“Stevie?” A bit of bedrock entered Sissy’s voice, demanding an answer.
“Tyker called in Anna’s team to work an extra shift,” Stevie muttered.
“On Holy Day?” Sissy sounded outraged.
“New Spacer contracts. Have to be filled immediately,” Jaimey said around a mouthful of bread and creamy butter.
Guilliam was willing to bet this simple meal seemed the height of luxury to the Worker family.
“That is no excuse for violating Holy Day. Mr. Guilliam, what is happening in the capital?” Sissy looked up at him.
“I am not aware of any change in policy. The order to work extra shifts had to come from Lord Chauncey. He’s on the High Council.”
“I do not like this. Jake, after lunch will you help me draft a letter to Laud Gregor? This must stop. I don’t care how important those Spacer contracts are. We cannot allow Workers to be abused this way.”
“I can help you,” Stevie said. He glared at Jake jealously.
A moment of tense silence hung on them all, like an unwanted ghost.
At last Jake executed a slight bow. “I’ll gladly turn that chore over to you, Stevie. Mr. Guilliam has requested a tour of the caves. I’ll accompany him.”
The tension evaporated.
“And we can talk privately about what is and what is not in those caves,” Jake whispered.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
ON FIRST DAY, SISSY LED her girls into the caves. They all wore purple-and-lavender coveralls for protection from the dusty work. Sissy looked forward to the long day ahead, refreshed by her reunion with Mama and Pop and Stevie. At the same time she worried that she needed to be back in Harmony City, monitoring everyday life.
This business of factory owners requiring Workers to complete extra shifts on Holy Day needed to stop immediately. How could she be sure Laud Gregor would see to it if she wasn’t presiding over the HC meeting?
“What’s down here?” Jilly asked, darting away from Sissy and the other girls into a newly opened side tunnel within the maze of caves.
“Come back here, Jilly,” Sissy called. Then she looked to Jake for help when her most energetic acolyte chose not to hear her.
He nodded curtly and went after Jilly in long strides. Not hurrying, but not wasting any time either.
“Why can’t we go down there?” Sharan asked, looking up from where she and Suzie made rubbings of the letters and glyphs on freshly cleaned brass plaques.
“Because we don’t know what’s down there yet,” Sissy explained. She transferred a badly encrusted plaque from one solution to another, using Badger Metal tweezers.
Her training in meticulous detail work made her the best person for this delicate cleaning process. She seemed to know instinctively how long to leave a piece in each solution and when to vary the acid level.
And each day, the acid baths made a little more of the residual Badger Metal stuck on her hands slough off. Almost completely clean now. Sissy saw this return of full feeling and dexterity as a gift; a thank you from Harmony for doing her work.
“How are we supposed to find out what’s down there if we don’t go down there?” Mary asked. She peered eagerly at the dark length of hollowed-out rock, leaning forward, but keeping her feet safely planted beside Sissy. She and Martha took the square pieces of brass from the last soapy basin, rinsed, and dried them.
Jilly was supposed to polish them with a soft cloth and special rubbing compound. Bella and Sarah then made exact copies of the engravings in as neat a hand as possible. But Jilly couldn’t sit still today. She’d rubbed the top layer of brass off unevenly and left other sections dull.
Jilly came skipping back to the main cavern where they worked. Her simple lavender coveralls in sturdy everyday cloth—already too short at the ankle by three inches and they had been new when they first came to the caves a month ago—showed as a bright spot before the rest of her became visible. She clung tightly to Jake’s hand.
Sissy often found those two together of late, heads together as they puzzled out a lesson, or shared secrets, or plotted pranks.
“Jake says there’s a new cavern at the end of the tunnel. A very old one. And lots of places that look like they might be other caves once they remove the rub . . . rubble. Is that the right word, Jake?” Jilly looked up at the soldier with adoring eyes.
Jake nodded. “Looks like they’ve opened enough space in one of them to poke a torch and a camera through.”
Sissy had to smile. More and more they all seemed to mesh together. Like a good team.
Or a family.
She sighed. Someday Jake would leave them. When his services were no longer needed. When they both realized that an out-of-caste relationship could never work.
Jilly’s eyes rolled up, and she swayed in place. Her face screwed up as if in great pain.
Jake grabbed her around the waist, keeping her from falling.
Sissy rushed forward and knelt in front of the girl.
“Discord hides in the open. The Gods cannot see him, only follow his trail of destruction . . .” Jilly mumbled. Then she closed her eyes. Her face relaxed and she found her own balance.
“What did she say?” Mary asked. She kept the other girls back. “We couldn’t hear her. She mumbled and slurred her words.”
“Nothing of import,” Sissy replied. She hated lying to the girls. But she had to protect them from this latest prophecy. Here, deep within the womb of Harmony, both she and Jilly had experienced this special gift more and more often. Rarely did they remember what they said.
Jake recorded it all in a notebook he kept sealed within a secret pocket in his uniform full of pockets.
“Laudae, I’ve found something!” Spacer Scientist Barba du Annalyse pu Science Fleet called from far down the tunnel.
“Let’s go see!” Jilly exclaimed, completely recovered and oblivious to the concern of her elders.
The scientist eagerly waved to Sissy to join the group huddled around a tumble of rock halfway back to the new cavern.
For four weeks they had all skirted the fallen rocks warily. They had so many new things to explore, so much other work to be done, the rockfall hadn’t pricked anyone’s curiosity. But Scientist Barba loved rocks. How they were formed. Why this one lay next to that one. The elusive minerals hiding in a matrix of other, more common minerals. She’d finally succumbed to her curiosity and started sifting through the tumble. Milton the weasel had joined her, eager to explore tiny places in the dark.
He’d eaten his weight in cave mice every day. The cats caught and played with other rodents while the dogs lazed in the sun at the entrance.
Sissy joined the throng of scientists, as eager as they to see what lay behind the rockfall. “Stay behind me, girls, until we know that the rocks are stable.”
Three men rolled away a three-foot-tall boulder. Above it, they could already see a blacker-than-black opening into yet another cavern.
“Why would they seal off some rooms and leave others open to all?” Sissy asked.
“This is the oldest section,” Barba said, mopping sweat off her brow with her sleeve. “Maybe, in olden times, before the Covenant with Harmony they had different customs.” She shrugged.
“Before the Covenant with Harmony?” Sissy asked. According to every myth she’d been told growing up, and all she’d read since, the Seven Gods created humanity with the Covenant intact. There should be nothing before that.
“Prehistory gets confusing when facts disagree,” Jake muttered in her ear. He was never far away from her, even when he helped the scientists sort and catalog their findings.
“Facts cannot disagree,” Sissy insisted.
Jake just looked at her long and hard. His expression made her stop and think. He used it often. And every time she came up with more questions than answers.
“We’re clear,” Barba exclaimed. Sweat glistened on her face in the torchlight. Why was she sweating now? She hadn’t put her back into rolling away the big rock.
“Laudae, I think you should be first inside,” Matteo, a Spacer scientist, offered her a torch.
Sissy gulped. What had Jilly said about Discord hiding?
“I’m right behind you, Laudae,” Jake said quietly.
She knew he’d already loosened his weapons. If anything hid in the dark, he’d be on it in seconds.
“It helps if you put the torch in first and look around.” Physician Gaila du Jenn pu Crystal Temple Hospital thrust her own light through the opening. The coroner was rather quiet and so caught up in her work she didn’t socialize much. Sissy had hardly spoken to her.
Sissy followed suit with her own torch, then peered cautiously through the arched opening. A perfectly carved arch, not a rough natural break in the wall. The dust of the ages swirled and rose before her. She stopped breathing.
“I see color on the walls.”
Enthralled she took one step into the new cavern. She had to squeeze around a tumble of smaller rocks that still clogged the entrance. Forgetting the dust, she gasped at the spectacle. Her lungs froze. She fought the cough, oblivious to the scientists who crowded in behind her, pushing her out of their way in their hurry.
Seven girls followed them, darting beneath outstretched arms to be the first ones to touch the brilliant colors painted on a smooth wall.
Jake handed Sissy an inhaler and stood by her shoulder. Together they watched as the bevy of professionals “oohed” and “aahed” over the mural that spanned a good ten feet of the fifteen-foot wall and ran from four feet off the floor nearly to the ceiling, twenty feet up.
“What is it about?” Sissy asked when she got her breathing under control. “Bella, Martha, keep your hands down. You don’t know if you’ll damage the paint!”
All she could see were faded splotches of rusty red, chipped sky blue, and lots of different shades of green.
“Looks like a version of the Creation,” Barba said, standing back to look at the entire picture while her colleagues examined tiny portions with magnifying glasses.
“We need photos,” someone shouted.
No one seemed willing to leave the spectacle to fetch the equipment.
Sissy looked at Jake.
“I’m not leaving the room without you,” he said quietly.
“Oh, for Harmony’s sake.” Sissy marched out of the room, and turned left toward the central cavern.
Two more scientists passed her, running, each with a camera in hand. They didn’t even look at her, too intent on their destination to notice.
“Knowing them, two cameras won’t be enough. They’ll want them all,” Jake grumbled. “Girls, we need your help!”
All seven of them crawled around the blockage and assembled at his side.
They returned to the new cavern, arms loaded with cameras, light bars, (the rule against artificial light had to be modified to accommodate the cameras) battery packs, and everything else they could think of that might remotely be required. The entire crowd of scientists centered on one tiny section down in the right-hand corner.
“What?” Sissy shouldered her way in and under to pop her head up in front of them all. Her eyes focused on an array of figures, each with a sacred glyph above their heads, like halos.
There was elegant Lady Harmony wearing green in the center, slightly raised above the others. Empathy, a bright male in golden robes, and Anger, a short blocky man wearing red stood to her left. Nurture, small and delicate in blue, and Greed big and flamboyant in orange to Harmony’s right. Unity, a swirl of many colors and blurred outlines, and Fear, a hard knot of anxious bilious yellow knelt before Harmony. As they always did, in every icon in every Temple throughout the Empire.
The symmetry was off, though. A black figure standing just below Harmony’s dais, facing out in defiance, looked as if someone had tried to chip it out, obliterate it, then been interrupted before finishing.
“Discord,” Sissy breathed. “Discord included in the sacred family.”
The torches smoked. Darkness crept in from the edges of her vision. Her face and hands grew cold.
She couldn’t find up or down, right or left. Nothing fit or stood in place anymore.
Discord hides in the open.
“It’s done,” a husky, androgynous voice whispered into Gregor’s portable telephone.
“What do they think of it?” he asked, suppressing a yawn. Three hours past midnight. Dawn only a few hours away. He should be in bed. Asleep. He thrust aside the mound of paperwork he’d dallied with while waiting for this call.
“They can’t agree on anything. Half cling to the old myth that the scene depicts Harmony banishing Discord. The other half are considering rewriting history.”
“And the Laudae?”
“Hasn’t said a word. She just sits, staring out the window. No lights on in her room, but I can see her outline in the moonlight.”
“Suggest to someone who will suggest to someone else that perhaps it’s time she comes home.”
“That will just make her more stubborn about staying.”
“I know. Amazing how peaceful the Temple is without her.” Meaning how malleable the HC was without her interference. He hadn’t even had to bring up the issue of Holy Day work shifts to bring Lord Chauncey back to his way of thinking.
As long as Chauncey voted the way Gregor wanted him to, Gregor would let the extra shifts work. Any deviation, and Chauncey faced heavy fines and possible removal from the HC.
Gregor stretched and yawned again. “Keep me posted. Good work. I’ll arrange a bonus for you when you return.”
“I want the bonus in my bank account by open of business today.” The husky voice turned hard.
“That was not our agreement.”
“It is now. I went to a lot of risk setting this up. Sooner or later that snoopy Military is going to try to analyze and date the paint.”
“The bodyguard is supposed to be guarding Laudae Estella, not asking questions.”
“Not him. The other one. The forensics officer. He’s got the skills and the equipment. Next thing you know, he’ll try to tell us the oldest bones are not human. He’ll announce that humans came to this planet from the CSS seven hundred years ago.”
Gregor froze. That was information only he and one other had access to. He’d learned it from his predecessor and been sworn to secrecy. The other one had stumbled on it accidentally.
“The money will be in your account by noon. I can’t do it before then.”
“Noon. No later, or I tell Laudae Sissy what you are up to.”
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
"HAVE YOU HEARD FROM Bethy?” Penelope demanded. She leaned across Gil’s desk, giving him a spectacular view of her cleavage.
Gil gulped and pushed away his first thoughts. Almost eighteen years with this woman and he never got tired of her.
“No. She is supposed to report to you,” he answered, carefully putting aside his current report. It would wait. Except that there were fifteen others beneath it awaiting his attention.
“She calls by radio relay every afternoon. But not today.” Worry lines drew Penelope’s mouth into a deep frown.
Gil checked his clock. Well after dinnertime. Late enough that he worried, too. “Communications in the mountains are spotty. A gathering storm could interrupt . . .”
“That hasn’t stopped her in the month she’s been gone.”
“Oh.”
“I’m worried, Gil. Gregor is up to something. If Bethy gets caught in the backlash . . . I’m scared.”
“Gregor would never hurt another Temple, especially not a young girl.”
“Not directly. But if Sissy outlives her usefulness to him, or he changes his mind . . . He’s ruthless. And unforgiving.”
“I know. I’ll make inquiries.” He half stood, just enough to brush her lips with his own. “At this point, no news is good news.”
“Are
you sure, Gil?”
“Yes,” he lied.
“It’s just that after the driver died, I worry. I wanted Sissy out of the Temple, not assassinated.”
“I know, Penny. Sissy has requested some unusual supplies for her scientists. I need to call to verify them. I’ll make sure Bethy is okay at the same time.”
“Do it now.”
“Now?” He surveyed the masses of paperwork left to complete before he could justify retiring for the night and act upon the invitation of Penelope’s breasts.
In an instant he decided that some things were more important than paperwork. He pulled Penelope into his lap (no fear of being observed together, Gregor had gone off to a party with the HC and a few select Nobles) and the ’phone in front of him.
After many long delays, relays, and clicks and pops on the line, he managed to connect to the Temple residence in the mountains.
Bethy herself answered. “Daddy, have you heard?” she asked breathlessly.
Gil hoped her shallow breathing was excitement and hurry and not the thin mountain air affecting her lungs.
“Heard what, sweetheart?” He tried to picture his daughter in her current location and only came up with the memory of the day she’d proudly displayed a gap in her mouth when she lost her first milk tooth; all bright smiles and dark curls floppy about her round baby face as she bounced about the room.
Penelope rested her head against his, listening as closely as he.
“We’ve found a truly ancient mural. It’s got some . . . anomalies. Is that the right word?” She asked the latter in an aside.
“Anomaly sounds correct. So you’ve been too busy to call home. What kind of anomalies?”
“I’m not supposed to say until Laudae Sissy makes a formal announcement.”
“And who do you suppose is going to write up the report she announces?” He had to smile.
“But, Daddy!”
“Tell him, sweetie,” Penelope coaxed.
“Hi, Mama, I should have known you ordered Daddy to call.”
“Stop stalling and tell us, Bethy,” Gil commanded.
She did.
He went absolutely still inside. Something was wrong. He couldn’t put his finger on it. Just something out of place. He needed to . . . to what? Dig up the original Covenant Stones?
Harmony Page 30
