Ancient Light

by Mary Gentle

  Shrub arniac, del’ri stems; rock and pebble and stick… now they all gleamed. Silver-glass. I wiped my lip, that hurt; took away a hand marked with blood, where I had bitten down. Now, all the interiors of the chiruzeth sarcophagi shone, crystalline; and here splinters of light ran into the chiruzeth itself …

  Ruric Orhlandis reached down into the interior, and picked up what had been a living cluster of kekri-larvae. She held a handful of light, that crumbled away into dust, drifted on the air into annihilation. Her eyes were dazed. My palms ran with sweat; heart hammered; I thought I would be violently ill. She lifted her head. She was shaking. A line of white was visible round those yellow irises, in that face that had looked unmoved on the burning of Orhlandis telestre.

  Unprompted, together, we moved to where we could hold each other in a necessary embrace.

  An hour later. We stood in the parchment-odoured library; windows open to the night. A breeze rustled stacked papers, and brought a scent of the city beyond. The Heart Stars cast enough light.

  ‘What do we do?’ I said. Then: ‘Ruric, it would all have happened sooner or later. With PanOceania, or some other Company. We were called … The Harantish planted Witchbreed artifacts where offworlders would find them, knowing it was a bait we couldn’t resist.’

  Ruric stood by the table. She slopped del’ri-spirit into bowls. ‘That wasn’t the first time that happened, but my agents prevented the other artifacts from being found.’

  She handed me a bowl of del’ri, and sat down heavily on one of the couch-chairs.

  ‘Kasabaarde has great and wide influence,’ she said, ‘but not total control. That’s as it should be. I think so. Or perhaps I only hope that I think so.’

  I blinked at that. Then I sat on the couch-chair beside her. Starlight robbed the room of colour: all was black, silver, grey. I yawned and rubbed at my eyes.

  ‘If I add it up, I’ve had about six hours’ sleep in the last two days … I can’t even think, never mind come to terms with what I’ve seen here.’ I paused. ‘You’re not telling me how the suppressor, the “counter-radiation”, how it functions.’

  ‘If you don’t know, I don’t have the right to tell you.’

  Through exhaustion I thought, If I had to guess, I’d say it was some property of the Tower’s chiruzeth structure. Maybe it … I don’t know … modifies the radiation of Carrick’s Star? And my ‘guesses’ are more accurate than I care to think about.

  Chiruzeth; that, when it lived, the Witchbreed shaped by their will alone; that now can’t be recreated, their secret being lost …

  I said, ‘Is all knowledge lost?’

  Starlight gleamed on her black mane as she moved her head, drinking from the del’ri bowl.

  ‘If there were any hint of Golden science left, the halfbreeds in Kel Harantish would have found and used it; or somewhere in the Barrens there would –’

  She stopped and looked at me. Those yellow eyes were luminous, almost with their own intrinsic light.

  ‘Christie, I have searched, for more ages than you can easily comprehend, for some way to undo the destruction that Witchbreed and Orthean together left living on this world. If there was a way, I would have found it!’

  ‘And the Empress Calil? She questioned Rashid Akida, I’m certain of it; God knows what he found. And he’s too ill to talk.’

  The Orthean woman said, ‘Goddess forbid that ancient light should again be used on this earth. I’m not at all sure it would be held back, as the Elansiir and the Glittering Plain and the north are leashed in, held in check – no, I’m not at all sure it wouldn’t strain to breaking that restriction, and what then?’

  That book-filled room was silent. The light of the Heart Stars shifted on the floor. I lifted the del’ri bowl to my lips, wincing at the bite of the spirit; fighting not only exhaustion, but the desire to use sleep as an escape. I do not want to think about what I have just seen. A world of crystal mirrors, over which moves only the wind, and the silver dust of annihilation … No, don’t think. Or I will recall what I felt at Rakviri: that the bright shadow is so easy to look upon – and love.

  ‘And what now?’

  ‘I have to ask you –’ Ruric stopped and glanced up, to where a brown-robed Tower servant stood in the doorway. She beckoned. The male handed her a strip of parchment.

  ‘I can use rashaku-relays and heliographs too,’ she said, with a smile of amusement. She read, and that sharp-planed face changed: I read amazement, and a kind of wry humour. ‘Well,’ she said. Well …’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I have eyes and ears in the Hundred Thousand,’ Ruric Hexenmeister said. ‘Today was Midsummer; they’ve named a T’An Suthai-Telestre. You see how fast word can come to me.’

  I leaned over, reading the parchment strip that the long fingers of her single hand spread out on her knee. It was in the curling script of the Hundred Thousand. The name of the new T’An Suthai-Telestre, legible by starlight …

  ‘“Nelum Santhil Rimnith”. I don’t believe a word of it!’ And then I thought of him in the Wellhouse, with Bethan Ivris; how he had spoken of peace with the hiyeks.

  Ruric threw her head back and laughed. ‘And after he was Portmaster in Ales-Kadareth, taking bribes from Kel Harantish – well, we do change. How we do change!’

  I tapped a key on my wristlink. Well past 19.00 now, and though Douggie might expect communications to be unreliable, he would be concerned. I said, ‘If I can get through, I want to know if Nelum Santhil and Doug are down in Keverilde still, and what’s happening about the hiyeks – if Sethri’s still talking; if there’s any fighting –’

  ‘You won’t be able to use that inside the Tower, I think.’ Ruric bent down and put her del’ri bowl on the floor, and then stood up briskly. ‘Rest, first. Christie, I have to talk to you again; there are things I must ask you. And you must leave the Tower soon. I’ll have my people take you where you can sleep for a few hours.’

  And sleep was an escape; a welcome, dreamless dark. No need to think of this ancient Tower, eroded by the ages; the secrets of its creation and repair all lost. No need to think of the bleak devastation miles to the south; or how sunlight had gleamed upon the Glittering Plain …

  No need to think of that city, four hundred miles toward the sunrise, and an Empress throned on skulls; whose face is the face of the Golden. No need to think: Is there the slightest chance that, after so many millennia, that weapon might be re-created?

  Sleep is an escape, a dreamless refuge; and a hand shook me out of it, shook me roughly awake: ‘We might not have as much time as I thought,’ Ruric Orhlandis said. ‘I’ve had word come down from the islands. The Coast ships in the Archipelago waters are beginning to move.’

  Dawn wiped the daystars from the sky. A midsummer day on the Coast: sky white as bone, and the wind a breath from an open furnace. I loosened the neck of my coverall, sweating; and swore in frustration as the wristlink showed me only static. I’d thought that on the roof-garden, outside the Tower structure, there might be less interference.

  ‘It’s no use.’ I thought: What’s Cory doing, is she still on the orbiter? Where’s Doug? I need to know what’s happening in Kel Harantish; I’ll ask Molly –

  I stopped, taken by that surprise that is not (after all these years) unfamiliar. It takes time to know that someone’s gone.

  I walked back through the dusty garden to the domed roof-entrance. Ruric Hexenmeister was there. She looked as though she’d slept in shirt and britches, or else not slept at all; the early morning sun cruelly illuminating her shabbiness and exhaustion. She was pacing, bare high-arched and six-toed feet scuffing the gravel; and as I came up, stopped to pounce as a brown-robe brought a message. She exchanged words with him.

  Amazing, I thought; still half asleep. Amazing how much there still is in her of amari Ruric Orhlandis. She is Ruric. And she is so many others as well. And while she’s told me the truth about the Tower and ancient light, she will, if necessary, lie totally about what
she’s going to do about it. And we both know that.

  The Orthean woman paced as if imprisoned; held by the claustrophobia of Tower walls. She stopped as I approached, and stood with her hand hooked in her belt. The dawn wind ruffled her mane.

  ‘Is there any use my stopping on one of the Archipelago’s islands?’ I asked. ‘I could try to contact the hiyeks there.’

  ‘Christie, I doubt it. The rumours coming through are confused. Some say the hiyek-families are quarrelling now, that they can’t agree on whether to sail back to the Coast, or finish what they’ve begun. I doubt you’d be able to do much.’

  A thousand jath-rai, scattered among all the Archipelago islands … No, I thought. There isn’t the time.

  ‘As soon as I can contact Doug or Cory, I’ll know what’s happening. I must know what action Cory intends to take. She’s terrified of hi-tech weapons in Orthean hands –’

  Ruric grinned toothily. ‘So am I.’ Then she stabbed one claw-nailed finger in my direction: ‘All I hear from you is “Cory” and “Peace Force”. You’re still in the Company, Christie. You restrain her.’

  ‘I don’t have the rank!’

  ‘I know,’ the Orthean woman said quietly. She took a step forward. ‘Try. Because of what you’ve told me – the Representative dead – there may be some way you can influence events. And yes, I know. I know, Christie. What business of the Tower’s is a war between the Coast and the Hundred Thousand? None. None at all. My only concern is the Tower’s survival, and that, at the moment, means watching Calil bel-Rioch. What happens to the Hundred Thousand is nothing to do with me, it’s unsafe to interfere –’

  She broke off and turned away, but I saw the pain on that dark face. How could I forget? A decade older than that woman who had been T’An Commander, T’An Melkathi; but still the same Ruric, that I knew that long-ago summer. Accused, guilty: I still hear her voice saying, All I’ve done, even to murder, I’ve done for the Hundred Thousand, As I love the land – I love it more than life – so I have tried to protect it.

  There is Blaize, and Haltern, and Cassirur; there is even Nelum Santhil … I said, ‘You know I’ll do what I can. And for the Coast, too; Anzhadi and the others.’

  She repeated, ‘It’s no concern of mine. What I can do without risk, I’ll do, but it won’t be much. I would come with you, if I could; but I can’t leave the Tower, can’t take the risk of losing this. There are so few who can live with an aeon of memories, and it takes so long to find them …’

  The dawn breeze began to fail, and the temperature to rise. Arniac opened scarlet blossoms. Our shadows fell ink-black on the gravel. I glanced up, not sure if I caught a shimmer in the air, and wondered, Tower defences? But it stirred no recollection. There have (I know) been Hexenmeisters too alien, too early dead or driven into insanity, for the chain of knowledge not to have its weak links.

  The Orthean woman turned back to me, linked her arm through mine; drawing me to walk between stone tubs of kazsis, away from the roof-entrance. ‘Christie, I said I’d ask you for help …’

  ‘Well?’

  Ruric smiled; that quirk that is half humour, half self-mockery.

  ‘Tell me I’m doing it again,’ she invited, as we walked in the early sun. ‘Tell me I can’t be in a place without going against the law of it … Listen: you must return here, and this is what we must most urgently discuss – you’ve said to me, you fear some synthesis of Earth’s technology with Golden science? So do I. But I also think this: if such a synthesis were possible, might we not find from it some way to destroy ancient light? Not merely to hold it in abeyance, but to destroy that threat that hangs over us?’

  ‘You …’ The sun struck down like a blow; I wished I had eyeshields. The dry heat exhausted me. And for a minute, I didn’t believe what I heard. ‘Ruric, you mean letting a research team inside the Tower?’

  ‘They wouldn’t come here?’

  ‘Oh, they’d come here, all right! You wouldn’t get rid of them. Isn’t it an infinitesimal chance that we could understand Witchbreed science?’

  Ruric inclined her head. Light glinted from skin and mane: the colour of flaked coal. ‘True. And if I were even to suggest such a thing to my people here – the Tower has always been inviolable; I confess I don’t quite know what they’d do. If it’s to happen, it will take very careful handling.’ Membrane slid back from her sun-yellow eyes. ‘But it’s a chance I can’t ignore.’

  I drew my arm from hers and stopped, leaning against the edge of a stone tub. It was hot under my palms, and kazsis-vine writhed away from my touch. Ruric stood with that crook-shouldered balance, watching me.

  ‘You wouldn’t suggest it, if it weren’t for the chance that Calil’s got there before you?’

  ‘No,’ she agreed equably, ‘I don’t suppose I would.’

  ‘And that’s down to us. The Company. We came here; we put a research team in Maherwa … Christ, I wish I knew what was in Rashid’s report!’

  Ruric shrugged. ‘There are things even my agents haven’t been able to find out. No one’s infallible. Not even me.’ And she smiled, with that Orthean humour that has more than a little of the macabre about it.

  ‘What we’ve spoken of – the Tower – I may have to go back to Earth. Talk to the top people in the Company home office and the government. It’s not a decision to be made on-world … the security clearance must be something phenomenal.’ Almost a laugh; and I looked at her: ‘You can tell. It’s too big; I’m afraid of it.’

  ‘So am I,’ Ruric said. ‘We do what we can.’

  By unspoken common consent, we turned and walked back towards the domed roof-entrance. The sky’s brilliance dazzled me. Faintly visible against it was the first pylon of the Rashre-y-Meluur, and its suspended bridge-structure that vanished into sea haze, northward towards the next chiruzeth spire …

  ‘I’ll send some of my people to escort you to your shuttle,’ the Orthean woman said. ‘If you need names of my people in the telestres and hiyeks, you can have them. You may need to get word to me.’

  ‘Not a prisoner, then?’ I said.

  That yellow gaze flicked up, humorous; met mine; and I thought, Assassin’s blade; ruesse; saryl-kabriz. Perceiving that a threat is sometimes not an insult and not a betrayal.

  ‘Weren’t you marked for Her?’ Ruric jibed; and then without any affectation or mockery added, ‘Christie, I trust you.’

  PART SIX

  28

  Ashiel Wellhouse

  Summer heat in the Hundred Thousand is mild, after the fierceness of the Desert Coast.

  Still, we clung to shadows of ziku, the light of Carrick’s Star streaming down through red foliage; and to the shadows cast by the walls of Ashiel Wellhouse, as the sun inched its way up to mid-morning. Warm air was full of chirith-goyen cloth-flies, dancing over the Wellhouse hives, specks of mica in the slanting beams of sunlight.

  ‘Something’s gone wrong.’ I stared eastwards, tense.

  ‘You offworlders are impatient.’ The skeletally-thin fenborn male beside me smiled. ‘You and the galeni. Only we know how to wait.’

  Galeni is what the aboriginal fenborn called Ortheans. Tethmet Fenborn straightened, shaking the folds of his brown robe across that green-gold skin; and then stalked off towards one of the other groups of people waiting. Has he seen someone who knows the Tower, someone who’ll give him word to send to Ruric?

  The wind brought the scent of fertile earth. Beyond the ziku grove, I could see how daystars skeined a milky-blue sky. Carrick’s Star shone down on dusty tracks that crisscrossed the hillside below Ashiel Wellhouse, running between banks of brown saryl-kiez, now just blossoming into blue flower. There were folds of the Ymirian hills in the north, and heathland to the south, fogged by a blue-white haze; and there, three or four seri distant, the black scar on the land where Keverilde had burned …

  ‘I don’t see anything moving down there.’

  Doug Clifford appeared beside me. That round face showed strain; he was white r
ound the mouth. He walked with none of his usual elasticity.

  ‘You’ve been out of contact for forty-eight hours, I hope you realize. Lynne, I have to say, I didn’t find that particularly helpful.’

  ‘I would have been here sooner. The shuttle was low on fuel. Cory’s people sent a refueller out to Lone Isle; I met them there.’

  ‘Bringing him with you …’ Doug’s gaze followed Tethmet, as the fenborn crossed the crowded yard.

  On the shuttle I recorded and re-recorded coded message-blips, sending them through the orbiter to FTL-drones. Twelve days, I thought. Then PanOceania and the government will hear what I heard in the Tower. Meanwhile: ‘I do have some new information,’ I said. ‘I’ll be calling a meeting. Cory. Ravi; he’s acting head of Research. You. I don’t yet know if there should be any Orthean representation.’

  Douggie’s head came up; he gave me a judgemental stare. With something of his old urbanity, he said, ‘I have the distinct impression that Commander Mendez assumes she’s acting head of mission. When do you plan to tell her otherwise?’

  I’m not telling her anything, let her find it out for herself … Before I could phrase that tactfully, Douggie’s attention was gone. He stared down the hillside towards Keverilde. Dust was rising, a mile or two distant. Others had seen it too, the crowd began to drift towards the gate-arch. I glanced back at the Wellhouse, to see if any of the takshiriye would come outside.

  Scarlet mane and green robe flared in the darkness of the door: the Earthspeaker Cassirur stepped out into the dusty yard. A dark-maned male followed. He supported another male, swathed in a dark becamil cloak despite the heat, whose mane was a wispy white crest, and who spoke rapidly and quietly and continuously. Nelum Santhil, with Haltern. For a moment all three were framed against the Wellhouse: a sprawling complex, brick walls rising straight and then swelling into onion-domes; smothered with kazsis-vine and shaded by ziku.

  As Douggie walked over to join them, and I was about to follow, a voice behind me said, ‘Representative Christie? Can you spare me a few moments?’