up the gorge, from its northerly incline.
He found them on the other side of a cold, clear
stream that ran between rounded rocks and the arched
roots of ancient trees. Greg was helping a limping
Catriona Macreadie as they emerged from a shadowy
notch in the gorge wall. Twisted trees flanked its
entrance and bushes sprouted high up, choking off light
from above. As he drew level with Greg, he glanced into
the fissure, from which a brook ran, pouring into a suc-
cession of small pools before joining the stream ... and
for a moment felt as if he was being watched from the
shadows.
Greg went first, offering Catriona support as they
crossed from stone to stone. Her face was pale and she
gasped occasionally but eventually they were both safely
on the other side, Theo offering his arm at the last.
'So what happened?' he said. 'And what were you
both doing down here?'
At that, Greg glanced quickly to Catriona, who
answered.
'It was my fault, Mr Karlsson -1 was sure I saw foot-
prints leading down to the stream, so I led the way, went
across, and . . . and . . .'
'And Cat slipped and twisted her leg, Uncle,' Greg
added, exchanging another look with her. 'I got her to
rest for a few minutes before deciding to head back, and
then you showed up.'
Theo smiled and nodded. Well, that's a fine line of
nonsense you're giving me, boy, he thought. What are
you hiding? Or should I be wondering?
He was about to ask exactly where Miss Macreadie
had injured herself when there was the sound of footsteps
and rustling foliage from the ridge overlooking the gorge.
'Found them,' said a voice, and several figures came
into view - some OG officers and an Ezgara commando.
'Hello, Mr Cameron - are you and your friends in need
of assistance?'
'We can manage, Mr Ingerson,' Greg called back.
'Did you catch the gunman? Is the Hegemony envoy
badly wounded?'
'The High Monitor fortunately escaped serious
injury but, tragically, his attendant is dead. The
killer ... is nowhere to be found.' He broke off and
turned his attention to someone unseen on the other
side of the ridge. 'Right, Mr Cameron, Major Karlsson
and Doctor Macreadie - you'll have to leave the area
now as the forensics people will soon be here. Let me
know if there's any problem.'
With that, he retreated out of sight, although the
Ezgara lingered, staring down. Theo gazed back for a
moment then turned to Catriona. 'Well, girl, I don't
think you'll manage that climb with a bad ankle, so in
the spirit of gallantry I hereby volunteer my nephew
Gregory to carry you to the top on his back.'
Greg stared at Theo, eyebrows arched in surprise,
but then Catriona uttered a low, warm laugh.
'Well, now,' she said. 'It is the manly thing to do.'
At that, Greg's reserve dissolved into a grin.
'Aye, well, just as long as it's manly!'
Watching Greg ascend the slope with Catriona on his
back, and hearing them both laughing, Theo smiled and
wondered. Then he paused to glance back at the shad-
owy gap in the side of the gorge, frowning.
No, he thought. Just my imagination, populating
dark corners with spirits and kobolds, even though
there's a real monster running around.
Shrugging, he followed the others up the steep path,
noting that the Ezgara was gone.
17
PATH MASTER
From the sheltering veil of shadows he watched the
Humans depart, feeling something akin to amusement
as the eldest of them paused to look back before like-
wise leaving. Then he was alone with the shadows and
cold, the trickling brook and the simple creatures, as
alone as he had been for nearly ten thousand years. Last
of the Pathmasters, last bearer of ancient knowledge,
fading remnant of cherished duty.
Was it all chance and happenstance that his essence
should be drawn here on the same day that a slaying
took place upon Waonwir, directly above the Sleeper's
vault? And that a Human female stunningly radiant
with potential should then wander close enough to get
his attention? Well, the Pathmasters who taught him
had always reminded him that coincidences were only
the most obvious manifestations of the light touch of the
Eternal. After all, the female had said, 'I've been search-
ing for you,' and he had seen in her thoughts the
fruitless outcomes of her exploring in the depths of
Segrana.
Such a prize she was, the avidity of her cognitive har-
mony burning so brightly along the transient edge of the
stable dimensions that he could almost make out the
ambits of possible futures. Questions had come tum-
bling from her in a torrent, but he had stanched it with
a command - seek out a vudron and undertake a vigil.
For in the end it came down to Segrana, to her slow but
sure perceptions, and to the reckonings she made. The
immemorial awareness of the great moon-enfolding
forest, vast yet thinly scattered, was close to the under-
lying qualities of the Eternal, which could not help but
influence Segrana when the human female entered a
vudron back there.
Then her male companion had arrived, a surprise
that had caused her to lose her footing by the brook, slip
and fall. The Pathmaster had allowed his visible mem-
brane of coerced particles to melt away so that when
next they looked he had apparently disappeared.
All the Humans and others were receding and he
knew that there was another place he had to be, a
daughter-forest where another fascinating Human was
taking his ease in strange company. The Uvovo-culti-
vated sanctuary lay several miles away, yet for such as
himself that distance was no greater than that between
one thought and the next, thoughts that were long and
complex, thoughts that bound this self with that succes-
sion of other selves which stretched away towards the
Eternal. He formed the thought of a glade in that daugh-
ter-forest, sweet and strong offspring of Segrana, and by
virtue of the entwining green weave of seed and leaf his
disembodiment travelled there, slipping through to
unfurl his essence in green, sheltering shade.
He found the Human, a male named Horst, sitting
on a low wooden bench beneath a sunny sky, leaning
sideways against the armrest, reading a book balanced
on a raised knee. Next to him on the bench was a
small flat device, its dark surface gleaming in the sun,
while on the long grass a short distance away a young
human female sat crosslegged, making chains of small
flowers.
But this idyllic scene was not at all what it seemed to
be. The Pathmaster knew that, like her flowers, the child
was an illusion, an insubstantial image cast by Horst's
>
cunningly wrought device. Earth Ambassador Horst
was a man in the grip of grief, as much a prisoner of it
as if he were weeping rather than smiling, and in his
grief he had surrendered part of himself to an unthink-
ing, visionless instrument devoid of true self.
Yet that was not the worst of it. Horst also played
host to one of the Dreamless, an artificial entity of a dif-
ferent magnitude: unlike the clever image of a dead
daughter, these Dreamless possessed a kind of volition
and a degree of self-critical awareness very similar to
their anti-life predecessors who had brought most of the
galaxy to the brink of disaster ten millennia ago.
Unlike those long-vanquished entities, however, these
Dreamless had evolved in symbiosis with a dominant
species, the Sendruka, thus spreading their influence far
and wide throughout the Hegemonic territories and
beyond. The new Dreamless had attained levels of
power and existence unimaginable to those predeces-
sors - every artificial entity consisted of two parts, a
lesser part occupying a physical matrix in the vantage of
the Real, either a device or an implant, and a greater
part that resided in that understratum of reality known
to Humans as the first tier of hyperspace. Such scraps of
information the Pathmaster had gleaned from innumer-
able overheard fragments of offworlder conversation,
the occasional stray thought, and those observations of
scholars and Listeners which he had received.
And the implications provoked in him a deep unease.
Were the implant Dreamless merely a manifestation of
the greater, hyperspace ones, or did they possess auton-
omy? What was the hierarchy of the hyperspace
Dreamless and how did they communicate with their
implant counterparts? That last unknown was the most
immediately worrying - did that method of communi-
cation bear any similarity to the frail bonds that linked
his essence to those former echoes of himself which were
on the path to mergence with the Eternal? His unease
deepened still further when he thought of the Sentinel
asleep in its vault, and how it communicated with deep,
hidden allies.
He regarded the Human Horst once more, noticing
how the man's attention was focused on a point in the
air just beyond the other end of the bench. His lips were
scarcely moving but he was speaking, softly in his
throat. From a tall, broad tree nearby the Pathmaster
tentatively reached out with rarefied senses, trying to
see into Horst's thoughts, with a touch of the mind so
light as to be scarcely extant.
Yet he felt the resonant disturbance of linkage, and he
saw ... so strange, another man, tall and well-propor-
tioned with a relaxed, even amused demeanour, yet he
was an image lacking any colour. Blacks, whites and
shades of grey.
They were talking, something about the sister ships of
the Hyperion, the ones that had gone missing, a tale
that the Pathmaster was acquainted with. I've had an
enquiry from another group of ship-hunters, Horst was
saying, calling themselves the First Flight Association.
And what's their pet notion} said the Dreamless's
monochrome image. That the Forrestal and the
Tenebrosa were flung far back in time and their crews
became the original ancestors of the Sendruka?
No, that's the HTF Society's theory. First Flight have
somehow deduced that all three ships ended up in the
Huvuun Deepzone and they've asked me to persuade
the Hegemony's Grand Archivist to release any Huvuun
survey data into the public domain.
But Robert, don't these people realise that the
Hyperion colonists were incredibly lucky to find an
uninhabited world like this, lucky not to have encoun-
tered any interstellar marauders or resource raiders, and
lucky not to have succumbed to some native micro-
organism? The other two crews would need similar
amounts of good fortune to survive the potential haz-
ards.
Which are many, said Horst. No - / fear that the
Hyperion's luck was a fluke and that the other vessels
were overcome by tragedy or violence. Perhaps in a hun-
dred years, or even tomorrow, a traveller will find a
dead hulk of a ship drifting around an uncharted star, or
the ruins of a settlement on some inhospitable world,
and the mystery will be solved.
The Pathmaster listened, amused at the finality of
Horst's declamation yet puzzled to see a knowing smile
pass across the grey-pale Dreamless's features. And as
the Pathmaster paused to ponder, he felt an echo of
wrongness resonate back from that sombre verdict, as if
there was something out among the stars to contradict
it.
Then the Dreamless turned a thoughtful gaze over at
the seated figure of Horst's daughter. For a moment all
were still in that tableau, the two apparitions hingeing
on Horst's state of mind.
The Pathmaster withdrew his perceptions, returning
to the simpler imperatives of plantlife, to build, to grow,
to put forth leaf, flower and seed, taking in the sun
while drinking from the soil. The cycles and rhythms of
nations and species, however, were vastly more com-
plex than those of plantlife and the Pathmaster had
come to know for certain that several ruthless ventures
and ambitions had been drawn together by the discov-
ery of Umara. Very soon these intersecting forces would
bring great pressure to bear on the colony's leaders, and
also on Horst, whose position might prove to be pivotal.
Also, a lot would come to depend on the resilience and
character of Cheluvahar, the new Artificer Uvovo. The
husking of Cheluvahar would soon take place, shortly
thereafter to be followed by the dispersal of Artificer
teams to their appointed destinations and tasks, many
secret, some formidable, all vital. Assuming that Segrana
was able to carry out the husking as planned.
Now a man approached, one of the ambassador's
staff, attired in a blue, high-necked uniform and per-
spiring visibly as he came hurrying round the forest
path and into view. He would be carrying news of the
shooting, the event that would set the first cogs in
motion, their turning bringing certain forces into play,
allowing larger cogs the freedom to turn, while other
things moved and stalked between the stars ...
As the Pathmaster watched, Horst nodded to the offi-
cial then turned to the ghost-image of his daughter,
speaking gently to her as if she were really there.
Reality, the Pathmaster thought. When it comes, will
it break him or will he learn how to survive?
PART TWO
18
KAO CHIH
Outside his armoured cabin the winds of the gas giant
V'Harant raged and roared as the gravity-tug Biaolong
maintained its spiral ascent, carryin
g its pendant burden
of six ore containers. Relaxing in the huge, ancient pilot
couch, retrofitted for the human form by Roug techni-
cians decades ago, Chih kept a practised eye on the
exterior monitor and the generator gauges while deftly
swapping the music tab in the couch's headrest. Like
the couch and most of the instrumentation, the exterior
monitor was a conversion hack, a dusty panel cased in
grey plastic and fixed to the original console with webby
struts. It showed a montage of views of the Biaolong's
hull, looking for all the world like an inverted stepped
pyramid, its flanks studded with tapered blocks, while a
perpetual blast of corrosive atmosphere whirled and
scoured and howled.
Watching it, Chih smiled, remembering Great-Aunt
Mei's assertion that the murky skies of V'Harant were
really Di-Yu, the underworld, the abode of demons and
punishment. Then he listened to the sound of that never-
ending storm, muted to a low whisper by the thick alloy
hull and the chemo-suppressor field, imagining it to be
the fangs of a demon host grinding uselessly away, just
beyond the armoured shutters. He laughed and was
about to start the music, a selection of Yunan school
electroniki, when the voice of his copilot, Ta Jiang, came
from the headrest instead.
'Chih - number seven is sliding out of resonance.'
'Not again,' he said, leaning forward. The generator
gauges were flat displays set on brassy, octagonal
plinths that jutted from the main console. Slipping on
the spectrum goggles, he studied gauge 7, switching
between colour lens pairs to take in all the 3D data.
The Roug's willingness to modify the instrumentation
had not extended to the antigrav generator displays,
stemming from the conviction that all operators had to
adapt their sensory perceptions to the equipment in
order to preserve the conceptual integrity of the primal
schemata. Fabulously intricate assemblages of motors,
gyros, gears, levers, mirrors and crystals constituted
the control systems of the gravity-tugs, the mines down
on V'Harant's core, the orbiting refineries, and the
cities of the Roug, floating somewhere in the gas giant's
turbid atmosphere. Three generations of human engi-
neers had been unable to persuade them to introduce
even the most basic digital upgrades, and with never a
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