Seeklight

by Kevin Wayne Jeter

  “Looms,” said Daenek, pointing to one side. His voice echoed for a moment, then was swallowed up by the unlit spaces. “This must’ve been some kind of a mill.”

  “Yeah?” Rennie lifted her candle higher. The deep shadows shifted almost imperceptibly. Daenek noticed that she had put the seeklight away in one of her pockets.

  Farther into the factory’s center, they came upon a tiny room, set off from the rest of the open space by panels of dust-smeared windows. Beyond the glass they could see several desks Uttered with papers. Daenek found the door and stepped inside the room with Rennie close behind him.

  Clouds of dust lifted from the papers as he pushed them about on one of the desktops with his hand. Records, he thought. Maybe the man who made them was the last to go.

  One of the windows was covered with a large sheet of paper ruled off into tiny squares. A red line crawled across it, sloping towards the bottom of the paper before it broke off. Rennie tapped at it, leaving little crescent marks in the dust. “I wonder what went down,” she said softly. Something about the empty factory seemed to have affected her mood as well.

  “Dreams, maybe.” Daenek clapped the dust from his hands and turned away.

  “Come on. Let’s get out of here.” Rennie pushed the little room’s door open violently. The clatter it made striking the panel next to it vanished into the darkness. “There’s nothing here.”

  Daenek nodded and started back the way they had come into the factory. As he walked with his head bent in thought, it was some moments before he noticed that Rennie was no longer right next to him. He turned and saw her several meters behind, bending down to look at something on the factory’s floor, the yellow light from her candle forming a sphere around her.

  Maybe she found a coin somebody dropped, he thought. Then this won’t have been a total waste. Waiting for her to come along, he looked idly around himself, holding his own candle in front of him.

  He was a little distance from one of the looms that stretched up into the heights of the factory. A tangle of fibers spilled down its complex surface, like a frozen waterfall. He stepped closer to examine it.

  The threads dangled into a little pile at the foot of the loom.

  Daenek lifted them with his hand and held his candle close. The stuff was some kind of synthetic fiber, slick and milkily translucent against his palm. A drop of candle wax fell onto the threads and they burst into flame.

  Quickly, he jerked his hand away but the stuff, with a billowing, cloying smoke, melted and clung to the sleeve of his jacket. He fell backwards, pulling more of the filaments from the face of the loom and into the fire spreading across the front of his jacket like a stain. The heat flickered upwards at his throat and chin. Frantically, he slapped at the flames with his hands.

  Behind him, he heard Rennie’s footsteps running towards him. He caught only a glimpse of her face before she grabbed him by the shoulders and rolled him over onto his chest. She grasped the unburnt ends of the stuff and pulled it away, the flames billowing as it spun across the floor, end over end away from them.

  In a few seconds the last bits still clinging to Daenek’s jacket were smothered against the floor. The rest had gone out as well, consuming itself into a little tangle of ashes. A nauseating smell of burnt chemicals permeated the air. “You all right?” said Rennie.

  Daenek rolled onto his back and lifted himself up onto his elbows. “Yeah,” he said. He couldn’t see her face, as both candles had gone out and been lost in the scurry. “Just singed here and there, is all.”

  She helped him to his feet and pushed him in front of her towards the factory’s door. Once outside, he leaned against the metal wall and coughed.

  “I guess that makes us even,” he said. The taste of the smoke was still in his mouth. “Remember the time with the shaft? Underneath the caravan?”

  In the moonlight her face was visible, settling into an expression of annoyance. “I should care about being even,” she grated. “Just protecting my investment, is all.”

  On the way back to the caravan she showed him what she had found on the floor of the factory. A rusty metal washer, that she flung into the bushes at the side of the roadway.

  When they had climbed back aboard, Daenek stood for a few minutes at the guardrail, gazing back towards the village and the hills beyond it. A few of the other mertzers could be seen in the moonlight, straggling back towards the caravan, their revelry finished. But Daenek’s attention was elsewhere, on the unseen figures somewhere in the dark, the ones who had abandoned the village, their homes. Pioneers of the abyss, he thought. The phrase was solid and chilling in him as a block of ice. Falling ahead of us. To where we all might be, someday.

  He turned away from the rail and headed slowly for the hatchway.

  Chapter XIV

  The returning was something that he had been secretly dreading and yet waiting for, since the moment he had first realized that it would inevitably come. And now, as all things did, it had come with the passage of time.

  The village of the stone-cutters had changed. The entropic process was accelerating. Daenek stood at the edge of the marketplace and watched the slowly milling crowd, jostling against each other as they moved from stall to stall. But now the trays of vegetables and other things seemed to be sinking towards the ground, bending and warped by the same gravity that tugged at the dilapidated houses and buildings. Soon the soil would have reclaimed everything. From behind him came the harsh mechanical noises of the quarried stone being hoisted aboard the caravan.

  A few curious faces glanced at him. Daenek knew they saw only a mertzer, in the usual leather jacket and cap, and with a face that meant nothing to any of them. “Come on,” he said to Rennie, standing beside him. “Let’s see if they still have their inn open.”

  They pushed through the crowded market and located the low-ceilinged building on the other side. The interior was dim and faintly steamy, filled with the quarry-workers converting their wages into beer.

  More faces, sullen with alcohol, glanced at Daenek and Rennie as they entered, then turned back to stare into the depths of their glasses.

  Rennie leaned against the serving counter and slid a couple of small coins onto it. She made motions of lifting an imaginary glass, then held up two fingers. The innkeeper set out two glasses filled with a dark liquid. Daenek sipped his and found it warm and sour.

  He listened to the voices around them, of the quarriers standing on either side or clustered around the wooden tables. It had been a long time since he had heard their language, his own first language. It was still clear and lucid in his mind, a fact that none of the villagers seemed to suspect.

  “Look at ’em,” someone muttered. Other voices, thick and slurring, joined in. “Damn mertzers . . . think they’re so great . . . what do they know about anything? Just hop on their big bloody machines ’n’ ride away . . . that’s all . . .”

  Daenek sipped again at the beer. The chorus of stone-cutters murmured at his back like ocean waves breaking in the distance.

  Beside him, Rennie looked bored, jingling corns in her pocket.

  The voices caught his attention again.

  “. . . machines . . . we used to have machines . . . just slice the damn rock right up . . . now we just get a few crummy blocks out by hand . . . sweat . . . look at those damn mertzers . . . things have changed . . . bad priests . . . subthane gone, and that new governor from the Capitol . . .”

  He knew what they were talking about. He had seen the development in several of the areas through which the caravan had passed. The old subthanes had grown too old or incompetent to handle the affairs of their regions any longer, and so had been removed and governors sent out from the Capitol to take their places. They were rarely seen, evidently preferring their own company to that of the people they ruled.

  “Let’s get out of here,” said Rennie. She pushed her half-full glass away and stood up.

  “You go on back,” said Daenek. “There’s something else I wan
t to do.”

  She shrugged and headed for the door of the inn.

  The voices of the stone-cutters had sunk into whispers.

  Daenek drew a line with his finger through a puddle of spilled beer, then stood up and turned around. One of the faces at the nearest table looked into his for a few seconds, then shifted back to his glass. Daenek recognized the man as the leader of the subthane’s militia that had hunted him down. The man was no longer wearing an immaculate black uniform, but rather the grey, dust-permeated clothes of a quarry-worker. His was also the drunkest face at the table, pale and dissolute. Daenek strode towards the door, wondering if he should feel somehow satisfied at what he saw.

  He crossed the marketplace and headed for the edge of the village next to the foot of the hills. When he got there, he saw that the narrow path that led up through the rocks, was now choked with weeds. There was little trace that his or the Lady Marche’s footsteps had ever weighed upon the ground. Pushing the weeds aside, Daenek started up, following the small indications that were left.

  Soon he emerged onto the level fields above the village. The top of the old house was visible in the distance, surrounded by the rustling weeds. He trudged towards it, as another man wearing a mertz-er’s jacket and cap had so many years ago.

  The door of the house was open, tilting out at a crazy angle from the ripped-apart hinges. Daenek leaned through the opening and saw that the interior had been gutted by a fire. The walls were blackened with smoke. There was nothing recognizable inside.

  He turned away and walked further on up the hillside. The bright sunlight pressed on his neck and shoulders.

  The little pool in the rocks was still shaded by the over-hanging trees around its edge. Daenek sat on his haunches beside it and tossed a mossy pebble into the center. When the ripples died away, he leaned forward and looked at his reflection in the water.

  The mask relaxed and his own face re-emerged, slowly after more than a year of being hidden. He studied the narrow, high-boned features, as if for a clue to something. After several moments he lifted his gaze from the dark water. The mystery was still intact, unbroken by any effort of his. There’s nothing for me here to find out, he thought. All the answers are still ahead of me. He got to his feet and started back down from the rocks.

  A little while later, as he was crossing the village towards the caravan at the quarry’s edge, he saw a sociologist interviewing a group of the village women. Their drab grey clothes looked even duller clustered in front of the resplendent white robe. A tape recorder was slung on a strap around one of its great, white-feathered wings, and it pointed the microphone at each of the women in turn.

  Daenek was too far into his own dark thoughts to pay much attention, but as he passed a few meters away from the sociologist it glanced away from the women and into his face. No emotion crossed the sociologist’s face, and it turned back to the women.

  Daenek’s insides clenched, though, as he realized that he had not re-assumed his mask-face after leaving the pool’s edge. He was walking through the village with his own face, the face of a thane’s son. He quickly looked around himself and hurried on.

  None of the villagers seemed to have noticed. But the sociologist . . . there was no way of knowing whether it suspected or not. Daenek cursed himself as he ducked into the shadow of one of the buildings and tightened his face into the mask.

  “I’ll be glad when we pull out of this dump,” said Rennie as Daenek entered the little room aboard the caravan. She was lying on her bed, lazily inspecting a small pile of gold coins on her stomach. Daenek wondered idly how busy she had been with her seek-light since they parted at the inn.

  “So will I.” He tossed his jacket and cap onto his bed. “Gives me the creeps.” He had decided not to tell her about the sociologist in the village, but the thought of his own error still burned inside himself. If all our precautions turn out to be for nothing . . .

  “Well, this is one of the last stops on the run.” Rennie pushed the coins into a little mound. “We should hit the Capitol in a month or so.”

  Silent, Daenek nodded. There would be no way to avoid whatever was waiting for them.

  Chapter XV

  “We’re leaving the caravan. Rennie and I.”

  Benter, the head mechanic, looked up at Daenek. The older man was sitting on his bed in his own private quarters, wearing the clean uniform he saved for going into the Capitol. “For good?” he said. “No, don’t bother answering. I already know.”

  Daenek gazed around the room. Pictures of the man’s wife and children, so far away in the mertzers’ home village, were on the walls. Benter would probably spend only a little time in the few inns that were closest to the unloading area and warehouses, and were prepared for the bi-annual flood of mertzers eager for a spree. Instead, Daenek supposed, the head mechanic would spend most of his spare money on trinkets and toys for his family.

  “I guess I knew for a long time now,” said Benter, “that you’d be leaving when we reached the Capitol.”

  Somehow, Daenek was not very surprised at what Benter said.

  The suspicion had been growing in his mind over the last two years that the mechanic knew more than he talked about.

  Something about the man’s quiet, unemotional manner had kept Daenek from worrying. “How’d you know that?” he said.

  The head mechanic leaned over the end of the bed and drew his footlocker closer to him. He raised the lid and rummaged through the contents, reaching down to the bottom. He held out a small cloth gathered into a ball and tied with string.

  Daenek took it from his outstretched hand and undid the knot. The cloth slowly opened like a flower, to reveal the fine-linked chain and little square of white metal that his mother, the Lady Marche, had given him when she was dying.

  Daenek’s heart accelerated as the chain uncoiled and the metal dangled from his fingers.

  “It was clenched in your hand,” said the mechanic. “When we found you out in the storm. None of the others saw it. I’ve kept it hidden all this time.”

  “Do you know what it is?” Daenek held it out between them. It shone as it slowly turned.

  Benter shook his head. “It belonged to the last thane. It was always in the photographs of—your father. I know you’re his son. The other mechanic, the one who was landed, wasn’t the only one of the thane’s followers aboard the caravan. Some of us just knew how to keep quiet. I recognized immediately the resemblance between yourself and your father. Others would have as well, eventually, if you hadn’t disguised yourself. That was smart of you, however you did it.”

  “Did anyone else know?”

  “Just the old translator. Just before he grew sick and died a few months ago, he told me that the letter the subthane’s men came aboard with, did say who you were. He was one of your father’s old followers, too, so he didn’t give you away.”

  They both fell silent, looking at the gleaming metal.

  “There’s nothing else I can tell you,” said the mechanic finally. “I don’t know how or why your father died—that’s what you want to know, isn’t it? Then go into the Capitol.”

  Daenek pulled the chain over his head and tucked the square of metal into his shirt. “Yes,” he said, his own voice sounding distant. The chain was cool against his skin. “That’s where the answers would have to be. If they’re anywhere at all.”

  Benter nodded and got to his feet. He stepped across the room and began to open the door, but stopped as Daenek turned towards him.

  “It hurt so badly,” said Benter quietly. “When we first heard of your father’s downfall. All of us who had faith in him. It was as if all the hopes in the world had died. And we never even knew what we were hoping for.” He pulled the door open, then closed it gently behind Daenek as he stepped through.

  He gazed down the long corridor. The caravan was eerily quiet, the engines shut down and nearly all the mertzers already departed for the nearby inns. He hesitated outside the head mechanic’s door,
as if listening for a sound that never came, then turned and walked toward the stairs.

  Rennie was waiting for him in the room they had shared for the last two years or more. “What took you so long?” she demanded.

  “Nothing.” He picked up his bag and hoisted it onto his shoulder. “Let’s get going.”

  Chapter XVI

  They had wound their way through the maze of warehouses surrounding the caravan’s unloading area when Rennie said, “Wait up a second.”

  Daenek stopped and slid his pack from his shoulders. It had been late afternoon when the caravan had pulled into the Capitol, and now the setting sun tinted grange the city buildings ahead of them. He felt little disappointed as he gazed up the narrow alleyway they had stopped in. Almost nothing in the city seemed to be much higher than the one and two story village buildings of which he had seen so much, even though these in the city appeared to be made from the same smooth white material that the Lady Marche’s house had been.

  The exception was a massive, many-windowed edifice in the distance that dwarfed the low buildings around it. Daenek assumed it was the Regent’s palace. And before that, he thought, it was my father’s. He turned, hearing the rustle of paper behind him, and saw Rennie unfolding a large map. “Where did you get that?” he said.

  “Stole it out of the bridge,” she said nonchalantly. “They’d never have any use for it—it’s just of the Capitol.” She knelt down and spread it on the ground. “Now here’s where the caravan came in.” She traced out a spot with her finger. “And this must be the landing pit over here, for the starships. And we’re walking east, so that means we should be right about here.” She tapped another spot with her finger.

  Daenek looked down at the map’s jumble of lines and spaces.