by David Mack
Her feet disturbed a puddle on the trail at the edge of the village. She stopped, looked down at her image on the water’s ripple-distorted surface, and waited until it was still.
I don’t recognize my own face.
Her eyes were aflame with wild energies, but nothing else about her had changed. So why did gazing upon her reflection feel as if she were staring at a shadow with no owner?
Who am I?
Drifting, light-headed, moving as if by the will of another, she strode down the dirt paths of the only place she had ever called home. Far ahead of her, people she had known all her life, or all of theirs, scurried in a breathless panic at the sight of her. They fled inside their huts, drew the ragged curtains, closed the rain shutters of reeds caked in wax and bound by animal sinew. Mothers snatched up their infants and sprinted out of Nimur’s sight. Pairs of young Guardians gathered up their charges and left their hand-crafted toys behind in their haste to flee.
The village looked deserted from the outside, but she knew better. She felt all those eyes upon her from inside the huts. Violet auras of fear hovered like dark halos above each dwelling, signaling the dread with which her return was being met.
She sensed all their minds. They were beacons in the darkness of mere being. In a world of dull matter and lightless emptiness, each spark of consciousness blazed like a sun cresting the horizon. Their light was more than visible; it was tangible. These were embers waiting to ignite.
At the periphery of the village, rushing in from many directions, were all the Wardens. Nimur felt their fear and their anger, their hesitation and their courage. As they energized their lances, she became aware of the source of the weapons’ power.
The caves. The wordstone. Of course. I should have known. We all should have.
Her voice shook the ground and rattled the huts as she vented her rage at her kith and kin. “Why are you all hiding? You know me! You called me friend! Now you hide from me? Have we become foes overnight?”
No one answered. The aura of fear darkened, and the Wardens quickened their pace.
Nimur stalked the paths of her youth, hurling her words like stones at the people she had thought loved her. “Why did I believe the priestesses? Why did any of us? The Cleansing is a lie! The Change is not a curse—it’s our birthright! Mine, yours, everyone’s! The holy ones dare to tell us we can’t be trusted with this power, but who are they to take it from us? They send their Wardens to bend us to their will, and they tell us it’s because the Shepherds say it must be so. But we can choose our own fates. We don’t have to die!”
Only silence and muffled sobs answered her tirade. She was tired of the walls between her and the other Tomol. With a thought she broke them down and cast them away. Entire huts lifted off the ground and launched out of sight, leaving only their bewildered occupants and their orphaned furniture to face Nimur’s wrath. “Stop hiding from the truth! You cower and whimper when you should be standing tall and walking this world like gods! Cast off your weakness! Seize the power you were born to wield!”
She marshaled a surge of resentment to sweep aside a cluster of huts ahead of her. Huddled in the suddenly naked footprint of one of them were Kerlo, Chimi, and Tayno, all of them sheltering the infant Tahna. As soon as Kerlo realized they had been recognized, he stood and stepped between the others and Nimur. “Please, don’t hurt them. They’re our kin now.”
“What do you understand about family, Kerlo?” Nimur sneered at her daughter’s hapless Guardians. “You’re as blind as the rest of them. The priestess tells you to hand over your child, and you don’t even try to resist. What kind of a father are you?”
Kerlo took a cautious step forward, his hands open and upraised. “This is the way it has to be, Nimur. All of us have our time, and when it draws to an end, we need to think of those we leave behind. It’s our responsibility as parents.”
“Our duty is to raise our children, Kerlo. Not to give them up on demand. Look at me, you fool. Do I look like I’m dying? Do I? I’m stronger than I’ve ever been, and my power’s growing. This is what the priestesses have been afraid of—that we would learn of our own strength. That we would find out we don’t really need them. That we would outgrow them.”
Sadness made Kerlo’s eyes glisten. “That’s not what they’ve feared.”
“Don’t you understand what I’m telling you? We could live twice as long as we do! Maybe three times longer, or four, or even more than that! Instead, we submit to a law that condemns us to birth children we never get to see grow up. A code that dooms each of us to live without ever knowing our real parents. Is this just? Is this right?”
“I don’t think that’s for us to judge.”
“I think it is.” Nimur cocked her head at the sound of running footsteps drawing near. The Wardens charged in from all sides, lances leveled and sparking with pent-up fury. A gaggle of villagers pushed in behind the defenders, their mood as fearful as it was hopeful.
Nimur considered retreat; then she decided it was time to make a stand. “We call the source of our legends Shepherds. But do you realize what that makes us, Kerlo?” She fixed her former mate with a contemptuous stare. “Cattle.”
• • •
The cave tunnel terminated at a large chamber that Theriault could see at a glance had been shaped by artificial means. There were clean cuts through solid rock, right angles where walls met, graceful arches over each of its several entrances, and a level floor of smooth marbled stone. In the center of the great room was a well ringed by a carved-granite bench.
Seta picked up a small shard of metal from the well’s edge and carried it to the nearest sconce, which was recessed into the wall. She struck the metal against the wall inside the sconce’s recess, and it cast sparks that fell and ignited a substance that released rich black smoke. From the odor it cast off, Theriault suspected the fuel was rendered animal fat.
Dastin grew impatient as he watched Seta light more sconces. “Where’s this wordstone?”
“In the great cavern.” Seta was focused on lighting the eight sconces that ringed the well chamber and seemed annoyed at Dastin’s irreverent distraction.
Hesh busied himself shining a light from his tricorder down the well. “I am unable to make a precise scan of the well’s depth due to the continuing mineral interference. However, an ultrasonic pulse has registered an approximate depth of one hundred eleven point two meters.”
The report drew a skeptical look from Tan Bao. “That’s not a precise reading?”
“As I said, sir, it is only approximate.” Hesh looked at Theriault. “At this time, I am unable to determine whether the well is dry, but I—” He paused as Tan Bao leaned in front of him and dropped a loose rock down the well. A few seconds later, there was a distant splash. The Arkenite turned a sour frown at the nurse. “How many rocks will tell us if the water is potable?”
Tan Bao clapped his hands clean and walked away. “Just tryin’ to help.”
Seta lit the last sconce and returned to Theriault’s side. “Before I open the way to the great cavern, you all must swear an oath of secrecy. Since the time of the Arrival, only our priestesses and disciples, and a handful of our Wardens, have ever seen this place. If my people were not in terrible danger, I would not be showing it to you now. Do you all swear to keep secret the means by which the entrance is opened?”
Theriault nodded. “Cross our hearts and hope to die.” Seeing that the Tomol was perplexed by the human idiom, she added, “Yes, I swear to keep it a secret.” Then she aimed prompting looks at the other members of the landing party. Their quick but solemn vows overlapped one another.
Satisfied with the landing party’s collective pledge, Seta stepped away from them and faced a blank wall five meters tall by eight meters wide. The teen closed her eyes and raised her arms, and then she uttered a string of words that the universal translator was unable to parse.
“Nchan kaji-mokuu, teon yeshor ukwilena mwongati.”
There was a low groan, followed by a loud dry scrape—and the wall started to move. The three-meter-thick barrier slid slowly to the right, revealing a short but broad passage to a vast cavern on the other side. As soon as the wall had moved far enough for people to pass, Seta led the landing party down the passageway and into the yawning expanse that lay beyond.
High overhead, long stalactites hung from the dome-shaped ceiling. Milky pools dotted the floor and lit the cavern with eerie phosphorescent light. The walls and roof boasted colorful striations in an impressive variety of colors. In any other circumstance, Theriault would have expected a trained geologist such as Hesh to be giddy with excitement to study them. Today, however, Hesh’s attention was fixed upon the same detail that captivated everyone else.
In the center of the cavern was a flat-topped pyramid composed of smooth stone and a polished, bronze-hued metal. Steps had been carved into all four sides of the pyramid to provide easy access to the impressive metallic object that stood on top of it.
It resembled peculiar sculpture: a thick, blocky base with a pyramidal capstone, from which rose two towering shapes that reminded Theriault of arrowheads; they were perpendicular to and intersected each other, as if one had been shot through the other so that they now shared a common core and tip. Its base was about five meters tall, Theriault estimated, and her best guess was that the metallic structure on top of it stood approximately twenty-two meters tall.
As she and the others walked toward it, her eyes adjusted to the curious illumination cast upward from the chalky pools, and she realized the blocky base of the metal structure was completely covered in raised symbols. She pointed at the object. “Seta, is that—?”
“The wordstone? Yes. There is written the history of our people—how we came to the island of Suba, and the laws given to us by the Shepherds to ensure our survival.”
A soft alert tone chirped from Hesh’s tricorder. He checked the device. “Commander, my readings are still imprecise due to the interference, but I am certain that my tricorder is detecting a peculiar energy field being generated by that metallic object.”
Theriault snapped her fingers, halting Dastin, Tan Bao, and Seta. She turned toward Hesh. “Can you get a clear reading on that energy signature?”
“Yes, sir. Just a moment.” He tinkered with his tricorder while everyone watched him. If the weight of their attention bothered him, he gave no sign of it. He looked up, his mien confident. “I have confirmed this is the energy signature detected by our probe. This is the power source we came to find. It is definitely synthetic and the product of a technologically advanced culture—though I am unable to tell you much more than that. Its inner workings are a mystery.”
“Then let’s go have a closer look,” Dastin said, continuing toward the pyramid. Tan Bao looked at Theriault for direction. She motioned for him to follow Dastin. Seta trailed close behind the two men, determined not to let them mount the sacred wordstone without supervision.
Theriault resumed walking behind them, and Hesh stayed close beside her. She kept her voice down as she issued her next order. “Set up a datalink to the Sagittarius. Upload that energy signature and all the visual data you can record about this thing. Then have the ship’s computer compare it against all similar artifacts in the memory banks.”
“Aye, sir.”
Seta skipped ahead of Dastin and Tan Bao and led them up the closest set of stairs to the structure. Theriault and Hesh followed a few strides behind the others. The new priestess turned and wore an embarrassed grimace. “There are still parts of the wordstone I don’t know how to interpret. Ysan was going to teach me, but . . .” She let the thought pass unspoken.
Dastin ran his hands over the raised glyphs that covered almost every available square centimeter of the structure’s massive base. “This is incredible. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Tan Bao circled the structure and studied its tens of thousands of symbols. “Reminds me of the Egyptian hieroglyphs, or the Tammarchian pictograms.”
Something about that didn’t sit right with Theriault. “I don’t think so. Not enough variety in the symbols. It’s not as complex as those systems. And it’s not like kanji, either. There’s something deceptively simple about all of it. And it reminds me of something I read, but I can’t quite remember what.”
Seta pressed her hands against one of the glyphs and closed her eyes. “Do you want to hear the parts of the wordstone that I know?”
“Yes,” Hesh said, quick to answer for the group.
“Long ago—more than a hundred thousand sun-turns by our current calendar—was the time of the Arrival. That was when the Shepherds brought us to Suba. We were only a few, the last of our kind. The Shepherds spared us the fate of our ancestors, who were destroyed by the evil of the ones who spoke in fire, the dark gods they called Shedai.”
The mere mention of the now-eradicated Shedai raised the hackles on the back of Theriault’s neck and drew a wide-eyed stare of rapt attention from Tan Bao.
Eyes still shut, Seta continued. “When the ancient Tomol grew too strong for the Shedai to control, the dark gods poisoned our people with the horror of the Change. It turns us into monsters. It gives us great powers, but it also drives us mad. A Tomol who completes the Change becomes insane and irreversibly violent. Our forebears laid our first homeland waste.
“Nothing can stop the Change. Sometime around our eighteenth sun—for some it comes before, for others it comes later—it begins. The first sign is always the same: The eyes burn with the fire of the Shedai. After that, the end comes within days.
“For the sake of our survival, it was decided that all who show the first sign of the Change would sever their ties to the living: dissolve bonds of marriage, give up custody of children to new Guardians, and surrender willingly to the Cleansing.”
Dastin was clearly unsettled. “You mean they jump into that pit of fire.”
“Yes. Only by the Flame of the Shepherds can the afflicted be Cleansed.”
At the risk of inviting bad news, Theriault asked, “What happens if someone completes the Change now? Someone like Nimur?”
“Then the wordstone is meant to protect us.” Seta turned a worried eye on the looming metal structure. “But Ysan never taught me how to summon the power of the stone. In ages past, the wordstone was able to snare and trap the Changed by turning them to stone. We call those prisoners of the wordstone the Endless. There are a few in the valley on the far side of the hill. But I have never seen it used. No one remembers the last time a Changed became Endless.”
A beep from Hesh’s tricorder turned all eyes toward the Arkenite. He checked the device’s display, then hurried to stand beside Theriault. “Commander, have a look at this.”
He handed her the tricorder but said nothing else. As soon as she saw the display, she understood the reason for his discretion. The memory banks on the Sagittarius had matched the glyphs on this structure to those detected a year earlier by the crew of the Enterprise, on a smaller but otherwise identical structure on a Class-M world threatened by an asteroid strike. The Enterprise’s crew had eventually learned that the structure was made by a culture that referred to itself as the Preservers. That “obelisk,” as Kirk and his crew had mischaracterized their discovery, had turned out to be an asteroid-deflection system put in place to protect the planet and its transplanted human inhabitants—an amalgam of various early North American cultures.
She craned her head back and gazed up at the structure the Preservers had left behind for the benefit of the Tomol. Why was it so much larger? Could a Changed individual actually pose a more potent threat than an asteroid strike?
Regardless, she knew there was little point in tainting the Tomol’s mythology by trying to explain that the Shepherds were actually the Preservers, or that the Tomol had likely evolved on a com
pletely different world orbiting a distant star. Disrupting their worldview in such a manner was not merely prohibited by the Prime Directive; it would, in Theriault’s opinion, at best serve no purpose, or, at worst, do more harm than good.
She handed the tricorder back to Hesh. “Can you use this to find a way to activate this thing? Help Seta make it do what it’s supposed to do to protect the Tomol?”
“I think I can. Are those your orders?”
“Yes. Get on it.” She left Hesh to work and put a reassuring hand on Seta’s shoulder. “My friend might be able to help you figure out the last part of your wordstone and stop Nimur. Will you accept our help?”
“If it will protect my people, yes.”
“Okay. We’ll do what we can. Just give us some time to figure out these glyphs.”
Dastin beckoned Theriault with a sly tilt of his head. They stepped off to one side and down a few steps on the pyramid to confer in private. The scout sounded concerned. “Sir, what if this gizmo doesn’t work anymore? If we’re counting on this old hunk of junk to save our asses, we could be setting up ourselves—and her—for a big disappointment.”
“I had the same thought.” Theriault took out her communicator and flipped it open. “Which means it’s time to make sure we have reinforcements standing by.” She opened a channel and increased the gain to cut through the interference from the hill’s mineral compounds. “Theriault to Sagittarius.” Seconds passed without a reply. She set her communicator’s transmission strength to maximum. “Theriault to Sagittarius. Do you read me?” The channel remained silent. She turned toward Hesh. “Is your link to the ship still active?”
He checked his tricorder and frowned. “No. The channel went dead twenty seconds ago.”
Theriault closed her communicator and tucked it back into its pocket on her jumpsuit. “So much for calling in the cavalry.”
14
Framed by the dull red glow of the bridge’s working lights, the main viewscreen of the Klingon battle cruiser Voh’tahk served as a window to the cold black reaches of space. Against that span of darkness peppered with stars, a single orb grew larger and brighter by the moment.
