by Mary Gentle
‘The Emperor Dannor agreed to all this?’ I was incredulous.
‘Not precisely,’ Pathrey Shanataru said. ‘But there are those in the city who see the Coast families moving out of our control – their taking s’aranthi gifts is inevitable – and think we should seize advantage while we still can. Before we’re left a small city and powerless.’
Heat made pale rock waver, and the horizon ran like water. I halted, panting, then trudged on up the rough slope at the edge of the T&A excavations. Dust buried my feet and ankles, chips of stone lodged inside my boots. Pathrey gripped my shoulder, six-fingered hand warm through coverall-fabric to flesh, and helped me to the top of the ridge. From here out to the harbour arm, the excavators had ripped up Coast rock to a depth of fifty feet. Looking between the gleaming machinery, I saw tanks of pulverised rock, the beginning of a system of interconnected chambers.
‘They’re modelling it on siiran,’ I realized, wondering if that were one of Molly’s more sensitive notions. ‘You realize the Company want something in return. Witchbreed artifacts. And Dannor bel-Kurick isn’t going to let offworlders back inside the city, is he?’
‘He may,’ Pathrey said. ‘His advisors put it to him most strongly. I have every confidence in his wit, shan’tai. He can see advantage, even when it is Calil bel-Rioch who brings it to his attention.’
I peered across at channels, chambers and tunnels, seeing the sites for the hydroponic systems; the connections to the desalination plants. Basic T&A: extract trace elements from the seawater during the desalination process, introduce them back into the soil to grow crops. Companies have terra-formed inhospitable worlds with larger versions of this process. As for long-term effect on climate and environment – has the Company run a prediction-pattern? I wondered.
‘If the Company trades these to the Coast hiyeks, then that’ll be the end of Kel Harantish’s controlling monopoly of the canals. It’ll leave the Emperor with no power. Just this tiny settlement, and – starvation.’
Pathrey Shanataru scowled. Then he glanced past me, back the way we’d come.
An Orthean female climbed the slope. Her skin with that white-metal sheen, fox-face and yellow eyes; dressed now in Harantish mail, and all the sepia dye washed from her mane, that had disguised her in Maherwa.
‘Shan’tai Calil,’ I said. Seen first here, then in Maherwa, now here again: how the wheel turns, and takes us with it …
The white-maned woman halted, looked at me with a certain humour in those yellow eyes. Then her expression changed. She spoke:
‘————————————’
‘——————————’
My response was automatic, was natural; and then as I slurred and stuttered, I realized it was in a language that no human should know, that no human tongue should be able to form. Celebrants, we stand. The ritual chant –
Calil bel-Rioch smiled.
‘Give you greeting, exile,’ she said. ‘How is my sister in the Tower?’
Bile surged hotly in my throat. I coughed, pulled out a rag into which I could spit, and waved aside Pathrey Shanataru’s hesitant offer of assistance.
‘Sorry – must be the heat –’
I shuddered, almost grateful for the body’s revolt. The first time I’ve seen her since that clouded time in Maherwa, and again … Obviously she planned to unnerve me, has unnerved me; this gives a respite.
Pathrey’s plump brown face showed concern. He offered a flask. I drank and found it tepid water, water with that taste peculiar to desalination. My eyes ran, Calil was a blurred image of white and gold. And then I saw that Pathrey’s eyes showed a thin rim of white round them: wide open with apprehension at hearing that tongue spoken.
‘Life on the Coast is hard,’ Calil said urbanely. ‘The heat – that hammer forges us all.’
Do I want to be alone with her questions? Compared to false memories in my head, the Kel Harantish Witchbreed are degenerate stock, interbred with Orthean bloodlines. If I were to think as a keretne, I would wonder if some freak of ancestry could, after sixty generations, produce a true Golden. This woman facing me, membrane sliding back from those chrome-yellow eyes, as much Witchbreed as Santhendor’lin-sandru, called Phoenix Emperor and Last Emperor – No: that’s Orthean thinking, not human.
Fighting for self-possession, I smiled. ‘Kel Harantish gives an interesting welcome each time I arrive, shan’tai Calil. Shan’tai Pathrey, thank you for the drink.’
Evening began to put long shadows blackly on the broken earth. Daystars clustered at the horizon.
‘As for the Tower, which you mentioned – I’d be interested to know which the Hexenmeister hates more: seeing the Coast hiyeks slavishly dependent on your maintenance of the canals, or seeing them abandon you to begin using Earth technology. It’s a difficult question, isn’t it?’
She sucked in a breath. I thought, Why, I’ve offended you. Good. A little more of that and I might know what sort of person we’re dealing with here.
‘My people tell me you were in the Tower,’ she said. ‘Where else could you get that look of Empire? That’s why I spoke as I did. That’s why you could answer.’
But the Tower’s memory is only historical archives … I rubbed the back of my neck, where the evening sun shone heavy on me. Jath sails were visible beyond the harbour arm, losing themselves in the glitter of that Stormsun sea. Footsteps were loud on rock, human voices called from the shuttle landing site, and the blank cliff-face of Kel Harantish reflected back the day’s heat. I was covered with a thin sheet of sweat.
‘The Emperor could stop the hiyeks now,’ I said, struggling for balance, ‘if he threatened to let the canals rot, and the siiran harvests fail.’
She shrugged. ‘What would that do except make the hiyeks turn even more swiftly to Earth? And why should we care for them, or for the telestres? They’re nothing but thieves. That land is ours, a part of the old Empire – we’re only in exile, here.’
Her tone held some intense, all-consuming emotion. Curiosity? Nostalgia? I thought, There’s something in your voice when you say Empire that even Dannor bel-Kurick doesn’t have, and he is Emperor-in-Exile …
‘That’s the past,’ I said.
Her chin came up, and she looked me in the eye. ‘Is it?’
Her sun-whitened mane blew across her face in the first soft wind of evening. She glanced over her shoulder at the blank wall of Kel Harantish. She looked older now than a bare month ago, when she had been Voice of the Emperor.
I smiled, in recognition. ‘Is that what you do – pretend omnipotence, knowledge of the past? You look more of a Witchbreed than even Dannor bel-Kurick, I imagine they fear you for that, even your own people. Don’t try it with me. The Empire fell long ago. And it doesn’t surprise me that you know there’s a female Hexenmeister. How much careful spying does it take, to keep up that “omniscience”?’
‘It’s true. I do that.’ Calil faced me. A young Orthean woman in dusty scale-mail, standing barefoot in the rubble; and then she raised her head again, with such a sudden and total grace that I could only think Witchbreed! Her husky voice went on: ‘Shan’tai, don’t they say always that the Golden Witchbreed have no past-memories, that that is what marks our race off from the slave race and their “Goddess”?’
She stepped forward until we were almost touching.
‘Offworlders have no past-memories either, but you do, I see it in you. And I – I remember. I don’t know how or why. I only know I see that millennial time, see that great Empire, and the cities that were greater in size than all this Desert Coast! I’ve seen aKirrik and Archonys of the Six Lakes. And I have seen that disease that the slave races created to be our downfall, so that we bore no children, and our last generation turned in their fury against each other, and brought those great cities down. Now tell me you have not seen this also, in the Tower!’
For a moment I felt only the dislocation of shock, and then I came back to harsh sunlight, and to Calil’s dazzled face.
>
‘Or is it a delusion,’ the Harantish woman said, ‘built up out of scraps and hearsay, and tales told to a child?’
I have thought that the light of logic, harsh as Carrick’s Star, illuminated one thing: Whoever witnessed those ancient scenes of terror could never have come living to the Tower, could never have become Hexenmeister, and passed on their memories to others. And so the whole edifice collapses, the “memories” are fakes. And now I know I’m still ignorant – I don’t know if what I experience is based on Tower Archive data, given to me by the Hexenmeister ten years ago; or whether it’s gossip, history, speculation; made up by willpower into some synaesthetic vision.
Looking into Calil’s yellow eyes, I see that same desperate don’t know.
Calil switched again to a Coast dialect and said urgently, ‘The woman in the Tower. Who is she? What is she? I must talk to you again. I’ll send my Pathrey to you, when it’s safe for you to enter the city.’
I watched her walk away across broken rock. Company domes and shuttle dwarfed by Kel Harantish’s walls, and Calil bel-Rioch a small pale figure, merging into pale earth …
Just when I thought I had all the facts (even if I didn’t like the answers), I find out there are still things unaccounted for.
Some change in the light made me look westwards. Steel-grey clouds were beginning to rise where Carrick’s Star was setting. Cargolifters rolled; T&A personnel shouted. Excavation here will proceed rapidly, now that the day’s heat is fading. Sixty miles away the hiyek-families are moving – how long, now, until the rains come?
Second twilight, shifting into night: a shuttle dropped down as I walked beside the walls of Kel Harantish. The roar of its landing hardly penetrated my thoughts, though I registered a night-landing as unusual here. I didn’t want to go back to the shuttle-HQ just yet.
The rocky earth was warm, radiating back the day’s heat. I stopped and looked up at the stars. The early summer sky of Orthe, so full of stars that they run together in blazes of silver, in great flowers of light. When I looked down, black dazzles floated in my vision.
In that second it flooded back into my mind: T’An Commander Ruric, Suthafiori crowned in Tathcaer, Haltern meeting me at the docks that long-ago spring; all the long journey north into forest and the Lesser Fens and those mountains called the Wall of the World. If I were free now, what would I do? If I did nothing but follow my instincts –
I took a microcorder out of my belt-pouch and flicked it on: ‘Lynne de Lisle Christie to Company Representative Molly Rachel, dated –’ I couldn’t remember a non-Orthean date ‘– Stormsun 20, local time. Molly, this is my formal and official resignation from the post of special advisor to the PanOceania multicorporate Company, to take effect immediately. From tomorrow, Stormsun-21, local time, my rank will be advisor to the government envoy; which Douglas Clifford will confirm. Message ends –’
My hand shook as I clicked the microcorder off. Dive back into your bolthole, girl! Back to the Hundred Thousand, who know you; back to government Service. Doug will confirm my position. Then –
Lynne, I thought, how long before you’re handing in a resignation to the government, too? Because all you want to do is go back to the Hundred Thousand, back home. Inaccurate as that may be, with all the reservations about being an alien in this culture, and ten years a long time. And why do that?
Because it means I don’t have to think if Molly’s right to do what she’s doing here. And because it means, above all else, that I don’t have to think about Calil bel-Rioch and that dead Empire.
Sorry, girl, escape isn’t that easy.
I stood in that starlit darkness, and on impulse keyed my wristlink into records I’d studied earlier in the holotank. The preliminary reports from Ashida’s research people in Maherwa.
I studied the image: small in the wristlink. An identification-grid covered the film, but I cut that out, wanting to see unbiased by Rashid’s preconceptions.
That dome, with the pillars set back into the steps, casting a sharp-edged shadow …
Then the viewpoint approached the black entrance, cut out for a second, adjusted to the lack of light, and showed a bare chiruzeth chamber. Vision improved. Serpentine curves decorated the walls. Carved vines, that seem to form features in peripheral vision. The viewpoint joggled, continuing across the chamber and down a flight of steps leading underground. So like those underground halls in Kel Harantish … I scrolled forward, to the point where the steps opened out into a network of low tunnels.
Tunnels with curved walls, and oval openings into yet more tunnels, so that one saw receding perspectives framed by irregular arches. These curves and supports are less like the architecture of men, and more like organic patterns of hive and vine. A maze, below the city.
All the research team’s explorations so far have recorded are tunnels like these. With one exception: an underground location that must, by measurement, be under the actual honeycombed wall of the cylindrical pit that is Maherwa. Here the confined and constricted tunnels open into vast spaces. Walls soar up to meet in gothic arches, seventy feet overhead. Squat pillars jut from a floor that, though it has no pattern to the eye, is to the hand’s touch carved with vines and skulls and shells. And there are other pillars that seem, from their translucent interiors, to contain a flow of water; but as to how or why … the team can speculate about pumps and water-purifiers, but can’t be certain. And can’t attempt to dismantle, or sample; not with the Harantish guard always there. But that will come …
I keyed the wristlink off. Half dazzled and waiting for night vision, I began to pick my way towards the trackways that the excavators had already worn into the rock, going back towards the shuttles. It must have been close on an hour I wasted, walking round the edges of the site and watching the excavators at work. When at last I came back to the shuttle that Molly had designated her HQ, I thought there was an unusual amount of activity inside.
David Osaka passed me as I walked up the shuttle-ramp.
‘What’s going on?’ I called after him.
He tossed words over his shoulder, still moving. ‘It’s the detachment of the Peace Force – they’re here.’
18
The Heartland of Corruption
Which means that Molly put in the request some time back. It takes time to get here from Thierry’s World. Did the Company expect to have to do this – or is that question naïve?
I entered the shuttle and walked down the cabin to the rear compartments. I found I was gripping my belt-pouch that held the microcorder, knuckles white.
‘– only way I can see to keep the invasion fleet from sailing.’ Molly stopped as I entered the rear cabin, looking up from where she and a Peace Force officer sat over the remains of a meal. ‘Ah, Lynne. I don’t think you’ll know Commander Mendez. Commander Mendez, this is our special advisor, Lynne de Lisle Christie.’
‘Hello, Lynne.’
‘Hello, Cory.’ I briefly enjoyed the pleasure of scoring off Molly Rachel. ‘Must be, what, six years?’
‘Must be.’ The woman nodded thoughtfully. Commander Corazon Mendez: a tall, thin woman with cotton-white hair; now in her mid or late fifties. Not looking any different: the same beak-nosed, gaunt face; the white hair cut sleekly round at neck length. She wore a black coverall with the Peace Force logo.
‘Does Doug know you’re on-world?’ I asked.
‘Doug? Not Doug Clifford?’
I explained to Molly. ‘Cory was seconded to the Service some years back as military advisor, round about the time that Doug and I were there.’
‘Ah. Yes. The envoy’s in Tathcaer, I think.’ Molly looked blank. ‘I was saying to Commander Mendez, the only way I can see to keep the invasion fleet from sailing is to turn the hiyek-families’ attention to T&A. Once they see what desalination and hydroponics plants can do – but it’s going to take them until next harvest to be convinced, and we don’t have that much time. The monsoon will only last two or three weeks. Then there’s nothing to stop
ships crossing the Inner Sea.’
The Pacifican woman was seated on one side of the table, Cory Mendez on the other. I sank down into the seat beside Cory, willing neither of them to see that my hands were trembling. The older woman smiled. She has one of those dark-complexioned hawklike faces you often see in the old Anglo-Argentinian families, and at the moment I could see on it a contempt for Pacificans that is not uncommon among Anglo-Argentinians; and a contempt for the commercial side of the Company, not uncommon among the police corps.
‘What about the other side of the conflict?’ she asked.
‘That’s a reasonable point. Molly, if I can sit in on this, I think it might be helpful.’ Thinking, It is ironic. What I do now will take me where I wanted to go, without the abdication that would have been involved. Without anyone seeing, I reached a finger into a belt-pouch and keyed erase in the microcorder. A superstitious impulse.
‘I think I can see an interim solution,’ I said. ‘As Cory mentions, there are two sides to the conflict. We ought to talk to the northern continent. Not to the telestre-Orxheans – that’s where the Kasabaarde talks broke down – but to the Wellkeepers and Earthspeakers. They’re the only people that just might let Coast Ortheans share some land, on the northern continent –’
‘Land-sharing?’ Molly said, incredulous. ‘Lynne, you know the telestre system better than anybody; they’d never –’
‘Share telestre land, no, I grant you. But there’s land north of the Inner Sea that isn’t occupied by telestres.’ I paused. ‘Sure, that’s because it’s wilderness; but even a wilderness there is paradise compared to farming the Coast.’
Cory Mendez nodded. ‘You could make what you’re doing there well known here. If you can get a result that’s halfway positive, it may delay the invasion, or fragment it; either way, it’s easier to contain and control.’
Molly Rachel stirred uncomfortably. The Argentinian woman caught my eye, with a smile that never reached her lips. Yes, I thought, I feel sorry for the girl too. Technically she’s superior to both of us, as Company representative – age and experience give us a very unfair advantage. And knowing Molly’s resilience, I’d better take advantage of her being off balance to get what I want.