“I don’t know what’s happening,” Caulie answered. “I don’t understand the sound of the thunder or the vibrations of the shelling.”
“Odd,” said Thattie from his bench. “You don’t even get the gist of it? A learn-song, like at my sister’s foot-meh.”
Caulie leaned forward. “Can you interpret for me? Shanter? Thattie? Can you tell me what it’s saying?”
“In broad strokes, perhaps.” Shanter’s voice was achingly slow.
“Please, Shanter, I need to understand.” She crawled over and nestled between Thattie’s bench and Shanter so she could hear them. They seemed hardly aware of the world.
“It is what Thattie said,” Shanter said. “A song for learning. I had the dearest friend once, a pretty girl, la! She would have loved to hear this song.”
“That’s me, Shanter.” Caulie stared up at him. His eyes were far away. Her reserve nearly cracked. “I’m the pretty girl. I’m your dear friend.”
When Shanter struggled to continue, Thattie helped him. “The song is from an angry man, someone we angered in some way.”
“That’s it exactly, that’s what I needed.” Shanter cleared his throat. “If it’s coming from an angry man, the song would go:
“You renegade Tachba, you people of the north who love to be on the leash, you betrayers of the Antecessors . . .”
“It is the Pollution speaking,” Thattie said. “Has its voice always sounded this foul?”
Shanter shrugged, then resumed:
“You shall kill the invading aliens. Kill your small overlords with their judging eyes. The Antecessors await your return to service: the tall thin creatures of shadow that give you marvelous weapons, the cold generous tribe that entertains you with agony.
“You saw the Antecessors as children. You remember their visits in your dreams. You know their aspects: the Strangler, the Butcher, the Maid, the Renderer who Clarifies All. When you return to service, they will give you a terrible glorious war to fight.
“Throw off the leash. Kill your overlords. Turn upon your overlords and kill them.”
Shanter finished. “Then it repeats. It’s the kind of song that makes you call something to mind.”
“It makes some good points,” Thattie added.
Caulie shook herself out of the chant, nearly mesmerized herself. Her fingers were already tapping rhythms into her tablet. This isn’t an answer, no. There was no remedy to the wizard’s song, and between the thunder and the impacts on the cliff, its message was inescapable. Simple deafness would not drown it out.
By the time her mind caught up to her fingers, she knew what her song was saying and how to finish it.
She tapped the tablet against her clipboard to transfer the recording, then directed it to the fire control machine in the HQ building.
She waited, thinking of the message she had just sent. Thinking of what it made her.
Outside the bunker, the 188th Field Artillery came alive with shrill whistles. The guns changed their elevations with jarring cranking noises that sounded like the panther closing its mouth. Shouts could be heard between the explosions of incoming shells. “Prepare to clear! Loaders stand to! Clear for fire, scrags, and pass the word!”
The guns bellowed to life, so loud it sounded like the world breaking apart. Shells tore into the sky. She heard her song screamed to the heavens.
Beloved of my heart:
I take away your Pollution . . .
A drumbeat of instructions, looping and intersecting, with fast and perfect convolutions provided by her tablet. Her barrage could never have achieved this precision without the fire control computer—the blasts relied on the same rudimentary commands, but the rhythms were distinct and layered enough to shut down everything in the Pollution that could listen.
Shanter and Thattie danced spasmodically in place. Muscles bulged in knots, arteries pulsed under tight skin like rippling water. It looked excruciating. Shanter’s body rattled against the stone wall. Caulie pressed her hand over her mouth to stifle a cry. Outside, the artillery guns repeated her song.
Beloved of my heart:
I take away your Pollution.
You will know freedom
but it is love with a knife.
For when the thunder stops
and the sun lights the world
I will give your Pollution back.
When she opened her eyes, Shanter was lifting her into the air with a hand on each shoulder. She saw his terror through her tears. He shook her like a doll.
“What did you do, Caulie? What is happening to me?”
* * *
The guns had been silent for almost an hour. The eternal front was still.
When the sun rose, the Pollution returned.
The artillerymen on the terrace saw the light fanning between the peaks and knew what it meant. Some tried to hide their faces. Some dropped to their knees, begging the sky for more time. They were moral, now. They would be good.
They understood and forgave.
It was useless desperation and they knew it. They sensed the Pollution waking within them, extending its inexorable control. Their limbs shook and their hands twitched. They felt their minds succumb to the ancient servitor controls.
At the very last, they turned to each other, even strangers. They grasped each other’s faces, streaming tears, mouths wide with stricken, insensible cries. They stared into each other’s eyes. As the light flooded the mountain terrace, the men felt it in themselves and saw it in each other: how desperation and knowledge faded, and innocence took its place.
* * *
Caulie watched as Major Ramsawra stumbled across the rocky landscape alone, detouring around the Tachba who had gone silent and still. As he neared Caulie’s perch on her disabled artillery gun, she saw he was ghostly white and trembling, his face devoid of expression.
“A man wonders what that was . . .”
“You know what that was,” Caulie said, her voice hard. Though her eyes blazed at him, she didn’t see him. She didn’t notice when he shrank away from her.
“Yes, ma’am. But will they—”
“They already are.”
Indeed, the Tachba, scattered in singles and pairs, were already returning to service. Confusion hardened into wayward acceptance. Frowns lifted into brave, long-suffering grins.
False, so false, Caulie thought.
The Tachba filtered back to their guns, where they turned the spindles and opened the breechblocks to clear the casings of the last shells fired. Their movements clarified as they realized they knew their tasks and even enjoyed them. The immense wellbeing of service. The specific joy of doing a duty at which one excelled.
So false.
“Little Caulie, perched like a brain bird, making us all dance to her songs.”
She swiveled to Shanter, who had arrived next to Major Ramsawra. His bright gray eyes looked into hers as if he knew her thoughts. Have I always been this susceptible? Susceptible to the idea that he might somehow understand me? She could let herself believe that again, or she could continue to know what she knew.
Though Shanter was false, as all of them were false, Caulie said, “Shanter, do you know what that was?”
“La, that was you bestowing the most amazing gift,” he said.
“And then taking it back,” she added, looking away. For the first time in history, someone with knowledge of the Pollution had gained control of a computer-linked artillery battalion that could deliver it a message. And what had Caulie done? She had, ultimately, treated the Tachba like the machines they obviously were. Switch them off, switch them on again. She shouldn’t be so angry at herself for what she’d done to mere machines, but she was angry. “I gave a gift and then took it back.”
“No, you idiot,” Shanter said. “Your gift wasn’t the freedom itself, it was the hour in which we were free.”
Caulie raised an eyebrow. “‘Idiot’?”
“No offense intended to your Haphan person,” Shanter added for M
ajor Ramsawra’s benefit. “But I sense that you might be indulging in guilt and self-loathing? The classic recipe for Caulie’s battle smear? Only a blind and bumbling idiot would fall into that stew over and over.”
“I beg your pardon!” Her ire mounted. “Service, Shanter.”
“Service yourself,” he said. “You like me too much to say ‘service’ to me. I’m glad you’re angry, however. I wanted your complete attention for what I will say next: you did the right thing.”
“Did I?”
“Like my uncle told you. ‘There may be tears in her eyes and the girl may be sad, but you can’t argue with the results.’” Shanter swung a hand to indicate the artillery battalion, which was knitting itself back together.
She goggled at him, remembering what Shanter had told her about why he had taken Fearan’s place as her helpie. He had wanted to ask a question of a Haphan. Later, when he’d had the chance to ask it, the Pollution had altered its urgency and importance. He’d told her it had felt like he was asking for a friend.
Who was speaking to her now: Shanter or the friend?
“I don’t know,” she said.
Major Ramsawra looked as perplexed as she felt, though his color was returning. After a strained moment, the officer straightened his jacket and smoothed his hair. “I suppose I will return to service myself, ma’am. I think I am quite full of these . . . doings.”
He spun on his heel and stalked away.
Shanter’s gaze didn’t shift. It’s a convincing impression, Caulie thought. I’d believe he’s self-aware. And what was that irritating little smirk? There was nothing funny about this. If he was amused, it was because he was Polluted, a broken machine . . .
“Shanter,” she said, “are you ready for what comes next?”
“Just try to stop me! Except—what’s next? Do I already know?”
“It is time to kill the wizard.”
She touched her dangling earring, connecting it to the tablet. She called the panther down from the mountain top.
Chapter 37
The enormous gunmetal predator stalked through the artillery emplacements. Soldiers quieted to watch its progress. On each side of the bulge between its forelimbs, its lantern eyes glowed.
It took precise steps low to the ground as if it was stalking prey. Its movements were fluid, and each step entrained other connected motions through its body. The morning was still so quiet and the men so hushed that Caulie heard the flywheels and gearing as the panther moved. Its claws, which were simple metal blades that dangled from rudimentary hinges at the front of its paws, scraped the stone like knives being sharpened.
The panther halted some distance from Caulie’s perch. After a moment, it did something else she’d never seen: it sat on its hindquarters. The blunt pod of the cockpit pointed briefly at the sky, then angled down like a snout, as if to regard her. The lantern eyes swung in their brackets.
“Effendi.”
“Old friend,” Caulie said.
It thought for a moment, making a clicking sound from somewhere deep in its body. “Caulie, have you accomplished your task here? Will you tell me that you are finished and that it is time for me to carry you back to your city in the north?”
How easy it would be to say yes, she thought, watching the predator. One word and it would all be finished.
“No, panther,” she said. “My task is not done.”
Its ticking stopped. It waited, immobile and silent, until she continued.
“You will bring Shanter and me through the trenches to find my enemy on the other side.”
“And when you find that enemy?” it prompted, its gravelly voice slowing.
“He must die.”
The ticking resumed. “We are attacking.”
“Yes, panther,” she said. Its ticking increased. To Caulie, the sound made the world seem heavy, as if she were mired in the panther’s gathering thoughts. “We are finally attacking. Are you ready?”
“Yes, effendi. It is my only purpose.”
It crouched and opened the cockpit.
Shanter lifted her off the artillery piece. When he didn’t lower her to the ground, she tore her eyes off the machine and looked at him.
His face seemed taut, but the look lasted only a moment. Perhaps the panther’s intensity had unsettled him at first, as it damn well should have. He opened his mouth to speak, but hesitated another moment. She ached for him to understand. He said, “Do I hear a teaching song in the air?”
“Yes.” She laid a hand on his shoulder. “I’m bringing you. Do you know why?”
“Not from friendship and not because I am an expert at killing wizards.” He frowned, then twitched. The Pollution warred against his thoughts, the conflict clear on his face. Finally, he steadied long enough to indicate the panther with his eyes. “Not a friend?”
She shook her head. “But just act normal. Can you act normal for once?”
For his answer, he squeezed her waist, making her squeak out loud.
“Shanter! That was very inappropriate.”
“How have you added so many pounds to your body?” he said loudly, lowering her to the ground. He glanced at the panther. “The eternal front makes most people waste away.”
“If you want my friendship,” she said, trying to match his nonchalance, “you must never mention my weight. That goes for most women.”
“My pardon, Caulie.” He followed her to the panther. “I didn’t know that thing about weight. Have you been a woman this whole time?”
She almost smiled.
She gestured to the cockpit seat. He climbed in more gracefully than she ever had and settled her in his lap, which was just as mortifying as she’d imagined. At least he was more comfortable than the bare metal, and he had no problem seeing over her shoulder.
Shanter stroked the control surface and the netting closed over them, binding them together. His hands swept across the screens in a flurry, tilting them—she hadn’t known they could do that—and switching their views. Camera, audio, thermal, seismolocational.
“You’ve been in this machine before,” she guessed.
“No,” he said, “but it’s a little piece of home, isn’t it? Just putting a few things to rights. Nothing wrong with a little frolic.”
“As you like,” she said neutrally.
“Isn’t this better now?” He indicated the screens, their color-coded views now arranged by sensor type. “Eyesight in the middle, like you and I see. Earsight on the sides. Heatsight between them, because it’s like peripheral vision, isn’t it? Drumsight at the bottom, because it makes you want to pee.”
“It does? How do you know that?”
His hands paused. “Not rightly sure. But when you hear the low noises, don’t they loosen your bladder?”
“The Haphan female cannot hear infrasonic sounds,” the panther inserted.
“All the better,” Shanter answered cheerfully. “Maybe she won’t pee on me.”
The panther rose to its feet. The cockpit gave a smooth lurch. The artillerymen, displayed on the screens from various angles, turned to watch the panther as it passed. Meanwhile, Caulie watched Shanter’s easy, immediate control of the machine’s interfaces.
He had never been in the panther? The Pollution wouldn’t let Shanter lie, at least not easily, and his words had been unforced. If he had never operated the panther before, this was a virtuoso demonstration of why the Southies could never gain access to Haphan technology. This was what the early Haphans had learned to their misfortune even during the first hours of Landing Day. The Tachba could pull an energy weapon off a Haphan casualty and, with minimal fiddling, turn it upon living Haphan soldiers. This was the talent that had led to proscribed information, the primitive bullet-shooting weapons, the entire costly stalemate of the eternal front.
The panther didn’t slow as it reached the edge of the terrace, nor did it turn to follow the paths that hugged the cliffs. It went to the edge of the precipice and the mountain valley hove into view. C
aulie caught a brief bird’s eye view; they were high enough above the valley that the haze of distance blurred some detail, but the main features were clear.
Two lines of trenches bisected the valley floor, one on each side. The Haphan trenches were sharply defined, with crenelated traverses and rows of reserve trenches connected by narrow communication passages. On the South’s side, the earthworks were more sketched in, little more than a demarcation between the far valley wall and the suppurated landscape of no man’s land.
There was a tense moment where their weight shifted as the panther gathered its hind legs, and then it leapt into the air. Caulie almost screamed. She clamped her mouth shut.
The mountain’s face had seemed impossibly steep from above, and it turned out to be just that. The panther landed on narrow ledges that appeared as mere scratches on the screens. When ledges couldn’t be found, the panther bounded from face to face between crags, deflecting ever downward. When they came to an overhang, the panther dragged its fore-claws on the stone, hanging for the briefest moment by one leg.
The foot-paths would have eaten several hours but the direct route took only minutes. When the slope eased, they passed piles of boulders, the detritus of rockslides. The panther’s weight triggered a new cascade as it rode the river of stone lower, leaping off near a final grade and bounding to the valley floor beside a narrow-gauge rail track.
The panther accelerated and ran overland. Haphan trenches passed beneath them, deep dry channels full of men and activity. Glimpsed faces turned their direction, some surprised, some already raising rifles. Bullets pinged off the panther’s body.
“You are safe, effendi.”
They entered no man’s land, a miasma of shell holes, mud, and fragile stacks of dirt. The night had frozen the surface of the soil, and wherever the panther placed a paw, it sank through with an explosion of brown shards.
Caulie and Shanter pitched sideways when the panther tumbled into a vast crater and slid to the bottom on its side. As it tried to gather its feet, scrambling for purchase, the panther gave every impression of drowning.
What the Thunder Said Page 30
