

  Molly Rachel, in Sino-Anglic, said, ‘Lynne, we can do without mentioning spies and informers from some cult-ridden settlement in the north. I think we’ll consider the subject closed.’

  The talks went on after that in much the usual Pacifican manner. Molly conducted affairs, bringing in Pramila and David for logistic and technical support; and the five Orthean traders asked the standard questions about the standard Trade&Aid speeches. Only the unmasked male looked at me, from time to time, and then the nictitating membrane slid back from those apple-green eyes.

  The room grew hotter, the air more close; and about the time I judged there’d be a mid-morning break, I edged round until I could speak to Doug Clifford.

  ‘What’s all this about, Lynne?’

  ‘Did you know you were leaving for the Freeport today or tomorrow?’

  Not what he expected: at first bewildered, then that affable public expression vanished. ‘I’m still government representative here!’

  ‘I know.’

  Molly said something I didn’t catch, there was a scuffle of people rising to their feet: the time well judged. As we went out I said, ‘Douggie, we should talk.’

  A square of sky was visible through this outer room’s window, daystars obscured by a haze. Anzhadi-hiyek had given Clifford rooms high up on the city wall. The air was hot and heavy with the promise of rain. The end of Wintersun. I collapsed into one of the padded del’ri-fibre chairs, wiping my forehead. Doug crossed to where he kept a flask of the fermented del’ri-grain spirit on a low table, poured two bowls, and lifted one in silent acknowledgement of exhaustion.

  ‘Jesus Christ, Douggie, I’m getting too old for this!’

  He seated himself in a chair beside me, smiling with squirrel-cheeked bonhomie. ‘You’re not fifty, my girl. Just wait. You don’t know what being tired is.’

  ‘What a pair of old wrecks we are – eh?’

  Humour faded. The light beat in and hurt my eyes. There was the constant stickiness of sweat, and that undefined irritation that is the precursor of many minor ills. A few months on the Coast, I thought, and what little stamina I have left will be gone.

  ‘I mean, too old for offworld service. Douggie, I swear I don’t know how you do it.’

  He sipped the acrid del’ri-spirit. ‘I do it – used to do it – by never getting involved beyond professional limits. Lynne … but if I’m being shipped back to the Freeport, it’s academic. Thank you for the warning, by the way.’

  ‘Probably the last time I’ll be a position to give one.’

  Noise filtered in from the walkway outside, and the shadows of passing hiyek-Ortheans fell briefly on the del’ri curtain of the archway. There was a smell of cooking, and dung-fires; a last burst of activity before the midday cessation.

  I said, ‘It’s all falling down behind us like dominoes – a palace revolution in Kel Harantish, the telestres, the Wellhouses, the hiyek-wars …’

  Doug said grimly, ‘Reports are going back to Earth.’

  I thought, I came here to talk; how do I raise the matter that’s important? That sudden influx of confidence, of energy, now gone. I don’t have the reserves of strength I had at thirty. Eroded by heat, by exhaustion, by the sheer pressure of demand.

  ‘I thought, when I came here with the Company, that I could do something. I really thought that, you know?’

  ‘You’ve kept the Company’s policy within restricted limits.’ Doug raised a thoughtful eyebrow. ‘Very restricted, if one were to consider, say, Melhuish’s World – or the European Enclaves.’

  He smiled. It warmed me. He’s the only one here with the same knowledge of the Company that I have, the same objections to their methods.

  ‘All the same, the problem isn’t that simple.’ I wiped sweat off neck and forehead. ‘Life here – this is subsistence-level, here on the Coast. Sometimes not even that. Is it right for us to be isolationist?’

  He shrugged, a gesture that meant he wouldn’t consider arguments. ‘It’s the life they’ve chosen.’

  ‘Chosen? What choice?’

  I pushed myself up out of the chair and went to loop back the del’ri curtain, hoping to coax some movement of air through the door-arch. There was none. This room was small, like all Maherwa’s rooms. I looked across the narrow walkway at sunlit space.

  ‘Maybe I can persuade Molly I’m still useful,’ I said, a little whimsically. ‘If I say I’ll go to Kasabaarde, perhaps, with the traders? But she doesn’t need that if she’s got the Witchbreed technology she’s looking for.’

  He crosse
d one leg elegantly over the other. ‘Lynne, as an old friend, let me ask you something. How long are you going to keep running?’

  ‘Until I know what I’m running from, what I’m running to, and why.’

  ‘I’m worried about you. I’ve been worried about you for some time.’

  The low ceiling of the room was claustrophobic. I moved to stand by the window, and felt a feather-breeze of humid air. You want my help against PanOceania, I thought; Jesus, Douggie, that isn’t it, that isn’t what’s important now!

  ‘It’s like this,’ I said carefully. ‘I’ve admitted to myself that there’s a problem. I’ve got some sort of balance back, but I can’t hold it, I’m up one minute and down the next. I get … wiped out, by memories. If I don’t go on and find out what this is, I’ll lose that balance, and that’s the finish. But if I do find out the cause …’

  Doug put his bowl of del’ri-spirit down on the low table. ‘Find out what, precisely?’

  ‘Everything I see now triggers off memories. I think that something was done to me, a long time ago. There’s something about it that I can’t remember, but I’m afraid to, because if I do remember, then I’ll … well, make myself a target.’

  He looked startled. ‘Target for whom?’

  ‘I don’t know!’

  Doug came and stood beside me at the window, and looked out at the Ortheans on the walkway. Without turning his head to face me, he said, ‘Lynne, this is classic hypno-tape paranoia. You think you have knowledge acquired by some arcane method, but it all comes out of old research data. You know what this is! And as for laying yourself open to attack –’

  ‘It isn’t just me. It’s all the offworlders here. I know that sounds paranoid, but … and you never saw Havoth-jair.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘She was a Harantish woman who spied on us in Kasabaarde, when Blaize and Hal and Evalen Kerys-Andrethe were there with me. She was behind an attempt to assassinate us. We let the Hexenmeister’s people question her – break her.’

  Why can’t I get her out of my mind? I look in this old city’s polished metal mirrors and I see her face.

  ‘Douggie, don’t tell me to go and see the Psych people.’

  He looked at me, indecision in every line of his face. ‘I may have to. I know –’

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘What happened to you after Max died.’

  The wall was cool against my back: chiruzeth under the painted plaster. I looked at Doug; could still see from the corner of my eye the city outside.

  ‘I fell apart. Some of it was Max’s death and, yes, some of it was reaction to hypno-implants. I see that now. At the time I thought it was all Max. All right, Doug, I was out for a year, hospitalized. But I do still know what I’m talking about!’

  Sincerity isn’t always an advantage. I saw how the effort I put into convincing him was making him doubt still further.

  ‘Let’s leave it at that,’ I said. ‘It isn’t something I can prove. Not yet. This isn’t just some ex-Service woman going crazy. There’s something behind it that’s going to affect us all.’

  I pushed through the del’ri-cloth curtain, and went out on to the walkway. Slow anger began to burn, and I strode down that long curve, heading towards the city-floor; not looking back to see if Doug called me. I will not be doubted! I thought. If I think I don’t know what I’m doing, that’s one thing; but I won’t have anyone else saying it.

  The ridiculousness of that dawned on me as I came to the foot of the walkway. I couldn’t help chuckling, but I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry …

  Five or six Ortheans pushed past me. As they went into the cliff-wall chambers, I saw they wore brown scale-mail and carried winchbows, and so must be the Harantish guardians of the dome – I stopped dead and stared. A small, dark-skinned male was last in the group; a plump Orthean male who wore armour uneasily, as if it were the last thing he was used to. He had a cropped black mane. It was as he vanished into the inner rooms, and I realized that I had last seen that mane elaborately braided, that I thought in shock Pathrey Shanataru!

  I took a step in that direction, and then hesitated. Pathrey Shanataru, and the nameless woman who had been Voice of the Emperor-in-Exile, had vanished in Kel Harantish’s “palace revolution”. To see him here, now, and obviously in disguise …

  No, I thought. This wants thinking out.

  I entered my quarters, to find Haldin Damory sitting on the bed. She stood, with that apparently effortless movement of the swordfighter. Harur-blades clashed. She wiped six-fingered hands on the thighs of her britches. Embarrassment brought the nictitating membrane down to cover those brown eyes.

  ‘T’an, I – I’ll understand if you want to call our contract void.’

  ‘What?’ Then I realized: the incident with the Kasabaarde traders. ‘Oh, no; no, I don’t.’ I sank down on the nearest metal bench and pulled off my boots. Then I glanced up, surprising a look of gratitude on the young Orthean female’s face, and recalled that all her troop depended on the contract too.

  ‘You’ve been in a Wellhouse, t’an Haldin,’ I guessed.

  She stood with her booted feet a little apart, balanced lightly: swordfighter’s stance. That tangled dark mane was falling from its braids. Shabby, stubborn, a hired killer; and yet …

  ‘The Hexenmeister mocks us,’ she said, almost sulkily. ‘I shouldn’t speak of it outside a Wellhouse.’

  ‘I was once marked for Her, in a Wellhouse.’

  If I keep saying that, some manic hilarity assured me, someone someday will tell me what it means.

  She said, ‘He mocks us. If his memories are nothing but Witchbreed trickery, passed down from one Hexenmeister to another, then our past-memories …’ She paused, the nictitating membrane sliding back from her dark gaze. ‘As I grow older, I remember more. T’an, I don’t truly believe our past-memories are deceptive. We have lived before, under Her sky, and we return; we meet, and part, and meet again, and do not forget.’

  That change from doubt to certainty would be inexplicable if she were not Orthean.

  ‘I don’t want to cancel the contract,’ I said finally. ‘There is something I want you and your people to do. Before mid-afternoon if you can. Certainly before tonight …’

  The sky clouded over. The drop in ambient temperature was amazing. I could sleep now, I thought; at last, sleep through midday. But I don’t dare sleep.

  Feriksushar had said, When the rains come, and the rains would be a monsoon, I guessed, and not far off now.

  Two hours passed before I heard Haldin Damory’s cheerful voice ring through the outer room. I turned away from the window as she entered, pushing the del’ri curtain aside.

  ‘I’ve found him,’ she announced. ‘What’s more, t’an, no one else knows I found him; not hiyek nor s’aranthi.’

  ‘Ah, good. Is he amenable to a meeting, here?’

  ‘He – they – they’re here now, t’an Christie.’

  They? I wondered, and followed her back into the outer room. ‘Give you greeting …’

  ‘Shan’tai Christie.’

  The sleek, plump male bowed, his brown face beaming. He looked little different from when I’d seen him in Kel Harantish; only that cropped mane, and his face slightly thinner.

  ‘Pathrey Shanataru,’ I acknowledged. Then I turned to his companion. ‘I’m sorry, shan’tai, I never did learn your name.’

  That whitefire mane was dyed sepia now, and some brown stain had been used on her gold-dust skin. She was in a plain ragged meshabi-robe. Still she gazed at me with luminous yellow eyes, this small Orthean woman who had been Voice of the Emperor-in-Exile in Kel Harantish.

  ‘My name is Calil bel-Rioch,’ she said softly. ‘I’m glad you came looking for my Pathrey Shanataru. I want to talk with s’aranthi-offworlders.’

  A kind of silence surrounded her, that made the noise and jostle of the mercenaries outside these rooms meaningless. Meeting that yellow gaze, I shivered. A wordless chant, a ritual feast … A
nd then she smiled, and was only a young Orthean woman, stripped of the pomp of Kel Harantish.

  ‘If you didn’t recognize me,’ Calil bel-Rioch said, ‘that’s because I have no wish to be killed by the Emperor-in-Exile’s spies. I’ve come here to find allies. I want to talk to you and shan’tai Rachel and shan’tai Clifford.’

  Names, too? Now that’s interesting.

  I said, ‘I need to know something. Have you come here with the intention of trading with the Company?’

  Calil looked at me thoughtfully. ‘I may no longer be Voice, but there are still those of a like mind with me in Kel Harantish. I understand your Company is anxious to trade with the Harantish “Witchbreed”.’

  The last word had a very curious intonation, part mockery, part self-contempt. The small woman gazed out of the window, at that enigmatic structure of dome and pillars, black in the sunlight on the floor of the Maherwa pit.

  ‘I once served my years among the guards,’ Calil bel-Rioch said, ‘and I have friends, still, amongst them. Friends who are all the closer since I rose to be Voice –’

  ‘But you’re not the Emperor’s Voice now.’

  She turned to face me. Nictitating membrane slid down over those yellow eyes.

  ‘Shan’tai s’aranthi, they know me, whether I am Voice or not. What you offer me, I can guarantee to them. I have friends who, when their turn comes to guard Maherwa, will open doors to me; and to PanOceania too, if I so desire.’

  Pathrey Shanataru added, ‘Some say we have in Calil bel-Rioch a closer bloodline to the Last Emperor Santhendor’lin-sandru … There are those of us who follow bel-Rioch, not bel-Kurick.’

  ‘We’ll trade,’ Calil said.

  And just that simply and undramatically, it became clear to me. This is the final point at which I have the chance to make a decision. All the time Kel Harantish was hostile, the likelihood of getting into the canal system was small. With renegade Harantish, though –

  Up until now, circumstances have acted to slow the Company down. Now I either take Calil bel-Rioch along to Molly, like a good Company employee, and let it all go on from there, or I …