Empire

by John Connolly

  Anyway, candles reminded her of home, of Edinburgh, where her father had always lit tapers at formal dinners. She pictured him now, wondering if he ever thought about her, if something of the Illyri whom she loved still remained within him. She flipped onto her back and watched the pools of shadow that flickered on the ceiling. Soon. She would have to try the keys soon. Nervous butterflies fluttered in her gut. Maybe she couldn’t change the world, or the worlds, but perhaps she could find out what Syrene had done to her father. All she needed was courage, and a plan.

  • • •

  After a while there was a knocking on her door, so gentle that at first Syl thought she’d misheard, but there it was again, polite yet insistent, rap-rap-rap.

  “Hello?” she called softly.

  The door opened a crack, letting the noise from the sitting room spill in at full power. Dessa’s dark eyes peered through the gap.

  “Syl?” she said.

  “What?”

  Syl tried to force every ounce of her displeasure into that single word, and Dessa bit her lip.

  “May I come in?”

  “Why?”

  “I have this for you.”

  Dessa opened the door a little wider and slipped inside, shutting it quietly behind her again. Syl stiffened, but in Dessa’s hands were balanced two crystal goblets of garnet-colored wine. She could smell its rich headiness from where she lay.

  “Here. For you,” said Dessa, smiling uncertainly as she stepped nearer, placing the glass on Syl’s bedside table.

  “It’s cremos,” she added unnecessarily, “the very best cremos. But then Tanit always has the best.”

  Syl stared up at her, then slowly twisted herself into a seated position, turning so that her back was against the wall, her long legs stretched across the width of her bed, making sure her eyes never left Dessa. Dessa returned her gaze, unwavering.

  “Why would you give me anything, especially cremos?” said Syl.

  Dessa glanced out of Syl’s tiny window and sighed rather tragically, making it clear she felt misjudged.

  “Because I thought you’d be feeling left out,” she said. “And I thought you might want a friend.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. You all hate me.”

  “No, we don’t,” Dessa protested. “I don’t hate you. I don’t even know you, and you don’t know me either. It would be foolish to hate each other.”

  “Well, I have enough friends already,” said Syl, but her words sounded farcical even to her own ears. Dessa smiled graciously.

  “Oh, Syl,” she said, and sat herself down on the bed as if it was already decided: they would be friends. Syl wriggled away uncomfortably, but Dessa didn’t seem to notice. “I’ve really wanted to talk to you. Sometimes you look so sad and lost, and I’m sure you’ve noticed that nowadays Ani spends more time with us than she does with you.”

  Syl puffed air into her cheeks crossly. That was a bit close to home.

  “Not that she intends to, of course,” said Dessa, leaping in anxiously to undo any offense she may have caused, “but it’s in the nature of her daily routine. The Blue Novices spend so much time together studying. It’s the pattern of Ani’s life now. She’s one of us. You must miss her terribly though.”

  Syl didn’t answer. The room went quiet, and they sat in silence listening to the party beyond the doors. Dessa sipped her cremos. Syl ignored her, staring at the wall. After some time, Dessa picked up the extra glass and held it out to Syl. The candlelight caught it, and a starburst of rubies cascaded across the ceiling.

  “Won’t they miss you?” said Syl, ignoring the offering.

  Dessa shrugged ruefully. “I doubt it. They have Ani now, and she can do what I can do. Clouding isn’t that special, you know, and I’ve never really mattered much to them anyway. It’s what you can do for them that matters.”

  Now Syl turned and looked at the girl curiously, taking in her hair the color of liquid lead, and her eyes as dark and purple as the cremos she held. Dessa looked back, and smiled sadly.

  “So why did you stop them that day, with Elda?” said Syl. “It was you. Please don’t deny it.”

  There was a long pause before Dessa replied.

  “Here,” she said finally, pushing the extra glass into Syl’s hands. “You’ll have to hold this for a moment—I need to show you something. Maybe then you’ll understand.”

  Syl watched as Dessa pulled up the sleeve of her robe, revealing a wide cream bangle on her wrist. She took it off, holding it up in the candlelight, and Syl gasped, for carved on the ivory cuff was a row of elephants each holding the tail of the one before it in its trunk.

  “From Earth?” she said, touching it reverentially, despite herself. Syrene had taken all her personal belongings before they’d arrived at the Marque. The only earthly items permitted to Syl and Ani were the ones the Red Witch herself had given to them: soap and sheets, which were hardly representative of the planet at its rawest and most real.

  “Of course.”

  “But how? Were you there?”

  “No,” said Dessa. “I wish. But when I was younger and still at school on Illyr, there was a girl in my class called Galai. I know—it’s an ugly name, but poor Galai was not exactly pretty to look at either.”

  She watched Syl, waiting.

  “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” said Syl lamely, for want of any other response.

  “Pardon?” said Dessa.

  Syl shook her head. “Only Shakespeare. Never mind. You were saying?”

  “Yes, dear Galai: I’d known her since we were children because our parents were friends, and I thought her to be a bit of a dullard, but she was also a good and loyal creature, although no one else knew that. They never even took the time to find out. Anyway, this bracelet was hers. Her uncle served on Earth and brought it back for her. She was so terribly proud of it . . .”

  She stopped, her eyes faraway, her bottom lip trembling.

  Syl coughed, embarrassed, and Dessa took this as a prompt to continue.

  “Galai is dead, Syl. She killed herself. Some of the others in our class bullied her so badly that she took her own life. And I didn’t stop them from upsetting her, from hurting her. I was scared they wouldn’t like me, so I didn’t even try.”

  There were tears in those deep purple eyes now, and Syl looked away.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, and she meant it.

  “Me too,” said Dessa, slipping the bracelet back onto her wrist and twirling it fondly. “Her mother gave me this after the funeral. She said I was Galai’s only friend and that she would have wanted me to have it. But the thing is, I wasn’t a friend to Galai at all. I looked away, but I have sworn that I will never look away again.”

  Her voice ended in a squeak, and she shook her head angrily, then took a gulp of her drink as if to oil her vocal cords.

  “I see,” said Syl. She didn’t know what else to say, so she took a sip from her own glass, the liquid slipping like sweet velvet down her throat as Dessa picked up the threads of the story.

  “Anyway, I wear this all the time now, to remind me of Galai, and of my promise. And that’s why I helped Elda, that’s—”

  With a crash, the door flew open and Tanit stood before them.

  “Dessa!” she cried. “What are you doing here? And why are you talking to her?”

  The pair on the bed stared back at her, speechless with surprise. Then Tanit saw what Syl held in her hand.

  “And why have you given her my cremos?” she shouted.

  She reared toward Syl and snatched the goblet from her startled hands, snapping the stem off as she did so and splashing the contents across the white bedding and Syl’s arm, like bright splashes of blood.

  “Come back to the party, Dessa,” Tanit ordered. “Immediately.”

  She waved the broken glass
at Dessa, who obediently got up and trotted from the room, guilty as a dog caught stealing from its master’s plate. But before the door banged shut behind her, she gave Syl a funny little grin over her shoulder, and Syl was left staring after them, confused, her sticky fingers still wrapped around the stem of the broken glass.

  CHAPTER 25

  The USB drive Tiray had been protecting could have been inserted into one of the Nomad’s ports in order to access its information, but he was reluctant to allow this. If he used its computer system, then any information on the drive would automatically be stored there, and that meant others could access it, either directly or remotely. Instead, Tiray summoned Alis, who produced a portable display unit from her pack, and Tiray used that to open the contents of the drive.

  What appeared before them looked at first like an image of tubular microorganisms—E.coli, perhaps, the kind of nasty little creatures that could make a person very sick indeed. It was only as figures and coordinates appeared alongside them, and the image began to rotate, that Paul saw them for what they were.

  “Wormholes,” he said.

  Paul was aware that the Illyri had discovered a lot of wormholes, and more were being mapped all the time, but he had no idea just how many had already been recorded. Now thousands upon thousands of them were being revealed to him, some so close to each other, at least in terms of the vastness of the universe, that they were almost overlapping. With this level of information at hand, it would take only moments for a ship’s navigation system to calculate the swiftest way to get from one galaxy or solar system to another—however remote—using a combination of wormholes. In Earth terms, it would be like traveling from Edinburgh to London via Shanghai and Alaska, and arriving before someone in a car had even managed to reverse from his driveway.

  “But isn’t this common knowledge?” asked Peris.

  “Some of it,” said Tiray, “although even I was not aware of just how widespread the network was. But one wormhole in particular was a revelation.”

  He waved his hand, and a star system in the upper right-hand corner of the map was illuminated.

  “This is the Archaeon system.”

  “I’ve never heard of it,” said Peris, “and I’ve been studying the Conquest for most of my life.”

  “That’s because Archaeon doesn’t appear in the general record, or on any of the existing wormhole charts.”

  “On whose orders?”

  “The Geographic Division of the Diplomatic Corps is responsible for all maps and charts,” said Tiray. “I suspect, though, that few of them even know of Archaeon. This is the most advanced map we could access, but if I were to delete all but the oldest of wormholes, and the charted systems accessed through them . . .”

  Another wave of his hands, his fingers manipulating images, and then:

  Nearly all of the wormholes vanished, leaving only twelve displayed. By a circuitous route, they connected the Illyri galaxy to Archaeon.

  “These are the first wormholes,” said Tiray, “revealed by the Sisterhood to Meus, the Unifier of Worlds, only days before his death, their location believed lost in the Civil War that followed.”

  The death of Meus had led to the Civil War, a century-long clash between the Military and the Diplomats, the scars of which had never fully healed. The circumstances of Meus’s death remained unclear. The official version held that Meus died in an accidental fire at his home, but some said he was dead—murdered—before the blaze even started. And Meus had been no friend of the Diplomatic Corps: he came from a Military family, and under his rule the power of the Diplomats had been severely curbed.

  “But it seems they were not lost after all,” said Peris.

  “No,” said Tiray. “They were hidden.”

  “Where did you get this map?” asked Paul.

  “I can’t tell you that,” said Tiray. “Suffice to say, there are those even among the Diplomatic Corps who believe that a darkness lies at the heart of the Illyri Empire, and it must be rooted out. The source of that darkness may lie in the Archaeon system, or why else would its existence have been hidden for so long?”

  Paul waved his own right hand, restoring the multiplicity of wormholes to the map. He stepped forward so that he was standing in the midst of them. Bladelike Illyri numbers and letters floated over his head, and planets orbited around suns before his eyes. Instinctively he reached up to his throat and touched the silver cross that hung there. Perhaps this what it was like to be God, he thought, a roving consciousness moving through the universe, before whose eyes suns were no bigger than tiny gemstones, and entire systems resembled merely a sprinkling of dust.

  “How did the Sisterhood discover all these wormholes?” he asked.

  “They have not said,” replied Tiray, “and they will not say. They claim only that it comes from many years of intense study.”

  “But the study of what?”

  Paul looked at Tiray, but Tiray just shrugged.

  “You are not the first to have asked. But Archaeon may hold a clue.”

  Paul returned to his study of the star map. He read the names of the systems to himself: Faledon, Tamia, Graxis . . .

  “What’s this?” he said.

  A blackness at the end of one of the wormholes had attracted his attention. The Illyri had begun the mammoth task of mapping each system revealed to them by a wormhole, all except this one. It was marked only by a single word: Derith, the Illyri for “Unknown.”

  “The Geographic Division has not been able to map it,” said Tiray. “Drones go in, but they don’t return.”

  “Have you any idea why?”

  “Who knows?” said Tiray. “There may be an asteroid field at the mouth of the wormhole, or a collapsing star. We’ve only mapped the tiniest fraction of the universe, but we’ve discovered that it is both emptier and more dangerous than we could ever have imagined. We’re finding anomalies that we can’t even explain, let alone name.”

  Tiray pointed a long finger at Paul’s throat, where he was still gently touching his cross with the fingertips of his right hand.

  “I see you wear a symbol of faith.”

  “I do.”

  “Well, if something—a god, for want of a better term—created the universe, then he neglected to finish it. He left empty worlds, both uninhabited and uninhabitable, and he booby-trapped space to kill the unwary.”

  “Or the curious,” said Paul.

  He spoke without thinking, his gaze fixed on that final wormhole.

  Derith. Unknown.

  Tiray spoke again, pulling him back from his thoughts.

  “Lieutenant,” he said, “I want you to take me to Archaeon. I want to see what lies there.”

  Derith. The word echoed deep within Paul. He did not know why, but that empty space on the star chart seemed almost to be calling to him. It was only with great difficulty that he turned his gaze back toward Archaeon. What was it that Tiray had said, something about a darkness at the heart of the Illyri Empire? Yes, that much was certainly true, but perhaps it wasn’t so much at the heart, but instead within its very consciousness, for part of it took the form of an alien organism curled around a brain stem. He knew this much from his final days on Earth. Paul turned slowly until he found Illyr, and he reached out to trace his finger through the image of the planet, the source of his enemy, the source of his love.

  His Syl.

  God, thought Paul, how had things become quite this complicated?

  Peris was watching him, waiting for Paul to make his decision. If the Sisterhood had found the Archaeon system, and they and their allies in the Diplomatic Corps had conspired to keep it hidden, then it was worth investigating. The other option was simply to head for the nearest Illyri base in order to deliver Tiray and his strange aide back to their people. But if Tiray was right, they’d have to fight their way there, because waiting on the other sid
e of the nearest wormhole might be more hunters concealed as Nomads. So they couldn’t go back, but neither could they stay where they were. Eventually somebody was going to come looking to find out what had happened to the two Nomad ships, just as at some point the Military would start to wonder why there had been no communication drones sent by the Envion, except Paul was willing to bet good money that whoever had sent those Nomads would be first through the wormhole.

  Paul turned to Thula.

  “Copy this map and share it with the Steven,” he said. “Tell him to chart a course for the Archaeon system.”

  CHAPTER 26

  As soon as Paul had made his decision, he felt a wave of exhaustion crash and break upon him. He could see it in the others too. They had hardly stopped fighting for their lives since the landing on Torma, and those who were still on their feet could barely keep their eyes open. Rizzo was already fast asleep in a chair, and even the strange geckolike eyes of the Illyri betrayed their tiredness, the nictitating membranes visible as sleep momentarily overcame them.

  Thula took a seat next to Rizzo, closed his eyes, and zoned out, but Paul fought the urge to join them. Instead he went over to his brother at the ship’s controls. Steven and Alis appeared to have overcome some of the initial awkwardness caused by the boy’s original body search, and were now conducting a full check of the Nomad’s capabilities. Steven’s face was alight with the joy of discovery, and Alis’s fascination with the craft seemed almost to match his own. Out of all of them, only these two did not appear to be weary.

  “How are you doing?” asked Paul.

  “This ship is incredible, just incredible,” said Steven.

  “Yes, so I’ve been hearing. My question is, how long can you keep going before you need to rest?”

  “Rest?” said Steven, as though Paul had just suggested that they trade in the Nomad for a used Toyota with one careful owner. “Look, I was thrilled when they gave me my own shuttle to fly—”