by Mary Gentle
‘The Company needs to know what’s happening in the Hundred Thousand, in any case.’ I turned to Mendez. ‘Cory, have your people grounded yet?’
She stroked the rings on her bony fingers. ‘I’ve come in advance. An observer. I’m old-fashioned, I like to see things for myself, not send my junior officers.’
‘Then, if Molly has no objections, you could observe first hand in Tathcaer – I say Tathcaer, because it’ll be awkward to ground a shuttle on the mainland, and that city has different rules. We can go oversea, stop over on Lone Isle rather than go back up to the orbiter.’
Anything to defuse hostilities here.
Molly Rachel looked at us. Her long fingers clenched into a fist, and then relaxed. While I watched tensely, she keyed a comlink contact to David Osaka, to Pramila in Kasabaarde, and – after some problems – to Clifford in Tathcaer itself.
‘Yes,’ she said finally. ‘The takshiriye are moving back into Tathcaer. As soon as they’re established, use that settlement as a base. Take a comlink-booster. I want eight-hourly reports. And I want results. The climate’s unpredictable here, the monsoon may not arrive, or it may end before we expect it to – so the data-profile says. Commander Mendez, I hope your troopships are here by then.’
The comlink chimed. She answered it, and then said, ‘For you, Lynne.’
David Osaka’s voice came through. ‘One of the locals is here, asking for you. Pathrey Shanataru. Says it’s about a meeting the bel-Rioch woman arranged to have with you – inside the city. What shall I tell him?’
I keyed hold and looked questioningly at Molly.
‘It’s a foot in the door,’ she said enthusiastically. ‘Even if nothing comes of this meeting, it sets a precedent. And I don’t think you have to be too concerned about your personal safety, Lynne, with half the Company on Kel Harantish’s doorstep –’
‘Okay, okay, I get the message.’ And to David: ‘Tell him I’ll be there in ten minutes.’
Molly nodded approval. I can’t very well avoid doing this, even if it does get the Company back inside the city; and besides, it’s something to do while we’re preparing to go to Tathcaer –
And that is all rationalization. I must see Calil bel-Rioch again. To ask her how she can speak a tongue I have only heard spoken in a vision, in a northern land. Ask how she knows a forgotten language. And ask: how is it that I know it, too?
Cory Mendez said, ‘How’s the research progressing? Are my people likely to face anything more than primitive weaponry here – any kind of alien tech?’
Molly Rachel shook her head. ‘This is a used-up world. There aren’t the resources for the natives to make Golden technology viable again, even if the knowledge of it had been preserved. I know Lynne doubts the technology can be reconstructed, even with Earth tech. From your viewpoint, I think there’s no need for concern.’
‘You don’t credit the rumours, then?’
Molly stared. ‘Rumours?’
‘I stopped over several hours on the orbiter,’ Cory Mendez said. ‘Sometimes it pays to listen to mess gossip. It’s unsubstantiated, but I hear that there’s now a trade in more than agricultural equipment going on here. That sonic stunners, CAS-IVs, small handguns, are turning up in Orthean hands in some of the Coast seaports. That there’s a black-market arms trade on Carrick V.’
‘No.’ Molly shook her head firmly. ‘Nothing comes on-world that isn’t checked by my people on the orbiter. If there is any small amount if Earth tech here, it’s come in illegally some time in the past ten years.’
Fear distracted me: the thought of Pathrey, waiting. And Calil bel-Rioch. And then I thought, No, not even she would abduct a Company employee at this juncture …
‘I’ll be back in an hour or two,’ I said. And left the shuttle, walking out to where the dark night was broken by strings of radiant lights rigged up across the hydroponic site excavations; and by the sound of seawater pumps, and the rumble of rock being pulverized. The earth was rough underfoot. Thunder scraped and rumbled along the northern horizon. I stopped, sweating, and looked up. The monolithic dark of Kel Harantish blocked out all the southern sky. Silhouetted against the Heart Stars, I could see the ropes and hanging platforms necessary for entry to the city.
David was waiting, and Pathrey Shanataru with him. I walked on to meet them.
Pathrey showed me to the city rooms occupied by the Harantish woman. He oozed obsequiousness, standing aside to let me walk down the steps inside the roof-house; and then as I reached the lower rooms, smiled and made as if to efface himself.
‘And this time go.’
The woman stood with her back to a narrow window. Pathrey spread plump-fingered hands in protest: ‘But, Calil –’
‘Listen to my conversations again and they’ll be the last things you do hear.’
She smiled. It was a threat: blatant, brutal. The plump dark male bowed, and his eyes flicked once to my face. I caught a look in which there was not just fear, but puzzled hurt.
Calil waited until he climbed the steps, and the roof trap door slammed shut behind him. Then she said, ‘Come here, Christie.’
I walked across the floor of varnished del’ri-wood. Floor, walls and ceiling; all panelled in that pale wood. In this stone and metal culture, wood is opulence. Ceramic pots held oil-lights, and their light glimmered on the del’ri-fibre mats and the window-arch. My boots scraped grit on the polished floor as I came to stand beside the white-maned woman and look out of the window. Warm wind blew in a gulf of darkness. Immeasurably far below, I saw the glare of the T&A site.
‘I have been thinking about truth.’ She smiled again. Some quality in her voice was hypnotic, at once amused and detached.
Double image: she is only a small Harantish woman, in a white meshabi-robe. No taller than my shoulder; thin, barefoot. And she is Golden. I thought, When I look at you I see another face, satin-black skin and mane, but the same Witchbreed-yellow eyes.
‘One of the great lies they tell,’ Calil said, ‘is that truth is simple, and is easy to understand. But truth is complex, with hidden inner workings, and outside masks; and understanding it is difficult, or impossible, and most of the world is condemned to dying without ever understanding a smallest part of it.’
She padded across to the low metal-lattice table and sat cross-legged and began to pour arniac into bowls. I could only stare. As if pursuing some thought, she added, ‘I have no right to the bel-Rioch name. I assumed it. It’s useful to me.’
I must have looked bewildered. She laughed. It was a short, smothered noise. As if in some past-memory or vision, I came to sit down by her on the del’ri mat. The arniac tasted peppery. The Coast poison ruesse has no scent to Ortheans, but to human senses it is obvious. No taste of it here – do I expect it? I wondered. I don’t know what to expect.
‘Have you been made Voice of the Emperor again?’
She grinned. Her features, seen close, are uneven: the corner of her left eye droops slightly.
‘I don’t need to be. Didn’t you tell me, Christie, that I assume a mantle of mystic infallibility? And if people don’t quite believe, at least they don’t disbelieve; and I have my own “Voices” to keep me informed.’
I thought, If it comes to pretending infallibility, you’re not the expert. That sounded bitter. It’s the Tower you want to know about. What can I say to you about Ruric Hexenmeister that Ruric would want known outside the Tower?
Chiming in with my thought, Calil asked, ‘Christie, it’s always been said there’s but one Hexenmeister in the Tower, through all the years; is that merely something they’d have us believe, or is it true?’
‘I want to know: why must you know that?’
She held her arniac bowl cupped in hands that are white, with a gold-dust glimmer in the skin. The surface of the crimson liquid shivered. When she looked up her yellow eyes were clear.
‘I have had visions all my life. Only the Hexenmeister could tell me if they are true past-memories – if the Hexenmeister is w
hat the Tower claims.’
‘Does it matter?’ I protested. ‘Listen. That’s the Company’s excavators you can hear. Earth technology here on Orthe. What does the past matter, compared to that?’
She shook the white mane back from her face, watching me.
Fighting not to be indiscreet, I said, ‘And what does the Tower matter, really? We have no way of telling if their knowledge is immortal memory, or only archives; and whichever it is, we still wouldn’t have any way of knowing if it were true. Three thousand years is a long time. Memories distort, and archives get corrupted –’
Calil, trying the thought out to see how it fitted, said, ‘Could it be that’s all there is? The great Tower no more than a collection of weevil-eaten parchments, and her spies and agents no less fallible than Harantish’s … Is that what I can believe, now?’
Argue round it how you can. The “parchments” are Golden tech data-storage, but it comes to the same thing. In that flickering lamplight I was suddenly tired of deception. It surprised me how bitter I felt against the old man, the old Hexenmeister. All that talk of remembered lives. And I believed it. So much grief for so many years.
The Harantish woman said cynically, ‘It makes little difference to my city. The Hundred Thousand would hate us still, for what they remember of the Empire, and that even without the Tower to tell the Wellhouses how evil we are.’ Now Calil sounded bitter. ‘If the past didn’t hang upon us like stones, why, we’d not be shut up in a city of traps in the middle of a wasteland. They callus “halfbreed Golden”. They fear us, that land to the north. And the Coast fears us, also. Christie, I have had visions that show them not so innocent. They claim they were a slave race of the Golden, bred up from fenborn aboriginals – but there were those who were not slave, and who built up the Empire hand in hand with the Golden Witchbreed.’
‘No one’s innocent,’ I said. Hearing her I have had visions. And I couldn’t stop myself asking, ‘How do you know that language, shan’tai Calil?’
‘Perhaps it’s still spoken in my city. Perhaps I learned it in the Tower. Perhaps –’
Cutting across her provocation, I said, ‘We’ve no records of it anywhere. I’ve looked. Nothing, in ten years on this world; if it was known, I think we’d have heard it somewhere. As for the Tower …’ Intent on explanation, I said, ‘There’s always a Hexenmeister. There are always others who could pick up the role and continue it word-perfect. But as for it being one and the same Hexenmeister, over millennia –’
I broke off, regretting it the instant the words were out of my mouth. My tone would have told her, if nothing else. Haven’t I just told this consummate Harantish politician the truth about her traditional enemy? Indiscreet. Perhaps more than indiscreet … But traditions count for nothing now. What does that rivalry between Kel Harantish and Kasabaarde’s Tower matter when the Coast is attacking the Hundred Thousand, and Earth is bringing technology and troops here? And won’t it make Ruric safer if they know she’s only one of many, and not an all-knowing authority? Won’t it? A little more and I might convince myself, make good excuses for that one unwise word –
All I could think was: Now I owe a debt to her: to Ruric, and to Orthe.
The arniac had grown cold, and Calil bent forward to adjust the spirit lamp that heated it. These walls muffle sound. Nothing could be heard from the other cell-hive rooms below and either side of us. Calil bel-Rioch sat back.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘then there’s no one to judge the truth of my visions of the Empire – except myself.’
I made an inarticulate protest. She didn’t hear. There was a look on that cold Golden face, so that I thought, This is a turning point for her, but how? Why? What has she just chosen to do? Could I have stopped her?
Calil, almost under her breath, added, ‘And I have nothing to fear from her.’
Nothing to fear – and nothing to gain. If I didn’t have it implanted in my memory by the Tower, where did that Rakviri vision come from? If Molly experienced it too, was it exterior to us? I don’t know. Oh, you can say that when
the Hexenmeister messed up my mind, he used data from the Tower Archives –
That is perfectly rational as an explanation: why can’t I believe it?
I sat sweating, dry-mouthed.
Calil, still with that new deliberation in her face, turned her head for a moment towards the window; looking towards the dark heat-soaked landscape, the bitter sterile sea.
‘Have I seen the Golden?’ My voice cracked. ‘Have you? I don’t know.’
Calil bel-Rioch said, ‘I have seen. I do see.’
She reached, without looking at me, and her six-fingered hand closed over mine. Scale-dry and warm and I felt as if that touch went beneath my skin and marked me clear down to the bone.
‘When the Elansiir was a garden land, and not a desert … I see the City Over The Inland Sea, in a bright day, in a time of war –’
Between one word and the next, vision flooded up; and then I didn’t know whether she spoke, or I, or both of us:
‘The City Over The Inland Sea …’
‘Chiruzeth, shining …’
The sound of the sea, lapping at cyclopean wharfs …
Light blooms into colours. There is a sudden scent on the air, heavy, sweet, an odour of summer. Humid heat. The light, that strange radiance, comes from chiruzeth: chiruzeth that shines with living light.
Above me, the suspended city blocks out the sun.
Under the gigantic pillars of chiruzeth that support the city, dark green shadows hang in the sea depths. Great soaring spans, curving over and up and across, their shadow falling on the Inland Sea. And in infinite distance I see a rim of clear water, shining gold: the distant skyline, between the city and the sea.
The towers of that incredibly-supported cityscape merge with the pale-blue sky, and with daystars that shine in constellations wholly unrecognizable. Small figures move on the towers, thin and intensely bright.
And chiruzeth shines: blue, blue-white, diamond-brilliant. That light touches deep instincts: a longing for gardens, for isles where darkness never comes; a world quite other than this, shot through with fire and light unbearable.
And one of us says, ‘There is the city of our enemies. Have you the heart to do this?,’ and the other answers, ‘I can, and I do, and I will.’
We stand long enough to see the sunlight fade on the city, and the twilight come and go. The light of the sun shines level under the city, in the air between it and the sea. Above, mile upon mile of towers, bridges, streets, battlements, cupolas, fountains. Now the City Over The Inland Sea lies like a dream of stone, under stars so brilliant they fuse together, burn in a sky like white phosphorus. A few sphere-lights cluster under eaves, or gleam as signals for flyers to land. At the foot of one of the great spans, that is also a bridge-way up into the city, we stand: and a faint and living luminescence clings to the chiruzeth.
‘Because we have entered the city, a wasteland will grow here. Because we have entered the city, great ones will go to corruption, their flesh will lie unconsumed –’
‘– because we have entered the city. We are the bringers of death. How shall we enter?’
And I see her with starlight on her face, that gold-dust skin, that whitefire mane: see her eyes that are yellow as childhood innocence and flowers. She kneels down on the cold earth. The span and the bridge-arch are before her.
‘Go and cry: Zilkezra is dead, Zilkezra of the High Lands is dead and come to corruption, and her flesh must not lie unconsumed. And when you come to the first gate, cry this cry, and they will send out the people of Santhendor’lin-sandru to carry me home, and commit my flesh to their bodies. And cry this cry at the second gate, and they will send word into the city that all may see me pass, and all the slave race and beastmen shall be shut within walls, and so I shall pass into the city. And when you have passed the third gate, cry this cry, and Santhendor’lin-sandru, Phoenix Emperor, he himself shall come to do that which is necessary for
one of his blood, and so I shall pass into the city, and so the city shall pass away.’
I say, ‘Are you determined on this?’
‘I am as we all are: I have no kin, and none to follow me. I am determined on the death of my enemies. Will you do this?’
‘I can, I do, I will.’
And I walk up the slope of that chiruzeth span, one of the supports of the city. Nothing beneath me but stone and air. And there are none but slaves at the great arch, that race we bred upfront our blood and from night-hunters in the northern fens: claw-handed, rough-maned, with translucent skin across their eyes. They cover their faces, seeing one of the Golden blood. I speak:
‘Zilkezra is dead, Zilkezra of the High Lands is dead and come to corruption, and her flesh must not lie unconsumed.’
In this time of war the gates are shut, no flyers scour the night sky. The wind off the sea is cold. At last comes the guard of the first gate, a woman of Golden blood:
‘Enter the city, blood-kin of Santhendor’lin-sandru. Bring that dead flesh into the city, and there shall be done what must be done. Only forgive us that we take from you robes and weapons.’
She calls our people (slave races must not touch flesh of us) and six of them bring a bier, and set upon it the naked body of Zilkezra, that does not move nor breathe nor speak. And I walk naked beside it as they carry it into the city, and to the second gate.
Here there are few sphere-lights, and so massive are the buildings round us, blocking out the sky, that I know I see scarcely a tenth of their bulk.
‘Zilkezra is dead, Zilkezra of the High Lands is dead and come to corruption, and her flesh must not lie unconsumed. Let the people of our blood come and see her brought home to the halls of Santhendor’lin-sandru.’
The commander of the second gate is a young man, who speaks to his guards. I see them go forth into the dark streets. Their footsteps call out the echo of an echo: dim memory of that space that lies below us, between the city and the sea. The commander speaks:
