“That one is dormant.”
“Is it?” he said.
“They don’t function in subzero. That’s why Galderkhaan was quiet for forty thousand years, until the ice began to melt.”
“You’re wrong, Flora,” Skett said. “They were quiet until Jasso found the other tile and Arni turned it on! Now none of the tiles are sleeping. You linked them all—or someone did.”
That revelation hit Flora with a shock so hard she actually wobbled. Caitlin O’Hara did that. The Group director did not like where this was headed.
“Your dead assistant here was linked with someone in the past,” Skett went on. “We knew that. But instead of being able to communicate with that person through her, which is what I was trying to do, instead of waking them both up, the tile here went ballistic and those two transcended against their will.”
Flora nodded. “And that connection between the tiles is still open,” she said, catching up to Skett.
“Very much so,” Skett said, regarding the tile with growing concern. “Open and growing, only now the power won’t be a simple, ‘Hi, how are you?’ connection as when Arni turned it on. It won’t be rats massing or intestinal bugs eating a mail carrier from the inside out or insects gathering at the South Pole. Mikel Jasso is standing beside a still-open doorway to Galderkhaan. I thought we could control that through this woman and her partner—”
“But the tiles are working on their own now,” Flora said. “Fueled by the Source?”
“I don’t know,” Skett admitted. “I sincerely pray they are not. There isn’t an acoustic monitor this side of the universe that can contain that.”
Flora eyed Adrienne’s body. Sirens blaring sounded closer. There would be an investigation; that was unavoidable now.
“I’m going to get a cooler,” Flora said. “Without the tiles, this will be a forensics nightmare.”
She saw Skett shaking his head.
“What, dammit?” Flora asked, approaching him through the thinning tester of smoke. “Why not?”
“A cooler is not going to work,” he said. “Not anymore.” He cocked a thumb toward the hallway, toward the storage room. “Listen.”
Flora reluctantly obliged him. There was a deep hum, like a long, low note on a bass cello.
“The other tile,” Flora said.
“Already active and getting livelier,” Skett said.
“It shouldn’t be!” Flora said.
“It’s drawing more and more power from this one and, I suspect, breaking its icy bonds. The freezer won’t contain it much longer, and a frigid little container certainly won’t stop this one.” He indicated the tile in the laboratory.
“There has to be a point of equilibrium,” she said. “Dammit, the tiles didn’t go chewing up Galderkhaan every time somebody used one!”
“No, but they were all—synched somehow. Honestly, Flora? I don’t know what the tiles can do. Until I held this specimen, I’d never seen one. But we had better continue this from a distance.”
Then the Group director looked around. “No. I’m staying.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Stop this.” Flora began typing on the computer.
The tile was beginning to shake harder, creating a high-pitched sound that was beginning to pierce her skull. Several yards away, Skett too was beginning to wince. He edged into the hall.
“What are you trying to do?” he yelled at her.
“No one should control a power this monstrous,” she said.
Covering his ears, Skett returned to the laboratory. He looked over Flora’s shoulder, saw that she had opened a program that accessed Mikel’s phone.
“No!” he said. “We have worked too hard to reach this point! All of us have!”
“So did Galderkhaan,” Flora said, “and look where it got them.”
Skett reached for the woman and pulled her from the laptop. The woman pulled herself from his one-armed grab, turned toward a drawer in the lab table, and yanked it open. She withdrew a scalpel and spun back toward her unwanted guest.
“Get out!” she said, just as Skett drove his own blade hard into her chest, plunging the silver blade to the hilt, through her heart.
“Mikel, destroy the tiles!” she cried out as she slid off the knife and hit the floor, dead.
“Flora?” a voice shouted thinly on the other end. “Flora!”
Skett swore. He didn’t know if Jasso would figure out what had happened, couldn’t stay here to find out, and Skett wasn’t sure what he’d tell the archaeologist in any case. Jasso probably wasn’t carrying explosives on the vehicle and he would have a hell of a time obtaining them if he went back to the outpost.
What do you need them for? Bundy or one of the others would ask.
To destroy an archaeological find, Jasso would reply.
It would never happen.
Confidently slipping the blade back into its sheath and stealing a quick glance at the wildly shaking tile, he killed the connection to Mikel, closed Flora’s laptop, and tucked it under his arm. He glanced back at her.
“Sorry,” he said. “I no longer need you—just this to access your offsite storage.”
Then he turned and hurried back into the hallway. The olivine stone in the laboratory was a lost cause, already too active. Yokane probably kept it near her for that reason: it would immediately become alert if another stone were in close proximity. He’d collect the other. With luck, his exit should time out perfectly.
Behind him, the tools in the table drawer began to shake loudly and then the lab table began to hop around; a moment later the walls themselves began to undulate like sails in a typhoon. Below them, the remains of Flora Davies began to liquefy. First the brain and other internal organs; then, as the unchecked vibration of the stone increased, the rest of her cellular structure came apart. Within moments, the woman was a pool of biological material spilled across the laboratory floor. There was no longer a knife wound, or anything to point to homicide. The floor itself was quaking, spreading the material thin and wide.
Skett followed the steady pulse of the original tile. He went down a flight of stairs to a sub-basement where the Group maintained a row of subzero freezers. He had been down here before: this was where the door to the alley was located, the alley through which he’d transported Arni’s body as well as other biological mishaps over the years.
Skett waited anxiously. He stood there, his skin vibrating as the air around him began to quiver. The old beams in the mansion shook and screamed and the structural matter of the century-old building also began to tremble faster and faster and then groan, loudly. He heard crashing above and then a pop that wasn’t so much a loud noise as a dull punch in his ears. It was followed by a massive shockwave that slapped him from above and behind him—the location of the laboratory.
Hopefully, that was the tile reaching some kind of critical mass, releasing its energy before going quiet—
The tile in the freezer instantly calmed once its link to the southern tiles had gone silent. As the building above him fell to dust, Skett grabbed the tile and ran for the door. Behind him, large stone and wood pieces disintegrated as they dropped, the ceiling vanished completely, and millions of tiny pieces of laboratory fell into the sub-basement, the upper floors crashing on top of that, all of them creating a pile that rose nearly half a story above a shocked Fifth Avenue.
Observers wondered aloud if it had been weakened by the flooding and fires from the night before. The fire department arrived and pushed back everyone who was recording the event on cell phones. The police department sealed the block, in the event it was a crime scene.
Within that rubble, the olivine tile was quiet now. The collapse of the edifice had caused the orientation to be lost. It would take a boost to raise its energy sufficiently to find the others, to reestablish a connection with the coll
ective. Until then, the now-subdued energy within resumed its waiting patiently, as it had done for an eternity. As it would do for an eternity more if it had to.
The power inside the tile wasn’t conscious but it was sentient. It wasn’t artificial but it wasn’t alive. It was a result. A result that was invulnerable to time, impervious to destruction, merely waiting as it had always waited.
But before it went entirely quiet again, the olivine tile briefly experienced a flash of power, someone reaching for it from nearby . . . someone whose energy it recognized from the night before . . .
Someone who would certainly seek it again, for she had been hungry.
CHAPTER 17
As a child, Qala had lived in the deep, lush valley of western Codurazh. There, a river carried jasmine to and from the processing farm operated by her several guardians. With soil rich in nutrients from ancient volcanism and long periods of shelter from icy winds provided by the surrounding mountains, it was there that the tea leaves and jasmine plants, along with other medicinal herbs, were born. Floated to the airships in Falkhaan, they were taken aloft to be nourished by the moisture in the clouds, to grow healthy and large in the pure, plentiful, even brazen sunshine. Like the airship personnel themselves, they thrived beyond the smoke of the magma towers, beyond the foggy dampness of coastal mornings. When they were ripe, the leaves were returned to Codurazhkhaan to be blended into tea or bottled for therapeutic and aromatic uses. From there, the river carried the finished product everywhere along its route, from the western coast to the eastern ice boundaries.
Because she grew up surrounded by high peaks—including the majestic Zetora, legendary home of the first Galderkhaani—it had always been Qala’s ambition to soar above them. She occasionally saw the largest of the airships pass high overhead, and when the flier recruitment boat came along the river, this girl still shy of womanhood implored Femora Ninma to allow her to apply. The old commander later told Qala that what he saw in her then was not just desire and poise. It was awe. He believed that one who flew on an airship should never lose a feeling of wonder for the skies—and whatever lay beyond.
“What does lie beyond, do you think?” the youthful Qala had once asked during training.
Ninma had answered, “Some say it is the true home of the Candescents, but I don’t know. And there is some beauty in not knowing.”
“How do you mean?” Qala asked.
Ninma had smiled warmly. “Your young thoughts are as valid as my old ones, possibly even more so. Ideas should always remain fresh. And,” he began, then stopped.
“Yes, Femora?”
He had looked at Qala then and said, “And I hope we never find out. That would make someone right and someone wrong.”
“Isn’t knowledge worth that?” Qala had asked.
“Questions are always more valuable than answers,” Ninma had replied. “I suppose if answers encourage new questions, they are valid. But this one? I do not think any of the major participants would receive the truth kindly, or willingly.”
By “major participants” Ninma meant the Priests and Technologists. Even as a child, Qala recognized the rising dislike and mistrust between the two groups that supposedly served the general well-being of Galderkhaan.
The importance of questions was one of the most valuable lessons Qala had ever learned: always to seek, to ask, to look, and then to look beyond—if possible through different eyes, younger eyes, older eyes. In that way, Qala had always maintained her balance. To stop and “gloat” about being correct was the stagnating act of a future imbecile.
Sitting with the physician as he spoke with Vilu, Qala could not help but remember dear Ninma and her own years apprenticing on larger and larger airships. Because she spent so much time on the ground in Falkhaan, Qala had formed a special bond with Vilu and had always understood and even encouraged the boy’s enthusiasm for flight. He was only slightly younger than she had been when she left the valley, and every bit as obsessed. In the many coastal cities she had visited, Qala discovered that those Galderkhaani who plied the seas felt a similar respect and love for that vastness: What was below, they wondered? What was beyond? It used to perplex Qala that a sailor or flier could feel the same humble love for two very different mysteries, two different places, above and below. Yet a Priest had once asked her, during a long, moody night flight: “How strange is it that among people we can have many loves, each special and deep in its own way? Yet for fliers and sailors, affection can only be for one or the other, the sea or the air?”
Qala had no answer for that. She felt, though, that those two worlds were in many ways the same: the mysteries of one reflected the mysteries of the other. Answers to one showed the way to answers in the other. The Galderkhaani called this concept Raque, and it was one of the oldest concepts in the civilization: the idea that there was a sublime and perfect balance in the differences of all things, one-to-one and many-to-many.
It was not known whether it was the ancient concept of Raque that gave rise to the legends of the Candescents, or the other way around. The Anata-Raque, who later became the Priests, believed that if there was life in the sea, there must be life in the skies, beyond the highest clouds, beyond the hovering phosphorescence. The future Technologists, the Eija-Raque, felt that because all things come from above, including the waters that made the seas, a great power they named Tawazh had to have been the primal cause.
The great debate had begun, but there was one thing the early Galderkhaani believed. Before they had mastered flight, the thunder that occasionally rose from Zetora convinced them that the Candescents actually dwelt there. The mountain that glowed, the peak that rumbled with life from time to time, the cliffs that gave Galderkhaan their first Yua, the olivine tiles that spoke to those who were the first Technologists—there was no other conceivable cause. The Anata-Raque and the Eija-Raque agreed on that, and that only. No one then, or now, addressed the mammoth flaw in the split between the groups: believing that all things came from above, the Technologists nonetheless tapped power from inside the world to create the Source. While the Priests, believing in balance, embraced the idea that there was a hierarchy to Candescence.
Qala was not a devoted student of such matters, certainly not like the Priests and their followers, who believed in deeply reflective prayer as a means to understand the Candescents; or the Technologists and their acolytes, who believed in the Yua as the medium for direct communication.
Torn by conflicts, no longer asking questions of each other, neither group had proved anything. The zembo, the nighttime lights far above even the highest airship, were still as mysterious as ever. The world after death was still unknown. And the bottom of the sea was stubbornly elusive.
Qala herself did believe that there is life above, even though those who had tried to reach it failed. Their balloons ripped or exploded and the fliers perished, just like those who attempted to use weighted, airtight conveyances to journey deep below the waters. She believed it because the spots of light hovered and watched with a friendly familiarity, in the way sand or stone, fire or molten rock, did not. Something must be behind them. Sometimes the lights flashed by, like leaves dropping from trees. Perhaps they too became extinguished.
Because the zembo could not be seized, like fish, Qala held that the lives and secrets of the Candescents were meant to be contemplated, not examined. One could surmise a great deal from the remains of sea creatures. Not the lights. Not even the largest one, the zembo-jutan, gave up its secrets—other than its sex, for its shape changed like that of a woman with child as it birthed and rebirthed the zembo every time darkness arrived.
The lights were meant to be considered in solitude or talked about in a group but, in the end, the majesty of their abodes was probably unknowable.
And yet, the things this boy was saying, like the sentiments Bayarma had spoken, were unlike anything Qala had ever heard. Raque described a realm where there
was “above” and “below.” It did not address a time that was “now” and “then.”
Yet if balance is universal and constant . . . such contrasting worlds should exist, Qala thought. She wished Ninma had spent more time addressing the frustrating aspect of questions, as well as their merits.
Qala had returned to the physician’s cabin after witnessing the discomfort of the sky. By the time Zell was finished talking with the boy, Qala had been informed that the airship was nearly ready to depart. The physician joined Qala outside the cabin while Bayarma remained inside, the boy curling beside her in the hammock.
Pressed by the galdani, Qala told him everything Bayarma had said to her as they walked toward the column.
“I do not know what to make of him, or her, or them,” the physician admitted.
“I don’t believe that,” Qala said. “You always have an idea, or at least an opinion.”
Zell shook his head. “I always have a sense of the truth behind something, whether the ailment is mental or physical. Not here. I cannot say whether this is something profound, a fabrication worked out by these two, or a mad shared fantasy.”
“Your instincts are—” Qala pressed.
“Failing me,” Zell admitted with a shrug of his bony shoulders. “What have these two to gain by such a tale? Yet how could they share a delusion? Which leaves only the one option, that this is a miracle for the Night of Miracles.” He leaned closer so none of the crew would hear. “But that would compel me to believe in beings I am not convinced exist!”
“I was thinking that too,” Qala said. “Yet there is also the timing, the way one appeared as the other left.”
“What about it?”
Qala answered carefully, thoughtfully, because she knew that her explanation brought her in line with the doubts Zell had just expressed.
“It is as though the winds of Raque were blowing, informing us that our view of balance is too narrow,” she said.
Zell fired her a look. “That’s not what I would expect from my Standor, whose cabin is full of maps and more maps because, as we know, the ground is fickle, unbalanced, uneven, and unstable—as strong an argument against Raque as one can find.”
The Sound of Seas Page 20