by J L Forrest
He pounded a few more times, then kicked the copper- reinforced timbers, wood stained blue by the long decay of the metal. After pounding a few more times, Dhaos turned back to the company and shrugged, his boyish grin regained.
“They are slow sometimes,” he said.
The gate locks clanged and the doors creaked outward, moved by machines invisible from below, revealing a stone passage slivered by high clerestory sunlight. An old man stood within, his body wrapped by rough woolen garments. His face shown ash pale, skin loose on his skull, his cheeks sagging.
He graveled, “Dhaos Shwn Oudwn, what visitor?”
“Someone,” Dhaos said, “I doubt you ever expected.”
Unable to reach her spear or the bows strapped to Kwlko’s cantle, Nyahri laid her hand on her knife. She gauged the throwing distance to the old one who, despite his age, set her on edge. Yw Sabi dismounted, stepped into the gateway’s shadow, and withdrew her hood. A moment passed before the elder bowed.
“Atreian,” he said, “Sultah yw Sabi et Ekaterina.”
“You know she’s dead,” yw Sabi said. “Improper, to use her name with mine. Under different circumstances, Templari, how I might punish you for such an affront—”
He bowed again. “My apologies and condolences, Atreiani, as I meant no offense. The pain must yet feel near for you.”
“Now use my proper title.”
He glanced up. “You jest?”
“My title, Templari.”
Another bow. “Magistress Sultah yw Sabi, we are honored by your arrival. You do recognize me?”
“You know I don’t.”
“I want you to know, Magistress, I was always on your side.”
A growl left her throat and she raised her arm as if to backhand him. The archers gathered, confused but ready to act, and Nyahri brought Kwlko several paces forward. At the last moment, yw Sabi checked her blow.
The old man flinched. “Of all we might meet,” the Templari said, “after such a long time, you’re the least welcome.”
“There, now you’re telling the truth,” she said. “Here is my truth—I can come in peace now or with violence later. The Dalkhu would still obey me.”
“Would they?” he asked, as if he doubted, yet his horror showed. “Peace. Come inside, but the humans must remain out here. I don’t want Dhaos and his pack of mutts sullying S’Eret’s halls. Forbid they might touch something.”
Dhaos laughed at the Templari. “You sting me, you old sack of bones. Am I not trusted?”
“No, Dhaos, not until your father’s dead and burned, or his flesh works in our service.”
Nyahri’s throat tightened as she realized what was to happen.
Humans must remain out here. Ay! The vast doors will shut, I on one side, yw Sabi on the other.
She kneed Kwlko closer yet, and the Atreiani gestured toward her.
“The E’cwni comes with me.”
“The rules haven’t changed,” he said. “Is there some reason we should permit a human so near a Citadel? Or so close to our collections?”
“I’m considering her claime.”
“How unfortunate,” he said, frowning at Nyahri. “Considering is not enough, Magistress. You know that.”
“She stays with me. Are there any other Magisters awake who might countermand my wishes?”
“Not to our knowledge.”
“You sound disappointed?”
The Templari frowned.
“Circumstances being what they are, I am a quorum of one,” she said, “and the E’cwni comes with me.” Yw Sabi waved Nyahri to her. “Come.”
Nyahri slid from the saddle, slung her mistress’s possessions, and took her spear in hand. She passed the reins to Dhaos.
“Do something useful,” she told him, “and tether the horses.”
“That is an improvement.” He smirked. “Last time you threatened to dismember a man for touching your horse.”
Nyahri followed yw Sabi and the gate closed behind them, leaving them in a dry gloom, a stone corridor thirty hands wide and sixty high. The floor sloped downward, the darkness deepening with every step. The old man turned, and crimson ghost-fire glowed in his eyes. Nyahri stifled her gasp.
“As you may now recall, Magistress,” he said, “I am Unit Kepler Seventeen.”
The Atreiani studied him. “How well do you remember her execution?” Fury smoldered behind her voice, all her usual calm reduced to nothing but a façade.
“My memory,” Kepler said, “is as good now as then. I can appreciate your anger, Sultah yw Sabi, but my job that day was to observe and record. You cannot begrudge me that? You cannot blame me for the atrocities of those times?”
“Blame? No, but you Templarii have never been my favorites.”
“We were not your creation.”
“Nonetheless, you’ll follow my commands and answer my questions. Am I understood?”
“Perfectly.” He lifted his chin. “Though by the official record you’re still an enemy of state, Magistress, I hope we can find some mutually beneficial way forward.”
“I care nothing for mutual benefit, Kepler. You obey. That is the beginning and end of it.”
He pointed the way, and they walked again. “I’ll attend to whatever you need, of course.”
“A place to stay,” yw Sabi said, “access to your records. Nyahri here will want the horses tended and we’ll need good, hot food.”
Farther still from the entrance, the light from the high windows faded and disappeared. Nyahri edged closer to yw Sabi’s side. “Mistress?”
“Hmm?”
“It is too dark. I cannot see.”
“I can. Take my hand, Nyahri. I’ll look after you.”
They laced their fingers together, side by side into the black.
◆◆◆
The library existed as dust, dryness, and ages of pressed paper and parchment packed on heavy-boarded shelves, books balanced to the tops of the walls. Candles set in lace-iron flickered from the ceiling. Stools and chairs stood at simple tables.
As Kepler led Nyahri and yw Sabi into one low chamber of the multi-celled collection, their footsteps echoed on the sandstone floor. Hands folded within his robes, he stopped beside a Templarin woman seated at a table. She dressed, as he did, in rough cloth. Though she appeared younger, her pale skin also draped too loosely on her bones. She scrawled in an open tome, Kepler looking over her shoulder as her pen flew across the page, its nib whispering constantly. Nyahri kept close to yw Sabi, mistrusting everything, the walls too near, the air heavy as mud in her lungs.
The Atreiani strolled from shelf to shelf, caressing the book spines, reading the letters on them.
“What is this?” she asked, gesturing to the library as a whole.
“Our complete record,” Kepler said, “from the time of our emergence after the Eventide until this day, every bit of news which has ever come to us. Not only in this chamber, but twelve others, and innumerable collections of artifacts. We have four distinct libraries, including this one, all within our domicile.”
“This is your best effort?”
“You misunderstand the difficulties, Magistress.” He looked around himself, at the bookcases and tomes, as if they demonstrated how remarkable the Templarin efforts had been. “We’ve done as well as we could.”
“This is paper, pounded kidskins, and ink. Computers, networks, databases—where are they?”
“Be assured, anything you wish, we Templarii can search it out or recite it. The local networks are long destroyed, and it has been ages since we could mine rare metals to start over. There are Persephone’s satellites, of course, but we’ve no way to link to her. There are only a few dozen of us left, Magistress. What would you have had us do?”
“You’ve nothing searchable?”
He gave a shrug. “Our computers failed time-out-of-mind ago and, unless you’ve some way to subvert the laws of thermodynamics, these papers and kidskins must suffice. You know as well as I, Sultah yw Sabi,
you Atreianii made only a handful of self-sustaining machines.”
Yw Sabi breathed a dismissive sigh.
“Speaking of Persephone,” she said, “of the Hive? You cannot raise it?
“No, Atreiani.”
“For how long?”
“Since fifty years after the first caldera blew.”
She squinted, an expression between careful consideration and irritation. “Fiftyish years or fifty years?”
“Ah, yes, we have always found that peculiar too. She went silent at fifty years to the second, Atreiani.”
“And Borea? Anything?”
“As I have intimated, nothing from the Hive, and Borea was never programmed for us, Atreiani. You know that. I take it she hasn’t responded to you since your awakening?”
“No.”
Yw Sabi sat at the table and pushed a chair toward Nyahri, who took the seat, moving it farther from the wrinkled, scribbling scholar. The Atreiani bent over the table, burying her face in her folded arms.
Nyahri leaned closer to her, almost laying her hand on the Atreiani’s shoulder. “Mistress?”
Yw Sabi looked up, squaring her shoulders to Kepler. “You’ve an analog indexing system? A card catalog? Something?”
“Of course,” he said.
“First I want to know, you piece of—” Yw Sabi closed her eyes, only a moment, mastering her temper. “Tell me, Templari, how long was I asleep?”
The woman persisted in her scribbling. Nyahri shifted in the chair, trying to get comfortable, awed by the walls of books. Until then she’d seen only one, a pile of papers her father bound in a leather satchel, along with a short stack of sacred parchments kept by her aunt and her mother before.
“How long?” yw Sabi demanded.
Kepler began, “You are the first Atreiani—”
“Get to it! How long?”
The Templari stepped back. “Over five millennia.”
Yw Sabi stood, her chair clattering onto its side. She put her hands to her hair, turning away, and leaned against a bookshelf.
Pen scratching.
“So long?” she said. “I thought a few hundred years perhaps.”
Yw Sabi slid down the shelves, onto the floor, and a few books fell behind her. The Atreiani stared into some middle distance, the look of shock. Nyahri went to her, scared to touch her, scared not to.
How do I comfort her?
The Templarin woman stopped writing, glancing at the fallen tomes, then returned to her work.
“It doesn’t matter,” yw Sabi reassured herself, her voice quieter. “Five years, five thousand, it doesn’t matter. You’ll teach me your indexing system, Kepler. I have to study your records, all fifty centuries’ worth.”
“Pardon me, Magistress, but wouldn’t it be easier if you simply powered the Citadel? You’d have all the answers you needed in a fraction of the time.”
“Not yet, Kepler.”
“Why not? Because of how you left things with your sisters and brothers? But that was a long time ago—”
“For me it was months. Ekaterina’s death was two years ago by my count, Kepler. For me these things are recent, do you understand?”
“Then, by your accounting, your misdeeds were not so long ago either.” He paused, letting those words settle. “Your peers are noted for their forgiveness, at least among their own kind. Bygones can be bygones. I can lead you to the portal myself, right now. You should open it. Waken them. Ask for their clemency.”
A flash of horror crossed yw Sabi’s face, but she suppressed it. Crouching on the floor, her shoulders slumped, her body heavy, she appeared to Nyahri once more lonely.
“I need to order my thoughts,” yw Sabi said, “and I won’t descend, Kepler, till I consider my position.”
“What position is that, Magistress? You committed serious crimes. In legal review, it may be determined you have already served your penance, but there must be a review, yes? According to laws you helped write? So long as the explosion at Abswyn was not your fault, so long as your apparently lone survival is mere chance—”
Writing, writing, writing, the scribe’s pen swirled so fast it blurred, a page done a minute.
Yw Sabi snarled at the woman. “Get out! Stop your fucking scratching and get the fuck out before I pull you from that fucking head and stomp you into the fucking floor!”
The scribe stood, gathering her instruments, and departed. Nyahri, startled by yw Sabi’s rage, sat back against a shelf, wrapping her arms around her chest.
Yw Sabi recovered her composure. “Five thousand years? How has it been so many, Templari?”
He bowed. “I don’t know, Atreiani.”
“The Citadels weren’t designed to lie so idle, not more than those fifty years—fifty.”
“I don’t know.”
“You must know something.”
“We have only the vaguest reports from beyond our borders.”
“Bullshit.”
Yw Sabi pounded her fist on the floor, the flagstone cracking under the blow. Nyahri flinched.
Gods, she is strong! How many ways, Nyahri thought, must I be reminded she is no human.
“Sultah yw Sabi,” Kepler said, his tone placating, “we keep only this Citadel and it has never woken. No news has ever reached us that any other Citadel has ever awoken. Even we were offline for those first years, were not even around when the surviving humans dug themselves out, or when the life blooms emerged on the Earth’s surface—”
“Life blooms?” The Atreianii squinted thoughtfully.
Kepler shrugged. “It is the best descriptions we have from the few remaining texts of that time—life blooms, on every continent. Life which simply appeared amidst the wreckage.”
“Interesting. What else?”
“Little else.” He held up his hands, again a placation. “I am telling the truth—I do not know why the Citadels sleep so long beyond their appointed time, and I do not know why it would be you who would awaken now. We did not begin keeping our own records until after the descendants of Exemplarii found us and rebooted us.”
Her eyes narrowed a moment longer, expressing her disbelief. “Whatever it is you do know, Templari, you’ll teach me.” She pointed to the shelves. “Five thousand years gone by, there are answers in these books, and I’ve no time to waste.”
He bowed. “I’ll retrieve the indices.”
“Good.”
Yw Sabi returned to the table, and Nyahri followed her.
Kepler retrieved a few dozen blocky tomes, setting them in order on the tabletop. A rapacious student, yw Sabi learned their system, asking questions of Kepler: files, call numbers, tags, cross-references, digests, abstracts.
Nyahri could only guess how long they’d take. At first, ten minutes seemed long. Then half an hour passed, an hour, two. As much as she tried to learn alongside yw Sabi, at length Nyahri closed her eyes, almost sleeping, listening to the occasional exchanges between the Templari and yw Sabi. At last, when all yw Sabi’s questions seemed answered, the Atreiani sent Kepler away. He closed the door as he left.
“Come, Nyahri, look.”
Nyahri forced herself to attention. “Yea.”
“Read this with me, and let’s try to piece this together.”
Nyahri leaned close to yw Sabi, who opened a book marked Histories 01.01.0001. They scanned the contents.
“In the early days,” yw Sabi said, “after what became known as the Eventide—”
“Yea, I know about the Eventide, Mistress.”
“You would, I suppose—part of your history but a new concept to me. Hadn’t encounter the term until I heard it from Shwn Jhon. After it, the Templarii tried to maintain contact with each other, betwixt the Temples, and with the satellite system called OpNet, itself controlled by yet another AI named Persephone. As Kepler tells it they lost most communications early. Still, the Templarii kept their responsibility as the record keepers, learning as much as possible of all the Citadels—their locations, to know which Atreianii
were where, to know which Citadels were built for which tasks. For all this time they depended on relays no faster than the Pony Express.”
Nyahri assumed this meant slow. “What do you wish to learn here, yw Sabi?”
The Atreiani held up a finger, asking for Nyahri’s patience. “By the time I went into suspension, my enemies had kept me in the dark about the Citadels’ manufacture. I didn’t know which had been assigned to what protocols, who would reside in them, or what else had been done. I’ve too many holes in my knowledge.”
Nyahri nodded as if she understood.
“Besides that,” yw Sabi said, “we’ve a bit of a mystery. Globally, the Congress’s original plans called for one hundred fifty Citadels. The odds that all those Citadels’ auto-awake functions would fail and that of all the Citadels, Abswyn would awake first, and that of all the berths in Abswyn, mine should power up first—these are astronomically long odds.”
“What does that mean, mistress?”
“It means I was meant to wake first. It was designed by someone to be that way.”
“You are certain Suhto did not awaken you?”
“Positive.” Yw Sabi pressed her thumb to her forehead, leaning forward as she considered. “That Suhto would be in the wrong place at the wrong time, that’s not astronomically long odds—that’s bad, bad luck. A human could never inadvertently awaken it.”
“I still do not know what that means,” Nyahri said.
“I’ve no idea either, lovely one. Let’s hope we find a hint somewhere here.”
“What did he mean by those words, life bloom?”
“Uncertain.”
They read together the first chapters of history surrounding the Eventide. During the great darkness, in the ash, when the geothermal power stations exploded and blotted the sun, during the strife between the Atreianii, during the making of the Citadels, during the blackening of the skies—
“The Templarii here lost contact with all the satellites,” yw Sabi said, “all the extraterrestrial facilities, the off-world colonies.”
Geothermal, satellites, extraterrestrial, Nyahri thought. I have much to learn.
“Yet the idea that Persephone went dark,” yw Sabi said, “is as ridiculous as Borea not answering me.”
