“But you still get to call them peasants,” she pointed out. “You’re an elitist.”
“And you’re my social inferior,” Shanter said. “Technically.”
“I beg your pardon!” But she saw the quirk in his lips, nearly invisibly small. She was training herself to look for it, because it only appeared when he was trying to be annoying. Now she had to decide whether she should be offended like a proper Haphan, or merely amused.
Her tablet chimed again, Jephia’s tone, and it was jarringly out of place with her mood. Somehow, for a brief respite, Shanter had distracted her out of the terror of the night. She retrieved the tablet from her satchel and balanced it against Shanter’s chest to answer the call.
“I won’t mention what this looks like,” Jephia said, “except this once.”
“He’s only carrying me.” Caulie was suddenly conscious again of his embrace, though she wasn’t embarrassed—at least, not only embarrassed. There was also a touch of irritation that her friend had to notice and savor her every awkward moment.
“No chance of real privacy, is there, dear? We must talk, but I still hope to have a career after this call.”
Caulie transferred the tablet’s audio to her dangling earrings, which were pressed against her cheek and jaw under multiple layers of cold weather gear. With the sounds clearer now, she was able to turn the volume down to a whisper. But these Tachba and their hearing. . . and Shanter’s warm ear was against her cheek. At this moment, Caulie couldn’t honestly say she cared about proscribed information and she was tempted to let Shanter hear whatever he might hear. But there was also the matter of Jephia—not what she would say, but how she might say it—and right now Caulie didn’t feel equal to correcting the kinds of misunderstandings that accrued around her friend.
Caulie switched her earrings to vibration mode. A century ago, a more sophisticated version of her earrings would have been nano-scale implants in her jaw, a permanent private interface. Now, though her earrings were only pressed against her face, she could still understand their muffled buzzing against the bones of her skull. It turned Jephia’s voice thick and deep.
“I have you through my earrings, in vibration mode,” Caulie told her. “You can talk.”
“Oh? And where should I start?”
“Tell me you kept reading the notebooks,” Caulie said. To her immense relief, Jephia nodded.
“I finished them the day you reached the front. I’m going through them for the third time now.”
“And?” Caulie prompted, when Jephia trailed off.
“I’m not sure what I’m seeing. I’m marking everything that seems important, but it’s all jumbled together.”
Caulie frowned at her friend. “You’re telling me it’s confusing?”
Jephia’s eyes snapped back to the tablet. “I don’t know everything, Caulie. Some of the passages only make sense if you read them in reverse order. Conclusions come before questions, that sort of thing.”
“Daggie throat-me don’t have a strong grasp of linear thinking.”
“It’s both her throat-me and her body in the narrative. Her body-me? They trade off with each other.” Jephia shrugged. “I hate one, but I like the other. Honestly it’s baffling and I can’t give it my full attention, I’m sure you know why.”
“That’s going to impact your grade,” Caulie said, and Jephia grinned. All else aside, Jephia was nominally her research assistant in the lab and the position was an internship for credit. It had been absurd even before Caulie’s journey to the eternal front.
“I have the notebooks scanned,” Jephia said. “All four volumes. I’ll find a way to send the files to your tablet. Maybe you’ll see something I won’t.”
For Jephia that was a generous concession. Her friend leaned closer to the screen. “I’m still not sure what we’re afraid of, Caulie. What did you find out there? What did you find, really?”
A week before Lieutenant Luscetian had walked into the lab and disrupted her life forever, Caulie had just gained clearance to see the notebooks of Ouphao’an the Sorceress. It was an incredible, unlooked-for academic windfall, but Caulie didn’t question it too closely, especially when she learned Jephia had also received clearance. It was obviously something engineered from the top down by her friend. Any critical knowledge gleaned from the famous daggie scholar would come with the Tawarna name attached. That was fine with Caulie, as the last thing she wanted was more public scrutiny. If she was lucky she would receive only the thinnest slice of reflected glory, and it would be enough to open more paths into the Imperial Archives.
When the notebooks arrived, Caulie had started with Ouphao’an A04, which was full of the exploratory writings of a young scientist at the beginning of her enterprise. Jephia, meanwhile, jumped straight to Ouphao’an BA02, which had the same brushwork and inscribing signatures as Caulie’s text, but which was written by an older, more cynical version of the person. In Jephia’s notebook, Ouphao’an had just ingested her lover’s throat-me symbiote, the small creature that the daggies considered the wellspring of the soul. Ouphao’an’s lover had died from the experience, and she was facing the last twenty years of her lifecycle alone.
This older Ouphao’an had turned dark, a physical change borne of trauma when reproductive organs shrank and the brain chemistry changed. The closest human analog might be menopause, except the typical daggies ate their children and destroyed their possessions. Ouphao’an had turned dark when she was a master of the Tachba Pollution. She had controlled legions of enthralled servitors upon which she could release her destructive urges.
Caulie knew generally about these last daggies—academic papers about them were fraught with ill-disguised anxiety. The militant wizards left a distinct and unsettling imprint on the world, and the same was proven true of Ouphao’an when her location was finally established. Her kingdom had covered more than a hundred square miles of brutal mountain terrain—and every settlement bore the stamp of a single personality. Town layouts with no variation. Pottery techniques that propagated seemingly immediately across the entire dominion. Even the chisel strokes on the transom stones above each door were identical, and hundreds had been unearthed so far. Evidence like this was what made these daggies so unnerving; it was how the Tachba could be so completely subsumed and controlled.
Caulie had even published a paper about the implications of that control. What if modern Tachba personas were so rudimentary because having a “me” hadn’t been a design requirement when the Antecessors originally bred their armies? The standalone personalities that now bewildered Haphans on a daily basis were something that had occurred much later; they emerged spontaneously and without guidance, an unintended consequence of the Antecessors’ abandonment. Caulie had theorized that the Tachba were being used incorrectly by the Haphans, and that they could be much, much more efficient—if the ancient servitor controls were understood.
It was something of a loss of innocence. Knowing what she knew now about the Tachba, and having met Shanter, Caulie would have never published that theory. Yet she was also grateful for her earlier work—without it, she wouldn’t know what was happening to the Tachba on the Ed-homse front.
The South had somehow produced a modern wizard of the Pollution. They had won an arms race the Haphans hadn’t even known they were running.
* * *
Shanter gave Caulie a squeeze. “Are you still with us, little princess? What’s that face you’re making?”
It was guilt. She turned away from the tablet screen, which had gone blank when the call ended. “How did you make it even more cold, Shanter?”
“Brought us higher in the mountains. When you need to flee, the recommended direction is up. That’s the saying. And la, it’s the same for when you-needing to think.”
“Whose saying? I’ve never heard that.”
“Queen Culleyho said it, I’m sad to relate.” Shanter didn’t sound sad at all. “You Happies don’t like to hear her name, but she had a few good thoughts
in her head.”
What looked like strange and solitary rock formations in the gloom resolved into artillery cannons as Shanter led her deeper. This was a mountain terrace, high above the trenches, from which the Haphan artillery did its work. The flat, stony plain seemed abandoned, but Caulie perceived flickers of light dotting the darkness. The artillery crews—a large population of them based on the number of lights—were tucked away in sub-surface bunkers next to each great gun. The entrances were covered by trap doors made of wood, canvas, and animal pelts, and light leaked around them. The bunkers had been hewn into solid rock, just like the one she’d fled in the trenches. The gunners are no doubt warm and cozy, Caulie thought grimly.
“Seems isolated,” she commented.
Shanter nodded proudly. “Not HQ, like you said, yet also not the trenches, which might be brimming with enraged Southies by now. If the danger follows us to this elevation, well, there’s always more mountain to climb. That’s another saying from Queen Culleyho.”
He was pausing here and there, peering into the dark, while the cold pried into Caulie’s body. “What are you looking for?”
“A place to call our own. We need to get out of the night; it might get chilly soon.”
Shanter found what he was looking for—the silhouette of an artillery cannon that differed from the rest. The barrel of this gun ended with a bloom of torn metal, and its body hunched sideways like a man covering a stomach wound.
He brought them closer and Caulie saw that the cannon was destroyed and obviously out of use. Next to it was the expected bunker, which seemed abandoned.
“You go in while I find some supplies and heat,” he said, and left her in the gloom.
Caulie pondered the forbidding entrance with nothing approaching enthusiasm. Some past occupant had decorated the hole by carving sharp teeth into its upper and lower lip—what a rascal. Perhaps she could wait until Shanter returned. The piercing cold wasn’t so bad. After all, she hadn’t been truly warm for days, so what were a few more minutes?
Her tablet chimed again. It wasn’t the call chime, but rather the alert that Jephia’s promised research archive had arrived. It all flowed back into Caulie’s mind: the atrocity of the thunder, the sprint through the trenches, Shanter’s unbreakable embrace as he carried her. There was an enemy wizard at work just over the horizon, wielding something that could kill from a distance that might as well be magic. There was the panther, under an unknown someone’s control, stalking her across the eternal front. There were the secret police hunting her. She was being herded toward something.
Her tablet had received Jephia’s file . . . which meant her tablet was still connecting to Falling Mountain somehow. Had the panther already followed her to this new location?
No, she couldn’t assume that. There were too many things she didn’t know, too many open questions, and too much strangeness all at once. The brighter, more innocent side of Caulie’s brain could feel her suspicious side trying to invest everything with meaning, as if she had captured the attention of some grim personality that loomed over the mountain battlefields, orchestrating the world like a puppeteer.
Don’t be such a superstitious Tacchie, she told herself. Just walk into that dark hole with the teeth and see what happens.
Yes, if she had to be rational about it: her tablet was connected because this remote artillery unit would need to be on the communication grid. Not even this insane war would require messengers to make the frozen, precarious climb that she and Shanter had just finished simply to order a barrage or change targeting coordinates. It didn’t have to be a bloodthirsty predatory robot that also helpfully routed messages from her friend. Still . . .
“Tablet, how are you connected?”
“Unknown,” it answered through her dangling earrings. “The protocol will not identify itself.”
“Is that odd?”
“Unknown. Surmise: I am a civilian device with a partial interface on a military network.”
Caulie pulled the tablet out of her bag. It lit with a cheerful, abrasive light at odds with the gloom around her. At the top of the status message was the file Jephia had promised, though it didn’t announce itself that way. It was encrypted as a thermal signature reading, and some astronomy software she didn’t even know she had installed had claimed it as a data file.
The next minor step would be to figure out how to decode the file into what it really was—academic papers and images of the daggie memory glass notebooks in her lab. The file would expand into a folio containing everything Jephia had managed to find out about wizards, cross-index servitor control, and cross-index acoustics.
Caulie brightened the screen and held it before her as she entered. The bunker was as empty of occupants as she’d hoped. She guessed it had been unused for at least a week based on the layer of frost inside. But besides that, it was as if the cannon’s crew had just stepped out for a moment. There were bunks, bedding, a fire pit full of white-crusted charcoal, scattered cutlery, plates shaped from stone, and a simple oil lamp. As she played the light across the jumble, she even found some personal effects: one of the long spears that blood-feds sometimes carried, which they called stickers; some carved figures from the pantheon of trench gods, all in a row on a ledge beside the entrance.
From this litter, Caulie knew without having to dwell on it that the occupants had died, probably when that artillery gun outside the entrance misfired. Knowing the Tachba, she might even be able to find their remains, in part or in whole, right where they’d fallen. That is, unless the oar beetles had gotten to them, filled the bodies, and edged them into nearby shadows. It was her good fortune the bodies hadn’t gathered back in the bunker like old friends . . .
Nothing. The unsettling thought triggered nothing in her; it was like scraping a callus on her foot. The Caulie that once would have trembled or exclaimed aloud was now folded away somewhere like a barely in-style garment, waiting for when it could be worn again. With a lack of squeamishness that would have appalled her just a few days earlier, Caulie crawled into an abandoned bunk and buried herself in blankets.
She got to work on Jephia’s file. When she cracked it and her workspace flooded with new documents, she opened the file that Jephia had modified most extensively. It seemed wisest and most time-efficient to start with something her friend had thought important. She read:
Tonight I am bereft, for my lover Ougwo is dead.
Chapter 18
So began the highlighted passage by the sorceress Ouphao’an in notebook BA02. The text was the applied translation from Caulie’s academic software, with the semantic parser set to maximum smoothing. The unsmoothed translation was much longer:
This body’s eyes see dark (dark which may have external cause) but neither my body, nor my me, desire to impute a cause for this externality (which is believed to be internal).
Let the universe fall to heat death! Both my body and my me hold Ougwo under a glass [subject may be poring over a memory glass inscription]. I have destroyed (eaten over a battle of weeks) my beautiful mate (male in every aspect).
This is common loss. This is our way [image of flowing water wearing a path in stone] but the darkness cannot comfort my heart (darkness has no me). The love of my only life is no longer physically present: we are bereft.
So this passage dated from after Ouphao’an had ingested her mate. Not Ougwo’s body, which would have died shortly after, but Ougwo’s throat-me, which was the symbiotic creature that had coevolved with the daggie race. Caulie had already studied everything she could find about daggie physiology and culture. The university library had plenty, albeit about the space-faring race rather than the forlorn and regressed version on Grigory IV. Still, advanced or primitive, all daggies had throat-me by the time they shed their juvenile legs and took on a humanoid appearance. It was a mutualistic relationship in which the throat-me provided higher-order thought while the body took care of daily business. A daggie’s personality was a continual negotiation between the bo
dy and its symbiote, where the throat-me rustled the quills it projected through their mouths, which forced their jaws forever open, and the bodies could do little more than moan. The rustling and the moaning combined in the daggie language—two streams of perspective, ever at odds, an intrinsic form of double-talk. In daggie parlance, the throat-me was what made each individual properly alive. Indeed, until a daggie youth was inseminated with the throat-me spores and its quills grew, it was not even considered to be fully conscious.
When the throat-me reproduction process triggered, usually during a time of stress, it sought out new genetic material and created offspring. It did this through a weeks-long test of fitness with a nearby available throat-me—even the throat-me of the daggie’s mate if none other was available. As far as Caulie had been able to picture, the process was like a team doubles match where the mouth quills hooked their barbs together. Each team tried to ingest the other team, until one side perished.
Ouphao’an had ingested her lover slowly, over weeks, staring into his eyes and watching the intelligence fade. It was as natural as sin, and by the end of it her heart was broken.
These were the details as Caulie understood them, and she hoped she wouldn’t have to refine her understanding. She also hoped that the software’s translations, left on maximum semantic smoothing, were preserving the information she needed. She didn’t think she could wade through the raw details. To confirm she wouldn’t miss something vital, she played the untranslated narrative, captured directly from the memory glass.
The tablet’s screen cleared. Its audio engaged abruptly, playing a long, sonorous moan that sounded like a horn in the distance. The sound continued and never left off, but it modulated and changed pitch. Then, as if called by the sound, a scratch of light appeared on the screen. Another scratch joined it, then a squiggle. Together, they formed a textual glyph. The order of the strokes would be crucial; a change in the order meant a change in the final meaning of the symbol. More scratches appeared on the screen, Ouphao’an’s fingertips moving on the glass. Beneath the symbols, there appeared a faint visual image of a daggie. Ouphao’an had impressed a moving picture into the memory glass using vibrations from the acoustic organ buried deep in her breast.
What the Thunder Said Page 15
