Writers of the Future Volume 27: The Best New Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year

by L. Ron Hubbard

  That was the swiftest winter Quarl remembered. Before he noticed the days marked off on his calendar, the dawn light started to grow longer. Soon the sun would peek over the edge of Ahn-Tarqa and start its slow ascent toward summer.

  Hallett was less industrious than usual on the last day of full darkness. She often turned her mask away from the shelves and toward the windows that faced the Bellinghazer Sea. Not until she broke away from summarizing a dense account of the Eldru war against the Meritoks so she could feed the jehol did Quarl feel he could interrupt her.

  “How lies your Sorrow?” An innocent question, a casual greeting for the Eldru. But Hallett caught her master’s other meaning.

  “It isn’t the Sorrow that lies on me now, Master. It’s knowledge.”

  He shifted in his chair. “Knowledge of what?”

  “Aman-Sah,” she said.

  “Have you learned something new about it?”

  “I think—I know that we are not meant to find it.”

  Quarl stirred. “That is close to blasphemy, Hallett. Do you also believe the foolish human folklore of the ‘Lightborn’ and their magics? Aman-Sah must be real. Otherwise all we do as scholars is meaningless, and there is no answer to the Sorrow.”

  “I don’t mean that Aman-Sah doesn’t exist, Master. But we won’t find it, not the way we are searching.”

  “Who do you think will find it? Humans? They don’t have the knowledge of the Art that we do. Most believe that Aman-Sah is a place they go after death, a mere fantasy in the sky.”

  “But there are those strange humans. The Sorrowless.” She picked up the jehol and set it on top of its cage. “I met one of them once. In Tyrn. We caught him and forced him to look into one of the memory orbs. Only the Sorrowless can bear to look into those devices for more than a few moments. We tortured him for days until the knowledge in the orb scorched away his mind. He never relented. He told us nothing.”

  “Don’t think about it anymore, Hallett. Forget about the Sorrowless. The Artikons will worry about them.”

  “But more of them are appearing, Master. Each year, our agents across Ahn-Tarqa learn of more of them. What is it they want, and why can’t we understand it?”

  “I said forget them.” The force of his voice surprised him.

  Hallett did not flinch. Instead she pressed her hand over his. He tried to pull from her touch, but she moved too fast. “Master, I must warn you. Do not trust me. Do not place your faith in me.”

  “W-why do you say that?”

  “You will not understand. You see it before you, but you will not understand.” She lifted her hand and returned to her work.

  Quarl had to say something. An acolyte had told her master that he did not understand something. No acolyte would dare accuse a superior of lacking knowledge. It was cause for the sternest punishment, a demotion back to the schools.

  Quarl did nothing. He said not a word to Hallett for the remainder of the night. She was right; he didn’t understand. He was terrified even to try.

  The next evening Hallett failed to arrive at the expected hour. At first Quarl did not wonder at this, thinking her ill. But the jehol chirped at him and nipped at the feather of his quill whenever he tried to write. It wouldn’t take the nuts from his hand and snapped at him when he offered the morsels.

  “Very well,” he moaned when he realized he could get nothing done. “I’ll go find your new master.” He locked the study and walked to the lower levels to find his tardy acolyte. As he started to recall their odd conversation from the previous night, his feet moved quicker down the marble steps.

  He pulled the bell cord over Hallett’s door. No one answered. Two more tries brought nothing. He was considering returning to his study to tolerate lacerated fingers for a few more hours when the Hierarkon came around the corner of the hallway.

  “Historian?” he asked as he recognized the mask shape. “The one training the new acolyte?”

  “Yes, Sagaciousness.” Quarl chose not to mention that she was missing.

  “How often do you give the acolyte instruction?”

  Quarl hesitated to say that it was every day. That was eccentric and the Hierarkon would ask more questions that he could not answer. “Often enough. She shows great dedication.”

  “Too much. She has interrupted the work of the Culturalists on the seventh floor three times this week. The olglim discovered her two days ago trying to enter the Servicer’s cloister while he was away. She claimed she was lost. Have you noticed any behavior that seems—unusual?”

  Quarl shook his head. “Perhaps her behavior is part of her dedication to research.”

  The Hierarkon waved his pale hand toward the locked door. “Is her dedication what brings you to her room?”

  “I—I thought she might have taken my jehol back with her last night. But she isn’t—”

  “Do you have any idea where she might have gone?”

  “No, Sagaciousness. If she is not scheduled to work with me and is not in her room, I do not know where else she might be studying.”

  Breath rattled from the Hierarkon’s mask. “Send word to me the moment she comes to you.” He moved down the hall as swiftly as scholarly dignity permitted.

  Quarl rushed back to his study with less dignity. He pulled open the jehol’s cage. “Tiny assistant, it’s time for you to earn your table scraps.”

  The jehol liked to curl up on Hallett’s chair when she was absent, and its whiskered nose would scrunch up minutes before she came to the study. The tiny creature had a sense of smell sharper than a hunting saurian’s.

  Quarl laid the jehol on the stoop outside his study. At first it looked terrified to be outside the confines of its home, but then Quarl brought out a crunchy nut of the kind that Hallett fed it. The jehol sniffed the nut cautiously, then pulled it away in its paws and gobbled it up. Its eyes shone with delight. It wanted more of the delicious nuts, and it knew only one place to find them.

  The jehol scampered down the curved hall and Quarl walked behind it. He could see from its wrinkling nose that it had picked up the scent it connected with its supply of treats. If it followed a fresh trail, it might lead Quarl to his vanished acolyte.

  The jehol twisted and turned, sometimes looping back on itself but then detecting a fresh scent and turning onto a new path. Each time it came to a stairway, it dashed up it without hesitating. Quarl and his tiny guide climbed one floor at time. At each higher landing, where the color of the stone turned a darker shade, Quarl felt certain they would come across Hallett. But the jehol continued to search, ascending the Fourth Spire until they reached the top and the single door standing at the end of the spiral stairway.

  The jehol must have made a mistake; Hallett would never come here. This was the Sanctum of the Peak, and a lock constructed from the Art sealed the door at all times unless the Hierarkon or a visiting Artikon wished to enter and look on the Sanctum’s treasures. Common scholars could only guess what artifacts hid beyond the steel door.

  Quarl waited for the jehol to run back down the stairs to pick up the correct trail. But the animal crawled to the door’s edge and nudged its whiskered snout under the crack. The sound it made was one that usually caused Quarl to smile; it was the squeak it used to wheedle one last nut from Hallett’s hand before she left for the day.

  The green light that usually glowed on the door handle now blazed red; it was unlocked. Quarl placed a hand on the metal surface and gave a gentle push, expecting that the light was an error and nothing would happen.

  The door swung on oiled hinges. The jehol lunged through the crack and chittered happily on the other side. Someone gasped, and then a high-pitched voice spoke in a foreign tongue.

  Quarl pushed the steel door open until he could see the stranger inside the forbidden room. She stood Hallett’s height and wore Hallett’s v
ermillion robe. Hallett’s mask lay on top of a shelf near where the stranger was searching through folios.

  But this person could not be Hallett. Hallett was Eldru and should have the shriveled pale skin of their race, the colorless eyes, the nose that was nothing more than two gashes over a lipless mouth. This person had a nose of sharp lines, and her cheeks were tinted pink. Her eyes shimmered with the blue of the Bellinghazer Sea in summer.

  An Idenite . . . a human.

  The woman’s bright eyes showed only a moment of alarm. Then she acted as calmly as if she had arranged days ago to meet Quarl in the sealed chamber.

  “I am Hallett,” she said, ending the debate before it began.

  Quarl passed into the Sanctum. The ceiling was so low that his head almost scraped it. The walls on both sides pressed close, and the only features aside from the woman and the jehol were shelves warping under the weight of parchments bound in saurian hide. The Sanctum looked like the room of a novice scholar. It would have disappointed Quarl and touched his Sorrow to see such a poor display for a place draped in mystery, but the human specter in Hallett’s robes overwhelmed all else.

  She had told him not to trust her. She had given him fair warning.

  “How—how did you enter?”

  The woman held up a smooth stone. “The Hierarkon’s pass-slate. The Servicer had borrowed it, and I stole it from his cloister.”

  “If anyone finds you here, you’ll be executed. Or sent to the Chirurgeons.”

  “Someone has found me,” she said.

  Quarl reached down and plucked up the jehol. “No one found you, Acolyte. No one.”

  He slipped the squeaking animal into a pocket of his robe, then turned to leave. He felt the Sorrow as never before. If he stayed and she tried to explain how she had come into the Core and risked her life, it would deepen his Sorrow to a point that he might never swim back to the surface of it. Such things could happen to the Eldru, even with their disciplined minds that embraced the Sorrow with elitist pride.

  “Wait—” the woman’s voice called.

  To his surprise, he did. The Sorrow did not drown him. He moved from the door and turned to face the woman again.

  “Tell me your true name.”

  Without daring to think about what he was doing, he answered, “Quarl.”

  “Quarl, remove your mask. I wish to see your face.”

  “If you have disguised yourself as an Eldru for this long, you know we show our faces to no one.”

  “I am not no one.” Her body stretched taller, and her eyes flashed so they seemed to light the Sanctum. “Seeing your face will not hurt me. I am Sorrowless.”

  So this was the answer to his silent questions. He had felt Sorrowlessness beside him for many months and did not even know it except for a stirring that dissolved the languor of his work. He recognized it now in the forbidden, frightening apparition of a woman from the lesser race. To her, he was one of the maligned “Shapers,” dark wizards that once tyrannized Ahn-Tarqa and still haunted it with their spies and slaves.

  “Did you hear me, Shaper? I am Sorrowless. I do not fear you. Remove your mask.” She softened her command. “Please, Quarl. I wish to see your face.”

  He tugged at the sides of the mask that gripped his skull. Air seeped around the edges. The mask dropped into the cradle of his palm. He looked at the human woman with unshielded eyes.

  She drew a sharp breath, then released it slowly. “The Sorrow hasn’t damaged you as much as I feared.”

  “You don’t find me as ugly as we are rumored?”

  “No. No, Quarl. And no matter what I thought I might see under the mask, you could not be ugly to me.”

  “That’s because you don’t have the Sorrow.”

  “There is more to it.” She held out her hand, and Quarl set his mask into it. When she laid it atop her own on the shelf, the two fit together like pieces broken from the same eggshell. Her hands rose to loosen the ties at the neck of her robe. The deep red cloth fluttered to the floor and exposed her shape.

  The human body did not need to hide behind formless robes and sterile titles. It glowed with the fleshy hue of life, and Hallett’s curves and valleys spoke of her Sorrowlessness as much as her gleaming eyes.

  Quarl felt a desire that he had never known before, one he had never dreamed possible. Hallett’s form, her closeness, the memories of nights beside her when he did not know that what flowed from his acolyte was life without the Sorrow—all overwhelmed him with longing. His skin shivered, the veins across his forehead pulsed.

  Hallett drew toward him. His Sorrow did not repulse her the way it would any other human or Eldru. Her warm arms wrapped around his chest and drew them together. A part of Quarl that he thought would stir only once came alive.

  Hallett lay naked on the bed in her room, her vibrant shape stretched over the covers. Quarl caressed his palm over her bare head; slight prickles rubbed against his skin. She must have to shave her pate every day to keep the appearance of a barren Eldru skull.

  You would like my hair,” Hallett said. “It’s red. I wear it down to my waist, woven into braids.”

  Quarl let his hand fall back into his lap. Thinking of Hallett as she truly was, even after what they had done together, caused a greater sting to his Sorrow than the first sight of her Sorrowless blue gaze. He had covered his face again not only from habit, but because it made it easier to avoid looking into those eyes as deep as indigo ocean fathoms.

  But Hallett’s eyes were not on him at the moment. She was studying the brittle folio she had taken from the Sanctum. Quarl had not asked her what was on it and didn’t want to know. It meant fewer lies to tell if the Hierarkon suspected anything.

  An amber blush touched the sky outside Hallett’s triangular window. The sun would soon rise for its brief scud across the horizon.

  “You should escape before full light,” Quarl said.

  Hallett teased the edge of his robe with her foot. “You’re the one in my room.”

  How like a human she spoke! Piercing voice and light speech, nothing like the student who had met him in the Chamber of Lading ages past. But this was the true Hallett. The reserved one who had studied beside him was the mask.

  “You know what I mean,” he said. “The Hierarkon is already suspicious of you. He might learn about the missing pass-slate, or he could check the Sanctum. If he has gone to the Artikons to report—”

  Hallett interrupted, “I have one more task to finish, Quarl.”

  “Then I shall leave you to it.” He reached down toward the room’s only other furnishing, a plain writing desk, and coaxed the jehol to scurry onto his palm. The animal had busied itself with grooming its cinnamon fur and seemed disappointed that Quarl wanted it to leave.

  But as he slipped the animal into a pocket of his robe, Quarl felt the touch of Hallett’s hand on his wrist. Even after luxuriating in her body, entwined around and inside her, following her whispered commands on how humans expressed lust to each other, the abrupt pressure of her skin had an electrical charge. “You might want to hear my plan before you leave me forever. That’s what you’re trying to do, isn’t it? Walk back to your cell and forget you ever met me. Go back to hunting for Aman-Sah with the rest of your decrepit people.”

  “I have no choice. You can’t remain in Black Spires, and I can’t shelter you. Even if you tried to live among the slaves in the Core, they would find out soon that you are not one of them and send you to the Artikons.”

  “I managed to trick you for many months.”

  “Because I wanted to see you as Eldru. The slaves will look on you as a human—and they’ll know the difference between someone with the Sorrow and someone without. They won’t sympathize with you; they’re too frightened of us.”

  Hallett got to her feet and slipped her robe back over her body
. “I’ll leave tonight, as you ask, if you grant me one thing.”

  “What?”

  She held onto Quarl’s sleeve and drew her face close beneath his. “You will want to say ‘no’ to what I ask. But you must not. And because of what you did with me, I know that you will—”

  An abrupt chill swept into the room. Both of them sensed the sable figure at the door before they turned their heads to see it. The glow globes from the hallway silhouetted the distinctive spikes of the mask.

  Quarl’s hands flashed to his face, terrified that perhaps his mask wasn’t in place. Eldru customs flooded his mind before anything else, even overwhelming the terror that his overseer had discovered that he had violated the laws of Black Spires and given secrets to a human. Given everything to a human.

  Hallett showed no fear. “How long have you been listening, Shaper?”

  The Hierarkon stepped into the chamber. “Three days. You were careful not to reveal yourself in your speech, but eventually you betrayed your identity to the listeners.” His hand touched a crack along the stones of the wall, and his long fingernail pried at a circle of meshed wire tucked inside. Quarl recognized the piece of the Art that could send sounds from far off into the earpieces of spies.

  “You need say nothing more, Idenite. In fact, you need never speak again. I will turn you over to the Artikons, and they will pry everything they need to know from your mind.”

  Quarl wondered what to say, how to explain. But he was the outcast in the confrontation. Neither the human spy nor the Overseer of the Fourth Spire seemed to consider him there at all.

  Hallett’s imperious Eldru tones returned. “I have seen what the Artikons do to people like me. I first disguised myself under your robes and masks in Tyrn, pretending that I was trying to lure another one of the Sorrowless into the reach of your Art that bleeds the mind. You taught me how to find the way into your demon city.”

  “You won’t learn the way out. I have placed a squad of olglim and devil claws outside this spire to seal it.” The Hierarkon unfolded his hand. “You have no escape. Return what you have stolen.”