A Liaden Universe Constellation: Volume I

by Sharon Lee

  Out among the star-lanes, enormous and a-quiver with every note of the song, Panopele listened, and heard no discord. Expanding even further, she opened what might be called her eyes, looked out along the scintillant fields of life and saw—a blot.

  Faint it was, vastly distant from the planet where her body stood and sang, toes comfortably gripping the soil— and unmistakable in its menace. Panopele strained to see—to hear—more clearly, hearing—or imagining she heard—the faintest note of discord; the barest whisper of malice.

  Far below and laboring, her body sang on, voice sweeping out in pure waves of passion. The two novices who danced spun like mad things, sweat soaking their robes. The two who wept fell to their knees and struck their heads against the earth.

  Panopele strained, stretching toward the edge of the song, the limit of Naratha’s Will. The blot shimmered, growing; the malice of its answering song all at once plain.

  Far below, the body of Panopele gasped, interrupting the song. The scintillance of the star-lanes paled into a blur; there was a rush of sound, un-song-like, and Panopele was joltingly aware of cold feet, laboring lungs, the drumbeat of her heart. Her throat hurt, and she was thirsty.

  A warm cloak was draped across her shoulders, clasped across her throat. Warm hands pressed her down into the wide seat of the ancient wooden Singer’s Chair. In her left ear the novice Fanor murmured, “I have water, Voice. Will you drink?”

  Drink she would and drink she did, the cool water a joy.

  “Blessings on you,” she rasped and lay her left hand over his heart in Naratha’s full benediction. Fanor was one of the two who wept in the song.

  “Voice.” He looked away, as he always did, embarrassed by her notice.

  “Will you rest here, Voice? Or return to temple?” That was Lietta, who danced, and was doubtless herself in need of rest.

  Truth told, rest was what Panopele wanted. She was weary; drained, as the song sometimes drained one; and dismayed in her heart. She wanted to sleep, here and now among the dewy evening. To sleep and awake believing that the blot she had detected was no more than a woman’s fallible imagining.

  The Voice of Naratha is not allowed the luxury of self-deceit. And the blot had been growing larger.

  Weary, Panopele placed her hands on the carven arms of the chair that dwarfed all present but herself and gathered her strength. Her eyes sought the blue star Alyedon: the blot approached from that direction. That knowledge fed her strength and resolve. Slowly she leaned forward and, as the chair creaked with her efforts, pushed herself onto her feet.

  “Let us return,” she said to those who served her.

  Lietta bowed, and picked up the chair. Fanor bent to gather the remaining water jugs; Panopele stopped him with a gesture.

  “One approaches,” she told him. “You are swiftest. Run ahead, and be ready to offer welcome.”

  One glance he dared, full into her eyes, then passed the jug he held to Darl and ran away across the starlit grass.

  “So.” Panopele motioned and Zan stepped forward to offer an arm, her face still wet with tears.

  “My willing support, Voice,” she said, as ritual demanded, though her own voice was soft and troubled.

  “Blessings on you,” Panopele replied, and proceeded across the grass in Fanor’s wake, leaning heavily upon the arm of her escort.

  THERE WAS OF COURSE nothing resembling a spaceport on-world, and the only reason the place had escaped Interdiction, in Montet’s opinion, was that no scout had yet penetrated this far into the benighted outback of the galaxy.

  That the gentle agrarian planet below her could not possibly contain the technology necessary to unravel the puzzle of the thing sealed and seething in its stasis box, failed to delight her. Even the knowledge that she had deciphered legend with such skill that she had actually raised a planet at the coordinates she had half-intuited did not warm her.

  Frowning, omnipresent ache centered over her eyes, Montet brought the scout ship down. Her orbital scans had identified two large clusters of life and industry—cities, perhaps—and a third, smaller, cluster, which nonetheless put forth more energy than either of its larger cousins.

  Likely, it was a manufactory of some kind, Montet thought, and home of such technology as the planet might muster. She made it her first target, by no means inclined to believe it her last.

  She came to ground in a gold and green field a short distance from her target. She tended her utility belt while the hull cooled, then rolled out into a crisp, clear morning.

  The target was just ahead, on the far side of a slight rise. Montet swung into a walk, the grass parting silently before her. She drew a deep lungful of fragrant air, verifying her scan’s description of an atmosphere slightly lower in oxygen than Liad’s. Checking her stride, she bounced, verifying the scan’s assertion of a gravity field somewhat lighter than that generated by the homeworld.

  Topping the rise, she looked down at the target, which was not a manufactory at all, but only a large building, and various outbuildings, clustered companionably together. To her right hand, fields were laid out. To her left, the grassland continued until it met a line of silvery trees, brilliant in the brilliant day.

  And of the source of the energy reported by her scans, there was no sign whatsoever.

  Montet sighed, gustily. Legend.

  She went down the hill. Eventually, she came upon a path, which she followed until it abandoned her on the threshold of the larger building.

  Here she hesitated, every scout nerve a-tingle, for this should be a Forbidden World, socially and technologically unprepared for the knowledge-stress that came riding in on the leather-clad shoulders of a scout. She had no business walking up to the front door of the local hospital, library, temple, or who-knew-what, no matter how desperate her difficulty. There was no one here who was the equal—who was the master of the thing in her ship’s hold. How could there be? She hovered on the edge of doing damage past counting. Better to return to her ship, quickly; rise to orbit and get about setting the warning beacons.

  . . . and yet, the legends, she thought—and then all indecision was swept away, for the plain white wall she faced showed a crack, then a doorway, framing a man. His pale robe was rumpled, wet and stained with grass. His hair was dark and braided below his shoulders; the skin of his face and his hands were brown. His feet, beneath the stained, wet hem, were bare.

  He was taller than she, and strongly built. She could not guess his age, beyond placing him in that nebulous region called “adult.”

  He spoke; his voice was soft, his tone respectful. The language was tantalizingly close to a tongue she knew.

  “God’s day to you,” she said, speaking slowly and plainly in that language. She showed her empty hands at waist level, palm up. “Has the house any comfort for a stranger?”

  Surprise showed at the edges of the man’s face. His hands rose, tracing a stylized pattern in the air at the height of his heart.

  “May Naratha’s Song fill your heart,” he said, spacing his words as she had hers. It was not quite, Montet heard, the tongue she knew, but ’twould suffice.

  “Naratha foretold your coming,” the man continued. “The Voice will speak with you.” He paused, hands moving through another pattern. “Of comfort, I cannot promise, stranger. I hear a dark chanting upon the air.”

  Well he might hear just that, Montet thought grimly; especially if he were a Healer-analog. Carefully, she inclined her head to the doorkeeper.

  “Gladly will I speak with the Voice of Naratha,” she said.

  The man turned and perforce she followed him, inside and across a wide, stone-floored hall to another plain white wall. He lay his hand against the wall and once again a door appeared. He stood aside, hands shaping the air.

  “The Voice awaits you.”

  Montet squared her shoulders and walked forward.

  The room, like the hall, was brightly lit, the shine of light along the white walls and floor adding to the misery
of her headache. Deliberately, she used the scout’s mental relaxation drill and felt the headache inch, grudgingly, back. Montet sighed and blinked the room into focus.

  “Be welcome into the House of Naratha.” The voice was deep, resonant, and achingly melodic, the words spaced so that they were instantly intelligible.

  Montet turned, finding the speaker standing near a niche in the left-most wall.

  The lady was tall and on a scale to dwarf the sturdy doorkeeper; a woman of abundance, shoulders proud and face serene. Her robe was divided vertically in half—one side white, one side black—each side as wide as Montet entire. Her hair was black, showing gray like stars in the vasty deepness of space. Her face was like a moon, glowing; her eyes were dark and sightful. She raised a hand and sketched a sign before her, the motion given meaning by the weight of her palm against the air.

  “I am the Voice of Naratha. Say your name, Seeker.”

  Instinctively, Montet bowed. One would bow, to such a lady as this—and one would not dare lie.

  “I am Montet sig’Norba,” she said, hearing her own voice thin and reedy in comparison with the other’s rich tones.

  “Come forward, Montet sig’Norba.”

  Forward she went, until she stood her own short arm’s reach from the Voice. She looked up and met the gaze of far-seeing black eyes.

  “Yes,” the Voice said after a long pause. “You bear the wounds we have been taught to look for.”

  Montet blinked. “Wounds?”

  “Here,” said the Voice and lay her massive palm against Montet’s forehead, directly on the spot centered just above her eyes, where the pain had lived for six long relumma.

  The Voice’s palm was warm and soft. Montet closed her eyes as heat spread up and over her scalp, soothing and—she opened her eyes in consternation.

  The headache was gone.

  The Voice was a Healer, then. Though the Healers on Liad had not been able to ease her pain.

  “You have that which belongs to Naratha,” the Voice said, removing her hand. “You may take me to it.”

  Montet bowed once more. “Lady, that which I carry is . . .” she grappled briefly with the idiom of the language she spoke, hoping it approximated the Voice’s nearly enough for sense, and not too nearly for insult.

  “What I carry is . . . accursed of God. It vibrates evil, and seeks destruction—even unto its own destruction. It is—I brought it before a . . . priestess of my own kind and its vibrations all but overcame her skill.”

  The Voice snorted. “A minor priestess, I judge. Still, she did well, if you come to me at her word.”

  “Lady, her word was to make all haste to fling the monster into a sun.”

  “No!” The single syllable resonated deep in Montet’s chest, informing, for a moment, the very rhythm of her heartbeat.

  “No,” repeated the Voice, quieter. “To follow such a course would be to grant its every desire. To the despair of all things living.”

  “What is it?” Montet heard herself blurt.

  The Voice bowed her head. “It is the Shadow of Naratha. For every great good throws a shadow, which is, in its nature, great evil.”

  Raising her head, she took a breath and began, softly, to chant. “Of all who fought, it was Naratha who prevailed against the Enemy. Prevailed, and drove the Enemy into the back beyond of space, from whence it has never again ventured. The shadows of Naratha’s triumph, as terrible as the Enemy’s defeat was glorious, roam the firmament still, destroying, for that is what they do.” The Voice paused. The chant vibrated against the pure white walls for a moment, then stopped.

  This, Montet thought, was the language of legend—hyperbole. Yet the woman before her did not seem a fanatic, living in a smoky dream of reality. This woman was alive, intelligent—and infinitely sorrowful.

  “Voices were trained,” the Voice was now calmly factual, “to counteract the vibration of evil. We were chosen to sing, to hold against and—equalize— what slighter folk cannot encompass. We were many, once. Now I am one. Naratha grant that the equation is exact.”

  Montet stared. She was a Liaden and accustomed to the demands of Balance. But this—

  “You will die? But by your own saying it wants just that!”

  The Voice smiled. “I will not die, nor will it want destruction when the song is through.” She tipped her massive head, hair rippling, black-and-gray, across her proud shoulders.

  “Those who travel between the stars see many wonders. I am the last Voice of Naratha. I exact a price, star-stranger.”

  Balance, clear enough. Montet bowed her head. “Say on.”

  “You will stand with me while I sing this monster down. You will watch and you will remember. Perhaps you have devices that record sight and sound. If you do, use them. When it is done, bring the news to Lietta, First Novice, she who would have been Voice. Say to her that you are under geas to study in our library. When you have studied, I require you to return to the stars, to discover what has happened—to the rest of us.” She paused.

  “You will bring what you find to this outpost. You will also initiate your fellow star-travelers into the mysteries of Naratha’s Discord.” The wonderful voice faltered and Montet bent her head.

  “In the event,” she said, softly, “that the equation is not—entirely—precise.” She straightened. “I accept your Balance.”

  “So,” said the Voice. “Take me now to that which is mine.”

  THE VOICE STOOD, humming, while Montet dragged the stasis box out, unsealed it and flipped open the lid. At a sign from the other woman, she tipped the box sideways, and the thing, whatever it was, rolled out onto the grass, buzzing angrily.

  “I hear you, Discord,” the Voice murmured, and raised her hand to sign.

  Montet dropped back, triggering the three recorders with a touch to her utility belt.

  The Voice began to sing.

  A phrase only, though the beauty of it pierced Montet heart and soul.

  The phrase ended and the space where it had hung was filled with the familiar malice of the black thing’s song.

  Serene, the Voice heard the answer out, then sang again, passion flowing forth like flame.

  Again, the thing answered, snarling in the space between Montet’s ears. She gasped and looked to the Voice, but her face was as smooth and untroubled as glass.

  Once more, the woman raised her voice, and it seemed to Montet that the air was richer, the grassland breeze fresher, than it had been a moment before.

  This time, the thing did not allow her to finish, but vibrated in earnest. Montet shrieked at the agony in her joints and fell to her knees, staring up at the Voice, who sang on, weaving around and through the malice; stretching, reshaping, reprogramming, Montet thought, just before her vision grayed and she could see no longer.

  She could hear, though, even after the pain had flattened her face down in the grass. The song went on, never faltering, never heeding the heat that Montet felt rising from the brittling grass, never straining, despite the taint in the once clean air.

  The Voice hit a note, high, true and sweet. Montet’s vision cleared. The Voice stood, legs braced, face turned toward the sky, her mighty throat corded with effort. The note continued, impossibly pure, soaring, passionate, irrefutable. There was only that note, that truth—nothing more—in all the galaxy.

  Montet took a breath and discovered that her lungs no longer burned. She moved an arm and discovered that she could rise.

  The Voice sang on, and the day was brilliant, perfect, beyond perfect, into godlike, and the Voice herself was beauty incarnate, singing, singing, fading, becoming one with the sunlight, the grassland and the breeze.

  Abruptly, there was silence, and Montet stood alone in the grass near her ship, hard by an empty stasis box.

  Of the Voice of Naratha—of Naratha’s Shadow—there was no sign at all.

  Heirloom

  HE WOKE, PANTING, out of a snare of dreams in which he over and over ran to succor a child, hid
eously suspended over a precipice, the slender branch clutched in terrified small fingers bending toward break beneath the slight weight—

  While he ran—ran at the top of his speed. And arrived, over and over, full seconds after the branch gave way and the tiny body plummeted down . . .

  He opened his eyes—not too far—and swallowed as the dim light assaulted him. Lashes drooping, he took careful stock.

  The dream—it had somehow become the dream of late it seemed—was both frequent and bothersome enough that he’d considered once or twice taking it to the Healers.

  On other mornings, those not quite so fraught with physical complaints, his considerations had always led him to reject the notion that the dream was prophetic, for hadn’t he been tested by the dramliz, several times over, at the order of the Delm-in-Keeping as well as at the order of his mother? And the dream never gave face to child, nor location to tree or cliff . . .

  The dramliz tests were remarkably similar to the piloting tests—somehow he always managed to fail without knowing exactly what it was expected of him. Of course the wizards claimed they weren’t expecting anything of him, but neither his mother nor anyone else seemed pleased by the results—not fast enough for pilot, nor possessed of whatever something the dramliz probed for—

  Well, and he had long ago understood that neither the clan’s ships nor the clan’s allies among the Healers or the dramliz would provide his sustenance, and he had begun casting about for what he could do to support himself, for he was a young man, holding in full measure all the stubborn pride of his House. He would take not a dex from the clan that could not use him. His quartershares could accumulate in his account until the cantra overran the bank and flowed down the streets of Solcintra.

  So he had cast about. He could shoot, of course, but one could scarcely make a living as a tournament shooter. Uncle Daav’s happy experiment of giving him a gun and target practice at Tey Dor’s had brought him close to the gaming set, who had no qualms about dealing with someone not a pilot, or not able to tell the future through true prophecy . . .