The Orphaned Worlds

by Michael Cobley

  ‘True, but the scholars there have enfolded their refuge with plants and flowers and umisk nests, all the tendrils of life.’

  ‘Hmmph.’ Yash scratched one of his ears. ‘Or you could be wondering if we’re being watched.’

  Chel smiled. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘Places like this, they always have a bit of …’

  He paused as one of the scholars muttered in her sleep and turned over. Both of them were still and silent for a moment, then Chel, in the faintest of whispers, said, ‘Talk outside …’

  They stood and carefully tiptoed to the door, then by the light of a handtorch moved along the corridor a few paces.

  ‘You were about to say something about old places like this, Pilot Yash,’ Chel said in a low voice.

  The short-bodied, long-armed Voth, wrapped in a bulky quilted coat, gestured at the stonework all around.

  ‘Your ancestors built this place for a serious reason, and it’s big enough for plenty of them and whatever they were about, yes?’

  Chel nodded, and Yash spread his hands.

  ‘Right, well among my people we know that all old buildings, especially ones made for war or captivity, carry residual imprints of past inhabitants and their activities. I overheard that them new eyes of yours let you see the past – have you seen anything here?’

  ‘I have not used my other eyes here,’ Chel said.

  ‘Aren’t you curious?’ said the Voth. ‘Jelk, if it were me I’d want to know what my predecessors were up to!’

  Chel smiled. Of course he was curious, but he was also cautious and not a little bit afraid of what he might see. But I’ll have to take forward steps sometime, and it would be worth seeing if this seer sight reveals who or what is watching us.

  ‘Very well, Pilot Yash, I shall take a brief look. But be aware that these eyes sometimes show me more than just the past …’

  He pushed the cloth strip up into his fine, dense hair and for a moment just stood, regarding his dim surroundings, grey surfaces in the torch’s meagre light. Then he hesitantly parted the eyelids of the outer pair of new eyes. At first, same as his own original eyes, except that there was an extra sense of solidity to objects, conferred by a four-way ocularity, illuminated by the pale halo of Yash’s torch from which tenuous shadows spread. There was stillness, the sound of Yash’s breathing, the faint pulse of his own heartbeat which seemed to slow, then slow further, the beat low and languid, slowing down …

  Then leaped back to normal again, as the walls suddenly flickered with shifting strands and clusters of glowing threads, and the air shimmered with glimmering outlines of shapes in motion, moving together or through one another, lines writhing across the walls and ceiling, tangled meshes, quivering webs hurrying to and fro …

  He gasped, closing his eyes tightly. It was too much, too overwhelming – Focus on the now, the here, and the vital, sift out the discord – yet he steadied himself, breathed deeply and opened his eyes again. And saw ghosts.

  Saw a group of nebulous forms made of those same fine outlines, which he now realised were the residue of past occupants, just as Yash said. The forms grew more detailed, became three Uvovo bent to the task of pushing a loaded cart along the corridor towards where Chel and Yash stood.

  ‘What do you see?’ Yash murmured.

  Chel held up a silencing finger, keeping his eyes on the approaching trio, standing aside as they drew near and passed by. On the cart was a large device of some kind, its details vague apart from hints of flanges, spikes and what looked like twisted limbs. The faces of the Uvovo were indistinct but there was a certain urgency to their posture as they faded into the dark end of the corridor.

  What am I seeing and why? It must be important for it to be still playing out after so many centuries, but why?

  ‘Looks as if we may have woken someone,’ Yash muttered beside him. ‘Now what’s that he’s got … no, wait, stop! …’

  Chel turned and for a moment saw one of his Artificer scholars standing next to the chamber door with a crowbar wedged behind one of the stone pillar uprights. The scholar’s face was blank as he put his full weight behind the crowbar and wrenched at the pillar. There was a grinding sound, then the lintel and the wall and ceiling above caved in with a roaring rumble, falling rubble throwing up clouds of dust.

  Yash dragged him back, shouting about a weakened ceiling, and Chel complied while in his mind’s eye he saw again the scholar, this time with a violet nimbus about him. Then Yash ignored his own advice and advanced through the dusty haze, coughing as he shone his narrow torch beam on the collapse. Chel was still looking through his outer new eyes and could see gleams and splinters of amber light slipping past gaps in the rubble that blocked the chamber entrance.

  ‘I can hear their voices, Chel!’ cried the Voth.

  But Chel’s senses, alerted by his enhanced vision, quivered in warning as he saw it – a shimmering outline flowing across the shadowy wall away from the fallen masonry. He concentrated his awareness on it, letting his perceptions draw the vision into his mind, as the outline took on hazy details, took on an odd, flattened form. A figure that dipped in and out of the wall as if it were no more solid than a barrier of smoke. Could this be the watcher?

  ‘Help me, Chel! – we can dig them out!’

  But the shimmering figure was heading along towards the big hall down from the mountainside entrance, from where several passages branched out.

  ‘I have to follow it, Yash – it’s the watcher!’

  ‘The what?’

  Chel shook his head and hurried after the apparition, ignoring the Voth’s increasingly angry shouts. As he strode off into the darkness his new eyes laid bare a scattering of details, motes, nuances, an opaque rendering of his surroundings in which the mysterious figure shone like a temple carving brought to life. He followed it round the corner and down the hall to where the open archways of two tall corridors gaped darkly. Earlier, Chel and the others had explored them briefly before retiring for the night; one led to a stairway that spiralled up to a small level of connected rooms full of stone channels and conduits that once would have guided numerous vital roots back when vast forests had towered over even the mountain ranges of Umara, in the age of Segrana-That-Was.

  The other led down a short flight of steps to a pair of heavy stone doors which they’d found to be solidly jammed shut. Predictably, this was where the bright outline figure went, gliding from wall to door, undulating across stained surfaces, sinking in and fading from view. Chel sighed as he stopped before the doors, studied the beautifully intricate carvings of entwining vegetation, then slipped his hands into the angled gripping slots and pulled. Nothing, not the slightest hint of any give. Frustrated, he gave them another sharp tug – and heard a faint crack.

  Frowning, he stared at the door, clearer now that his eyes, original and seer, had adjusted to both the darkness and the underlying residual images of the past, fleeting glimpses of other hands pushing the doors open, other forms coming and going. He focused. The right-hand door no longer seemed so flush against the other, and Chel could just detect the thready glow of energy at the hinge pintles, floor and ceiling. This time he grasped the finger slot with both hand and hauled on it with all his force, felt movement, paused for breath and pulled again.

  With a scraping, grating sound the door gradually came open, a finger’s width, then a hand’s width, then finally a gap sufficient to allow him to squeeze through. On the other side he leaned against the wall, smelling a musty dankness amid the darkness, gazing at the stairs that wound down into the dark heart of the mountain. He felt the sheer weight of all the rock that lay above him, that great, cold downward-pressing mass, and for a moment he wavered. But he gathered his resolve, pushed the unease aside, and continued, following the stairs down.

  His footsteps kicked up dust and he could feel fine grit through his hide boots. Through the crumbly erosion of the walls his fingers could make out deeper grooves, not the details of ancient Uvovo depictio
ns and bas-relief decorations, but something else. Then in a leap of conjecture he was sure that they had once acted as guides for creeper plants, a web of them trained throughout the Uvovo stronghold, bringing living greenery to its every corner. Perhaps even light, too, from ineka beetles and ulby roots.

  The stairs came out in a small room off a curving corridor. It was pitch black down here but his Seer eyes revealed the cracked walls, the regular chamber openings along the outer wall, the occasional pile of rubble, the dried-up corpses of insects with a few live ones scuttling away from his feet. But of the strange wall ghost there was no sign. At last he came to where a fall-in was serious enough to block the way, a mound of rock and earth that had spilled into the passageway quite some time ago going by the encrustations of dust and delicate, desiccated remains of plants. A big wedge of ceiling masonry had punched a hole in the floor through which Chel could see an empty room devoid of life.

  The curved corridor ran in a wide circle, and the inner wall had only two openings, intriguing recesses with steps leading down to square double doors. Resembling ceremonial entrances, they were set diametrically opposite each other but were blocked by boulders and large pieces of broken stonework which had been piled into the recesses. Standing before one of them, Chel frowned as he wondered who had done this and why, and what lay behind the doors. Then he retraced his steps back to the big rockfall and the hole in the floor which might just be wide enough to get through …

  As the great mound of dust-caked rock and soil came into view, he quickened his pace – a familiar glimmering radiance clung to the edges of the hole, fading as it sank. Moments later Chel was squatting down to lower his legs in, then, grasping a solid section of the edge, he swung down, hung there a second before dropping the last few feet.

  Landing in a crouch, he barely had time to draw breath before he was engulfed in whorls of radiance surging up from the stone floor underfoot. The glittering light flowed in skeins of amber about him, a slow enfolding luminescence beyond which strands of dust and desiccated motes floated.

  ‘Intruder! … Violator! …’

  The radiance swirled and pressed and probed, seeking access, a weakness, a gap in the defences. Chel did not yield.

  ‘Not I,’ he said.

  ‘Defiler! … Outrager! …’ When it spoke it was like a shriek pared down to the level of a whisper. ‘… Bringer of empty sleep! … Name thyself …’

  ‘Cheluvahar of the Warrior Uvovo, scholar and seer …’

  ‘Liar! … Despoiler of truths! … You lie – all the Seers died at the Isle of Colloquy when the Enemy fell upon them from the sky … the sky … they came with silent death …’

  ‘I am a new seer,’ he said, resisting the stabbing grasp. ‘Segrana remade me from what I was!’

  ‘… you lie … YOU LIE! … she who enfolds, she is gone, dead, expired … burnt and dead … great Segrana of endless memory … you lie, just like the Cold Walker …’ The voice lost its ferocity and the shimmering nimbus receded. ‘… It comes here with a great cargo of lies, vast and cruel … it tests me and I tire … it tries to make me believe cruel things but I will not forget … what I am …’

  ‘Who are you?’ Chel said. ‘What are you?’

  ‘… seed and root, leaf and branch …’ The voice sounded mournful. ‘… droplets of sun, droplets of time …’

  Chel was astonished. The couplets were familiar, a childhood refrain, a youngling’s rhyme whose words came easily to mind.

  ‘… the feathered ones, the scaled ones … the digging ones, the chewing ones … the buzzing ones, the singing ones … the swimming ones, the resting ones … all kept safe, all kept well … by the lonely keeper … the Keeper of Segrana …’

  The voice fell silent and a pale amorphous luminosity flowed away towards a carving-covered wall, up to a long horizontal crack into which it vanished.

  What kind of being is that? he wondered. It knew of the Keeper, but it tried to possess me just as it did with my scholar.

  According to the song-cycles of the War of the Long Night, the Keeper of Segrana was the wisest of the wise, the most capable of all the Pathmasters chosen by Segrana herself to carry out a vital wardenship. The Pathmasters were closely attuned to the thoughts, the moods, and the currents of Segrana but only the Keeper was able to share them, by virtue of bonds laid out in the underdomain of reality, by way of intertwined consciousnesses. If this was true, how could a spectral remnant survive all these centuries? Could Yash be right, that past events full of the most intense emotions could imprint themselves in the solid surroundings of their locations?

  He looked about him. It was a long room with shallow recesses to either side, each with several concave ducts running across the back, connected to the others. These had to be root guides similar to those he’d found in the underground root chamber a few weeks ago. Through the gloom of the room he saw a shadowy door at the far end and made towards it. Beyond was a circular passage with another nine root chambers leading off, and a small central room with small, narrow steps leading up. He climbed up through a rectangular gap and found himself at the bottom of a high, circular hall dimly lit by a few opaque, glassy panels dotted here and there, giving off a wan radiance.

  The hall was about a hundred paces wide and the tall encircling wall seemed to be decorated with horizontal bands of friezes. To Chel’s immediate right was a circular stone platform supported by four equidistant head-height plinths. He could see that once there had been four of these platforms, but the one to his left was slumped, charred and melted as if it had been subjected to tremendous heat. The one directly across had been smashed apart, and seared chunks of stone lay scattered over half the floor. The fourth seemed as undamaged as the one Chel stood near but when he looked at it closely, just with his ordinary eyes, he could discern a hazy, tenuous aura and faint silvery gleams in the grooves of the patterns incised into its surface.

  With a shock he realised what he was looking at. The motifs and symbols that covered the still intact platforms looked very similar to those on the face of the warpwell back at Giant’s Shoulder. When he approached the one with the aura he immediately felt a sense of presence, of connections to things beyond the mountain, as if it were almost alive. He ascended a small set of stone steps up to the rounded lip and stepped onto the glimmering patterns.

  At once light bloomed from the high walls, from symbols that appeared amid the carvings whose polished mosaic style gave off bright reflections. Other glassy panels lit up, providing ample illumination.

  AT LAST YOU HAVE COME, SEER CHELUVAHAR.

  A shining silver veil rose around half the platform’s rim, its folds of light brightening and rippling as the speaker spoke.

  ‘Greetings, Sentinel,’ Chel said. ‘Have I been expected?’

  I REASONED THAT THE NEED FOR A ROBUST REFUGE WOULD LEAD YOU TO UOK-HAKAUR, ALTHOUGH NOT SO DELAYED. TIME GROWS SHORT.

  Time grows short, Chel thought. It hadn’t taken long for the cryptic utterances to emerge.

  ‘Sentinel, may I ask how you are able to speak with me here when you reside beneath the Waonwir?’

  THE GREATER PART OF ME IS INTEGRAL TO THE WAONWIR – THAT IS ITS STRENGTH AND MY WEAKNESS. HOWEVER, MY ABILITY TO DIVERT PART OF MY COGNITIVE SELF ALONG THE WORLDPATHS REMAINS UNDIMINISHED.

  ‘What are the worldpaths?’ Chel said.

  WAYS LAID DOWN IN THE UNDERDOMAIN BY THE FORERUNNERS TO DRAW TOGETHER ALL THE CITADEL WORLDS IN PREPARATION FOR THE INVASION OF THE LEGION OF AVATARS. UNFORTUNATELY, FEW WORLDPATHS REMAIN INTACT, AT LEAST AMONG THOSE THAT CONVERGED AT UMARA.

  Possibilities tumbled through Chel’s thoughts. ‘Sentinel, are these worldpaths only for communication, or can we travel along them?’

  TRAVEL BETWEEN THE CITADEL WORLDS WAS COMMONPLACE AND COMMUNICATION WAS PART OF DAY-TO-DAY EXISTENCE. NOW, MY ENERGY SOURCES ARE WEAK AND UNRELIABLE; I AM CAPABLE OF OBSERVING AND COMMUNICATING ALONG THOSE WORLDPATHS STILL OPEN TO ME, BUT SENDING A LIVING BEING WOULD BE DEMANDING AND
PROBLEMATIC.

  ‘Yet you transported the Earthsphere ambassador away, and later sent the visitor Kao Chih and his companions to safety after the defeat of the Legion machine.’

  WHEN THE CONSTRUCT MADE ITS REQUEST FOR A HUMAN OR UVOVO GUEST, IT ALSO SENT AN ISOSHELL OF COHERENT ENERGIES WITH WHICH TO EFFECT THE TRANSFER. A SMALL AMOUNT WAS LEFT OVER, ENOUGH TO REMOVE THE THREE DEFENDERS TO A SAFE PLACE.

  Chel frowned and turned, his attention distracted by a now-familiar presence, and there, flickering across the foot of the wall was the shimmering entity that called itself the Keeper.

  HAVE YOU ENCOUNTERED THIS LURKER SINCE YOUR ARRIVAL, SEER?

  ‘Yes,’ said Chel, gaze following the pale radiant outline until it disappeared behind the rubble of the smashed platform. ‘It took control of one of my companions and caused a cave-in that trapped them in a chamber up near the entrance, then when I came down here it tried to possess me but failed. Is it really the Keeper?’

  THE POSSIBILITY EXISTS. THE LAST KEEPER OF SEGRANA WAS FIGHTING AGAINST THE DREAMLESS TO THE VERY END – HIS MIND WAS STRETCHED ACROSS THE FULL BREADTH OF UMARA, FROM THE HEIGHTS TO THE DEPTHS AND THROUGHOUT STRONGHOLDS LIKE UOK-HAKAUR. IN COMMON WITH THE WAONWIR AND MOST OF THE ANCIENT UVOVO BUILDINGS, THE STONES HERE WERE REFASHIONED TO BECOME LIKE DEVICES, SOME WITH SPECIFIC PROPERTIES, SOME WITH MANY, ALL WORKING TOGETHER TO PROVIDE SANCTUARY, CONTINUITY AND MEMORY FOR THE UVOVO.

  ‘But the war broke that continuity,’ Chel said.

  THE WAR ENDED MANY THINGS. WHEN SEGRANA-THAT-WAS SACRIFICED HER GREATER STRENGTH, THE DREAMLESS SENT THEIR MACHINE SERVANTS AGAINST HER, BURNING THE FORESTS, BURNING THE LAND, BURNING UMARA. THE UVOVO DIED, AS DID THE PATHMASTERS AND THE KEEPER.

  Chel remembered something. ‘After I resisted its assault, it spoke of someone else it had met, the Cold Walker – is that you, Sentinel?’

  YES, THAT IS ITS NAME FOR ME.

  ‘So, it is possible that the stones of this place absorbed some remnant of the original Keeper,’ Chel said. ‘But could this vestige present a threat?’