By Keran Parizek
A bleak and timeworn beauty lingered in the
rock-strewn waste of the eastern Bight, and
Astren, as she hiked through it, took pleasure in
its melancholy grandeur. Around her in the
distance towered the Walls of the World -- the
massive black cliffs of staggering height that
enclosed the L-shaped Great Valley. An immense
canyon opened westward through the Walls; and
through the gap she could see the dying sun, a
motionless disk of sullen ochre that smoldered in
the tawny sky. It cast a feeble ruddy light across
the chill and desolation round about her.
Yesterday, she'd travelled out from the City by
the Lake of Bronze to add to the cache of supplies
she was accumulating in the barrens; and at that
time, she'd heard the scurrying of small animals
concealed amongst the patchy vegetation, and the
squawking of a flock of anteliornis on the Lake.
But now, as she returned to the City, all seemed
unnaturally quiet. A breathless stillness had
spread across the land, as if it lay drowned
beneath a tide of silence. The shards of dead
coral crunched into the friable soil beneath her
boots; but nothing else, save her own breathing,
seemed to stir.
What's happening? If something's out here
hunting, I should feel it, she thought. But
the aether itself seemed hushed. To the south she
could see the pale glow of the City's lights; but
she couldn't sense the telempathic noise
invariably produced by the minds of its
fifty-eight thousand inhabitants.
Her brows knit, and she halted and turned, to scan
her surroundings. A furlong to the northwest, a
low-lying pool of fog marked the position of a
magma-warmed spring; beyond it, far off, she could
see smoke from a range of volcanoes curling
skyward. To the north, many leagues away, a second
huge opening gaped in the Walls of the World; and
she eyed it warily. But she spied nothing
noteworthy on the northern barrens, either with
her unaided eyes or with binoculars. When she
turned eastward, she could see the glare of a lava
lake reflected dully against the foot of the
gargantuan red-black cliffs; but again she
detected nothing that could have produced the
uncanny calm.
Peculiar. -- Could the Heritage have invented
some sort of an aetheric damper? She
frowned. The basic research she'd seen published
suggested that no human or perihuman power was
close to creating such a device. Nor was the
Federation for the Furtherance of the Heritage of
Humankind well equipped to pursue aetheric
research -- they so distrusted anyone who might be
able to make contact with the bizarre and deadly
Outsiders that they routinely killed all the
communers in the cities they controlled. But what
else could produce such an effect?
For once, I'll be glad to back inside the City
walls, she thought as she set off again,
quickening her pace.
Soon the coral scrub ended, its old southern
reaches buried beneath a millennium-old lava
plain. She started to cross the plain, stepping
carefully over its ropy black pahoehoe formations
. And she stopped, suddenly.
She felt an evanescent contact in the aether --
the touch of another mind, subtle as the brush of
a single strand of spider's silk.
Her spine prickled, and she slipped her plasma
lance out of its holster. Only another communer
could have impinged upon her mind in quite that
fashion -- and not many human communers were left
in the Great Valley, now that the Heritage
controlled every city but her own.
Her lips compressed and her knuckles white, she
stood motionless, listening.
Nothing disturbed the aether, and finally Astren
began walking again. But she didn't, immediately,
sheathe the lance. Ever since the Unforgivable
Experiments had breached the Earth's defenses and
allowed the bizarre and ominous entities of the
Outer Circle to invade, the inhabitants of the
Great Valley had had worse to fear than beasts,
other humans, or their near-human kindred. Too
many of the Outsiders were pneumavores -- psychic
predators and parasites.
They had found human psyches rich enough to feed
upon, and scarcely adapted to resist them.
*****************
Astren had ridden nearly a mile ahead of the
caravan, armed with lance and rifle. Few jobs
held more peril than the position of forward
scout, but she'd survived to travel more of the
ancient Road than anyone else in the Bight.
A party of a dozen people had approached,
heading in the opposite direction. From a
distance they'd looked like an ordinary merchant
family from the Tableland. She hadn't spotted
anything unusual when they'd closed to fifty
yards -- but something had put her off,
something indefinable. She'd fired a flare to
warn the caravan's guards behind her, even
before she'd recognized the faint aetheric
chitter that distorted the timbres of their
minds, and even before she'd spotted the waxy
grey pockmarks on their exposed skin.
They were Ridden.
She'd drawn her lance as soon as she'd fired the
flare -- still almost too late to save herself.
The Riders within the human hosts had begun to
utter the vertigo-inducing infrasonics with
which they stunned new victims. But the whole
colony had recoiled in shock when her lance had
cracked and struck the Ridden nearest to her.
She still remembered the man's face as he'd
fallen, his sleepwalker's glazed expression
giving way to an all-too-human look of agony and
horror as he came back to full awareness for a
few ghastly seconds. Then he'd bucked and
flailed as the convulsions started. The Rider
was trying to abandon him, to escape the
destruction of its human host, but it had so
altered his nerves and brain that he could not
survive without it.
Later, she and certain of the guards had hunted
down the rest of the colony. The hardest to kill
had been the parasitized little girl. Astren had
done it herself with the heaviest plasma cannon
she could borrow, on the highest setting, so
that the throes were over before they could
begin.
After that, the dry heaves had hit her; and
she'd spoken to no one, all the way back to
camp.
*****************
By the time Astren had left the lava barrens
behind, and had reached the plains near the Lake
of Bronze, the strange hush had lifted. She could
see the watchtowers ringing the City's walls, and
the floodlights on its battlements; she could also
sense the droning that emanated from it. At this
distance, it sounded to her communer's sense like
the buzzing of a beehive. From long experience,
she knew that the closer she drew to it, the more
it would jangle, as it resolved into a cacophony
of individual signals broadcast into the aether.
Astren had long speculated that the unrelenting
aetheric discord of the cities was why so many
communers disappeared in adolescence, not long
after their talents had manifested. The need to
escape the onslaught of empathic noise had often
driven her out beyond the city walls in her youth,
despite the danger. Perhaps she'd escaped the fate
of the others because she'd avoided -- barely --
the temptation to call out into the red twilight,
hoping to be answered by someone who understood.
Certainly, the desire for quiet had inspired her
choice of occupations -- she'd chosen to become a
scout partly out of curiosity, but mostly because
she desperately needed a way to survive, for
extended periods, outside city walls.
Her lips quirked. She never approached her
intermittent home without mixed feelings, but
sometimes she needed a respite from the dangers of
the wilds more than she needed the calm of their
aether. Some day, she'd have to learn to get by
without ever returning to the shelter of city
walls. Time would bring Heritage rule to the City,
now that it stood alone in its independence; the
only question was -- how much time?
She hoped she could afford to buy a spare plasma
lance for her cache before the City came under
Heritage control, forcing her out into the
wilderness for good. But since the Carven City had
fallen to the Heritage a year ago, her own city
had no trading partners more sophisticated than
the nearest large perihuman settlement. Prices for
such manufactures as weapons had shot up
drastically almost at once; she'd had to spend
nearly four months' earnings just to replace the
shielding in the plasma tube, when she'd last
taken her lance to the smith. A second weapon was
still well out of her reach.
*****************
Three days later, Astren sat at her desk,
dictating an article for The Chronicle of the
City by the Lake of Bronze. The shielding
she'd installed in her apartment, and its height
above the City's streets, kept the aetheric din
that prevailed among the crowds below from rasping
her nerves too raw: only a muted brook-babble of
emotion reached her.
At length, she laid down the microphone and
stretched; then she critically read the text on
the screen.
You already know about the latest attack on a
caravan travelling toward the City by a raiding
tribe of Rufous Folk. You know that the Rufous
Men flayed all the true humans accompanying the
caravan, and then impaled their red, skinless,
and still-thrashing bodies on stakes, to blacken
by the side of the Great Valley Road. The
Heritage news release of three days ago provided
a graphic record of the atrocity, as the smoke
still rising from the perihuman quarter after
the resulting riot attests.
Let me assure you that that datastream is
accurate -- as far as it goes.
What you don't know yet is that the reason the
Heritage could provide such horrific footage is
that a Heritage battalion was stationed less
than two miles away. Despite their outnumbering
the Rufous Men by five to one, the only action
they took while seven men and two women screamed
in agony was to send a scout with a camera.
"How could you possibly know that?" the Heritage
supporters among my readers will demand. "Who
told you?"
Nobody told me. Nobody had to. I'm a scout and
an explorer, and my view of the world outside
the City walls isn't limited to what the news
services choose to show me. I saw the carnage
from the Headland South of the Lake, a quarter
of a mile below me. I listened to the screams
and cursed under my breath because I was a lone
woman carrying a light lance and a rifle, not
two companies of soldiers armed with heavy
plasmatics.
I'm a sniper. I did what had to be done with
that rifle.
Readers of this publication know me as a critic
of the Heritage, but I've always supported their
policy calling for the eradication of the Rufi
raiding tribes -- a policy the raiders
themselves have made it extremely hard to
quarrel with. There could have been no question,
during those hideous hours, that the use of all
force against the raiders was justified. So why
didn't the Heritage troops act to protect the
lives of the helpless humans in that caravan?
Was it miscommunication, as some diehard
Heritage supporters will surely insist? Was it
the fog of war -- never mind that the battalion
wasn't engaged? Or is it that the Heritage
considers nine people dying by torture a small
price to pay for the ill will the Rufi action
has roused against the perihumans in this city?
How many cities have fallen to the Heritage only
after riots fomented by their supporters are
quelled by their troops arriving to impose
martial law?
Where would the Heritage be without the Enemy?
There was more she wished she could cover, but she
didn't have the space, and so she transmitted the
article to Loren, the editor of The Chronicle,
as it was.
*****************
I'm not sure even my sister would recognize me.
I look like a used-up harlot,
Astren thought as she stared at her reflection in
the cracked mirror of the women's washroom. Heavy
shadows now marked the hollows of her eyes; deep
lines of worry etched her sallow skin; her
newly-cropped hair, dyed a yellow-brown, hung limp
and oily against her skull. She wore a frayed
tunic and a stained skirt; she stood,
slump-shouldered, like the City's hopeless poor.
Seventeen days ago, she'd written her article for
The Chronicle. Five days ago, the City by
the Lake of Bronze had finally caved in before a
Heritage siege, assisted, as she'd predicted, by
uprisings within; and she'd been trapped within
the City. She'd always kept the fact that she was
a communer secret; but since the Heritage counted
their political opponents as traitors to humanity,
they would certainly arrest Astren if they could
identify her. Thus, some of her new shabbiness was
deliberate disguise.
Stress had caused the rest. For days now she had
been locked into the Six-East Honeycomb with its
other denizens, while a miasma of anxiety,
helpless resentment, and despair festered in the
aether, beneath the deceptive calm of boredom. She
wished she could stop her aetheric sense, but she
hadn't dared to bring any shielding devices from
her apartment, for fear of calling attention to
herself. As she left the washroom to step into the
corridor of the honeycomb, she moved with a
subdued despondence that blended in perfectly with
the attitudes of its other inhabitants.
The combs looked like their namesakes, on a grand
scale: hexagonal cells a bit more than a yard
across were stacked row upon row. Her own cell was
up on the second tier, accessible via a ladder and
catwalk, so she had to climb to reach it and
unlock its hatch. Some of her neighbors had left
their hatches open and were leaning out to talk.
Preoccupied, she nodded to them.
"Imona?"
A second passed before Astren remembered to react
to her assumed name. She glanced over to the
second cell on her right, where an unusually pale
and plump-looking woman was peering out, while
trying to comfort a little girl only slightly
darker and thinner.
"Hello, Leni," Astren answered. She smiled, though
she knew that the expression must appear more wan
than cheering on her haggard face.
"You haven't heard anything, have you?"
Astren shook her head. "No one's been allowed out
of the comb yet." The occupation forces had welded
bars to the doors at the top of the stairwells
leading up to ground level, and had stationed
guards there until the residents could be screened
for loyalty to humanity. The only good thing about
the situation was that the residents had received
food deliveries regularly during the days they'd
been penned here.
"I hope they let us leave the City."
"I hope so, too," said Astren. But she looked away
as she said it. Leni was pale blond, and her face
and hands had some of the smooth plump look of the
Delvers, a troglodytic branch of humanity who had
adapted to the cold and the dimness of the land by
becoming near-albinos with a heavy layer of
subcutaneous fat for insulation. Astren suspected
that the other woman was a City-Delver hybrid.
Neither she nor her daughter would fare well under
the new regime.
Astren saw that Leni was consoling her child
again, so she hoisted herself into her dark and
nearly-empty cell and lay down on her sleeping
bag.
The bag, and some clothing heavy enough to protect
her from the cold outside the City, were the only
things that she had dared to bring with her. She
had been forced to forsake everything that might
connect her to her former life: she had abandoned
her mementos of her family, her friends, her
books, and her own writing. She had even, with
considerable reluctance, left behind her lance.
The indigent and uneducated woman she was
pretending to be could never have afforded one,
and if she'd been caught with it, she couldn't
have explained it.
She closed the cell's hatch, but this merely
deadened the drone and babble of voices reaching
her ears, and it did nothing to quiet the thumps
and creaks caused by people moving around in their
own cells. That she could never find silence in
the combs vexed her; it was second only to the
place's dismal aether as a source of discomfort.
Since they'd been locked in, there had been
several killings -- all but one of them caused by
someone's persistent refusal to shut up.
*****************
A raucous braying jolted Astren half-awake. She
had reached reflexively for her lance; only after
her fingers closed upon nothing did her
sleep-slowed mind resolve the noise into words
from a loudspeaker.
" ... repeat, all residents will be escorted to
the Examiners for determination of their
eligibility to remain within the City limits ..."
Astren sat up groggily, then sighed and reached
into her backpack for a long-acting tranquilizer
and a tack -- her equipment for fooling the
detector, which posed the greatest threat to her.
The tranquilizer would mute all of her stress
reactions; the tack, placed in the outside edge of
her shoe so that she could conveniently rock her
foot onto it, would allow her to add stress
responses when she answered innocuous questions,
so that her answers to the dangerous ones wouldn't
stand out.
*****************
Eleven hours later, Astren lurched out of the
Detention Center into the unchanging rusty
sunlight she hadn't beheld in days. The
tranquilizer had worn off, and the release from
tension tempted her to laugh giddily. Instead, she
walked farther down the street, to slip into the
recessed doorway of a bolted and shuttered shop.
Then she leaned against the door, slipped her shoe
off, and pried the tack out of it.
Her disguise had worked. The Heritage scrutinized
the backgrounds of those who had the education and
the resources to lead -- they might be effective
troublemakers -- but the feckless poor received
only cursory attention. There had been a tense
moment when she'd confessed to being a petty thief
in order to account for the nervousness she'd felt
when asked about her occupation. But the Examiner
she'd faced was not an interrogator skilled at
cracking cover stories; he was, instead, an
overworked bureaucrat who'd asked only routine
questions, and who had gazed more often at the
clock's face than at hers.
She rubbed her bandaged left forearm. It still
smarted: when the Examiner was satisfied, the
technicians had tattooed her. Her skin now
permanently bore her name, an identification
number, and a certification of the City-bred
purity of her genes; in ink that would eventually
fade, it noted her residence in the Six-East
Honeycomb. Those of higher status received their
marks in a clear ink that fluoresced in
ultraviolet light; hers was a visible brand that
would forever stigmatize her as a scrub in any
Heritage domain. But avoiding a thorough
background check was worth the disfigurement.
I hope the others get through it. If they read
Thansa's papers, or Loren's articles --
She noticed her fists had clenched, and
consciously relaxed them.
*****************
Astren clutched a ragged shawl over her head and
made her way back to the comb. She was tired and
her feet ached, because she'd been walking around
in worn thin-soled shoes that suited her current
persona. But she still contemplated -- briefly and
madly -- turning around and walking away again,
even though it was nearly curfew.
Just one more night, she told herself, as
she showed her tattooed arm to the guard, who
checked her name off on the list of residents. I
can stand one more night.
But, as she descended the metal stairs, she caught
her breath. She felt as if despair, shot through
with grief and anger, had driven the air from the
room and soon would drown her. The comb dwellers
spoke in murmurs and tense whispers of the
missing: one in five had not returned from the
examination.
Occasionally, flashes of malicious satisfaction
mingled with the emotions of the mourners, as here
and there a vengeful neighbor smirked instead.
Leni's cell, of course, was one of the unoccupied.
Astren tried not to look at it as she crawled into
her own.
*****************
The Heritage demanded that anyone leaving their
cities present an exit permit she'd had no
prospect of obtaining; and the guards had been
searching the departing merchants' wagons. But
Astren had noticed that not even the most
conscientious guards cared to closely inspect the
wagons carrying organic refuse outside the City's
walls.
Thus, two days later, she crouched low in a
compost heap that stank to the Abandoned Heights,
feeling cramped and nauseated. The rubbish was
newly dumped, and the vapors rising from it had
not yet frozen; they masked the mist of her
breath.
To the south, she could see the City's lights
shining in the sepia gloom. To the west, lurid
sunlight glowed through plumes of smoke and acid
steam rising from the volcanoes south of the Black
Hills.
Nearer at hand, a column of prisoners and their
guards marched along the road in silhouette, their
forms visible against the tarnished-bronze sheen
of the lake's surface. The man-tall shapes of
Pioneer Dogs trotted alongside the human and
perihuman figures, so close that they certainly
would have discovered Astren, if the reek of the
offal around her hadn't masked her scent.
Not daring to move, she watched them pass. She saw
former respected citizens mixed indiscriminately
among hardened criminals of every variety.
Fur-traders of the shaggy Rufous Folk were driven
along with captured caravan-raiders; Delver
merchants trudged beside the members of a snatch
gang who'd sold their victims as slaves -- or as
food: the gang had dealt with Outsiders.
Behind them, in a motley assortment of
part-humans, Leni stumbled forward with red puffy
eyes. There was no sign of her little girl.
Only a third of the prisoners were perihumans and
hybrids. The Heritage had condemned many humans
for treason to the species, and Astren spotted
some of her own colleagues from the Hall of Study,
or from the News Service, in the column. She
thought she recognized Loren, though she only saw
him briefly before others cut off her view. He
kept his balding head lowered and his back
hunched; on his face swelled a bruise so large and
livid that she suspected his cheekbone had been
smashed.
Astren's stomach knotted as if she'd been kicked.
I hope that's not Loren. I hope. But the
cynical underside of her mind added: I'll bet
they took offense at his article on the number
of full-blooded humans they've worked to death
building the Great House.
I'll bet the Great House is where they're
going, too.
Eventually, the guards' lights, and the tramp of
many feet, receded to the northwest. Astren
crawled out of the compost and hauled her
tarp-wrapped backpack after her. Then she looked
back toward the City's north watchtower, and
carefully eyed the rotation of the infrared
scanner. By the time she stood to sprint toward
the spinegrove three hundred yards off, the
scanner's eye was spinning away from her.
*****************
Escaped at last! she thought, as she dashed
from her hiding place in a jumble of boulders to
drop, shivering and panting, behind an escarpment.
She could no longer be seen from the watchtower --
she knew, because she'd helped maintain the City's
defenses herself, and because she'd thoroughly
explored the local landscape. Whoever would
have thought that I'd flee the City as if its
instruments were the eyes of a monster?
She threw the stinking tarp and her befouled
clothing into a fissure, and then spent an hour
scrubbing with pumice soap in a hot spring before
she dressed again, this time in insulated garments
suited to the chill of the wilderness. After that,
she sought out her cache, to add to the meagre
stock of provisions she'd been able to carry out
with her.
Finally, she located a firehollow. The lava in the
central pit cast an orange glow upward, onto the
surrounding black basalt; by its light, she
extracted her sleeping bag from her backpack and
unrolled it on the flattest rock she could find.
Then she lay down to drowse in the warmth.
Exhaustion had already levelled her emotions; her
stiff muscles began to relax.
I'll sleep soon -- too soundly, maybe. But
there's nothing I can do about that. Anyway, I
almost don't care what eats me, as long as it
doesn't wake me up first.
*****************
As Astren slept, huddled in the firehollow's
warmth, a wild and distant cry shivered the
aether, and pricked at her awareness without
waking her. At first it sounded like an oddly
resonant wind keening down through the Great
Valley from the Abandoned Heights; her dreaming
mind only placed it as a descant when her
communer's sense registered the lower notes of the
eerie melody it counterpointed.
There had been other occasions when she'd caught
the echoes of an undersong within the aether; but
not before tonight had its tones carried strongly
enough for her to know that she had not imagined
it. In it she perceived a strand of an alien
emotion that she would have described as elation,
if there had not been a curiously cerebral quality
to it; this interlaced with an equally reflective,
yet profound, sense of loss.
Even half-asleep, she knew it for the voice of an
Outsider. Had it roused her to full consciousness,
she would have recognized her peril; since she'd
been forced to abandon all her other
countermeasures, she would have whispered rhymed
and cadenced verses to herself to block out its
influence. But she slept, and so the call
entranced her before she could defend against it;
and it kindled in her a yearning for a forgotten
splendor that had glittered in the darkness of the
ancient sky.
She sank back into slumber when the aether
stilled, but the influence of the song lingered.
*****************
When Astren awoke, she frowned as her eyes opened
to the heavens. In that first instant she had,
impossibly, expected to see a spangled expanse of
sapphire. But the sky, as always, was a russet
murk; and over the western lip of the hollow, the
red sun glowered.
She shook her head to clear it, then wriggled
partway out of her sleeping bag and propped
herself up, feeling the roughness of the basalt
ledge against her palms. Heat and orange light
rose from the lava pool in the central pit of the
firehollow, far below.
That's one night passed, and I'm still alive
... I wonder -- when was the last time anyone
survived more than three days alone in the
wilderness, armed only with a knife?
It would probably take her four days to cross the
northern Bight and reach Geode Camp, a mixed
Delver-and-human mining settlement in the Black
Hills. If Delver feeling against city-bred
humanity hadn't grown too strong, she still might
be find a temporary place to stay there.
She knew that finding a permanent home there would
be impossible. Now that the Heritage had taken the
last free city in the Valley, they would begin to
send small detachments of troops to destroy the
lesser outposts of resistance. But perhaps they
wouldn't bother with Geode until they'd finished
the Great House and had complete command of the
northern Road. She could hope, anyway.
So she made ready to travel, and scrabbled up out
of the firehollow onto the coral-clumped plain.
She walked steadily to the northwest, keeping to
cover when she could; and late in the day she
crossed the bridge over the White River.
*****************
Astren camped in a spinegrove that night; and
again she dreamed.
Once more she beheld sapphire skies alight with
tiny diamonds. This time she walked beneath them,
through drifts of snow that gleamed blue beneath
the light of a shining silver crescent. A keen
wind stung her face with frozen crystals whipped
up from the drifts, and she shivered as she looked
skyward.
In the heavens strange diaphanous curtains of
colored fire rippled and floated, like the
slow-falling robes and veils of unearthly dancers.
And something whispered to her, softer than the
hiss of wind-driven ice.
*****************
The next evening, as she hiked up a rise, Astren
began to see a yellow-white glow to the northwest;
it stood out sharply against the blackness of the
Walls of the World behind it. When she reached the
crest and peered through her binoculars, she could
see the rows of floodlights fixed to the turrets
of the immense Great House, which sprawled across
the summit of a low hill.
She could just barely make out, along the base of
the House, the dimmer lights that marked the
positions of the labor gangs and their guards.
Nearer, columns of lanterns snaked along the Great
Valley Road, as draymen hauled building materials
to the construction site, or returned to the
cities of the south.
She had meant to cross the Road to the south of
the Great House, but the traffic was heavier than
she had expected, and she could see a long row of
lights moving across the landscape, like a line of
beaters. Almost certainly they belonged to a
Heritage patrol. They would have Pioneer Dogs with
them, which meant that she couldn't afford to
cross the Road where they might discover her scent
trail.
She had little choice but to veer to the north,
instead; but she hesitated, for a long moment.
That would take her close to the Valley of the
Shadow, where the Walls of the World blocked all
sight of the sun. Amidst the perpetual darkness of
the valley floor dwelt certain of the Outsiders
who had wrought humanity's first major defeat,
when they had thrust the Road Makers back to the
Bight -- though that greatest of all known human
civilizations had then reached the zenith of its
power.
She had no desire to meet them.
*****************
Four days later, Astren limped down to the bank of
a warm stream flowing eastward out of the Black
Hills. She passed a palisade of asymmetrical tree
corals whose streamward sides were branchless,
rimed with frost from the mists that rose from the
purling water. Moisture-loving mesh corals grew on
the banks, and their branches stretched out over
the water's surface to form a dripping
three-dimensional lattice; she had to break some
of them in order to sink down, bone-weary, on a
rock by the water's edge.
She craned her neck, to peer through the coral
toward the Great House, now to the south of her.
She could still see the floodlights on its high
turrets, but no lesser lights moved across the
umber landscape between it and the stream. That
meant that no patrols were in the vicinity, and
she slumped in relief. She ought to be out of
their range, but the Pioneer Dogs might
conceivably track her, regardless.
With more unease, she eyed the northern approach.
The black bulk of the Walls of the World towered
over the land here; and, in their midst, a scant
few miles away, the great northern gap opened up
onto the Slope Where the Great Road Ends, which
led down to the Valley of the Shadow.
She grimaced and splayed her fingers along her
temples. She wasn't sure she was capable of
travelling on, even if there had been a hungry
pneumavore over the next rise; at least, she
probably wouldn't get far enough to make any real
difference to her safety before she dropped from
exhaustion. To evade the patrols, she'd had to
slog on for almost a day and a half, with her
halts short and infrequent; and she'd seldom had
the chance to tend her feet, which hurt everywhere
they weren't numb.
When she listened carefully to the aether, she
could hear clicks and murmurs in the distance, but
she sensed nothing nearby. Apparently safe for the
moment, she took off her boots to lance and
bandage her blisters. After that, since nothing
happened to alarm her, she wolfed down her
rations, washed some of her clothes in the stream
and hung them over coral branches to dry, and then
unrolled her sleeping bag. She climbed into it and
fell asleep at once.
*****************
The first thing Astren saw when she began to wake
was the crisscross of the coral branches overhead,
darkly limned against the bronze sky. The fatigue
of the previous two days lingered, and it took her
another hour to shake off sleep altogether and sit
up, brain-befogged; only after a moment of
disorientation did she remember where she was.
Hastily, she turned and looked toward the Slope
then, but she saw nothing moving upon it.
Next she looked through the branches in the
direction of the Great House. She could see the
handheld spotlights borne by a line of soldiers
passing her position; they made her uneasy, but
they were a fair distance off, and she didn't
expect their lights to be able to pick her out
among the coral. But there was something else
wrong.
She could barely detect them through the aether,
even though she should have been able to sense
their presence well before she could see them.
The Silence had returned.
I don't want to know what it is. All I want is
to get out of here, she thought, as she
hastily retrieved her clothing from the coral,
shaking the frost from it. She rebandaged her feet
as quickly as she could, acutely conscious of the
empty space at her belt where the holster of her
lance should be. She clambered to her knees and
reached for her pack --
And the aether cracked and rang with
stress-shivers that sounded like the splintering
of tiny glass bells.
There came, toward the stream's banks, a cold and
brilliant mind of terrible power -- an awful
presence that made the aether shudder with
overtones of mystery and undertones of dread. No
sound accompanied its arrival.
Then a tall figure entered her field of view,
shrouded and veiled in dark draperies that made
her think of shadow made substantial. For a long
moment, it regarded her with wide eyes that had
the gleam of the lost moon shining through them.
She stared up at it, her lips parted, her hand
arrested in mid-motion. Her thoughts froze, as if
her soul had held its breath.
After that, the aether quieted, and lost its
unnatural stillness; again she could sense the
Heritage squads in the distance, and she surmised
that the entity had cloaked its strength.
When she discovered that she could move again, she
rocked back onto her heels, staring at the thing
still. Now what? she thought. She feared
to address it, since it had not yet spoken; what
was the etiquette of its kind? Finally she spread
her hands to show that she held no weapon; then
she stood, and bowed.
The Silent One inclined its dark shrouded head to
her.
Astren let out a breath. She was still wondering
whether she dared attempt her first-ever aetheric
conversation with it when it half-turned and
beckoned to her.
At that, she swallowed. But she took a tentative
step after it, and then another, as it glided
before her to the northwest, up from the stream's
bank toward the Black Hills. She walked carefully,
though her blisters were well bandaged; her boots
left treaded prints behind in the frost that
verged the streambed.
I've gone mad. I know this thing's an Eater. I
could feel it, before it . . . veiled.
I'll bet it's a stealth hunter. Who knew any of
them could hide that way?
I wonder what would happen if I didn't follow.
I wonder what will happen if I do.
*****************
They had climbed part way up a hill, away from the
thick corals of the stream, when one of the
Heritage spotlights swept swiftly over the form of
the Silent One, and then returned to fix upon it.
Within seconds, the mix of wariness and boredom
emanating from the patrol to the south vanished in
a spike of fear, excitement, and aggression.
Astren knew what was coming -- she'd seen enough
Heritage contacts with Outsiders -- and flung
herself down the hill in a roll. The Silent One
evidently anticipated the Heritage's next move as
well, for it suddenly dissolved into shadowy
filaments, and spilled down the slope like a river
of black cirrus clouds in some surreal dream.
Abruptly a blinding white glare stabbed through
the rusty twilight, while the air above sizzled
and exploded in a thunderous crack. Astren ducked
reflexively and covered her ears. Then she felt
heat roiling down the slope toward her, and she
crawled into a clump of barrel corals to shield
herself.
Bright pain flared in the aether, close at hand;
it quickly faded, to be replaced by an icy emotion
that was not the seething of human anger, but a
chill determination to destroy. An appalling
energy began to build -- and then it surged
through the aether with the devastating force of a
seismic wave on a sunless sea.
Astren, already prostrate, wrapped her arms about
her head and ears in a futile but instinctive
effort to ward it away. She began to shiver, and
lay limp against the earth; as her field of vision
greyed, she scarcely felt the small coral shoots
that jabbed her in the cheek.
In a dazed way, she was aware of the passing of
time.
Afterward, somehow, the aether shimmered about
her, and an electric energy crackled lightly up
her spine and about her head. She blinked, sat up,
and turned around, to see the Silent One, less
then ten feet away, lowering its dark-draped arm.
She averted her eyes from its disturbing gaze,
brushed some grit from her face, and ran her
fingers across her temples. What -- ? Why are
we alive? Oh. They didn't fire twice.
The aether had changed. The patrol . . . still
seemed to be in position. Still seemed to be
alive. But she detected no indications of
conscious thought from any of them.
She looked at the Silent One. But it merely
beckoned to her again.
With a feeling of doomed fascination, she rose to
follow. This time they skirted the hillside,
avoiding the acrid smoke and steam rising from its
calcined soil, and the blackened shards of coral
on its slope.
*****************
They travelled over the dark rocks and red basalt
soils of the Black Hills. Astren tried to keep her
mind on remembering their route and on noting the
flora and fauna, rather than speculating on the
purposes of the enigma she was trailing. She
stopped often to apply lubricant and bandages to
her blisters -- with some trepidation, the first
time; but the Silent One had simply waited for her
without evincing any impatience.
About the sixth hour, the aether stilled again,
and she saw that they were heading toward a pale
glow in the sky; but its origin was hidden by the
masses of the Black Hills. At the seventh hour,
they crested a hill. The Silent One halted at the
top of it; and when Astren finally reached the top
to look down into the valley below, she stopped,
astonished.
Seven brilliant globes of light traced out a
three-dimensional curve in the sky, supported by
immense, fantastically wrought pillars that looked
like black iron. Below them lay a great circular
courtyard paved with pale limestone, and large
enough to contain a small village; scattered
outside the circle were cottages, and strange
houses with turrets and silver-scaled roofs. Here
and there she could see the figures of the
inhabitants crossing the circle, or following
pathways from dwelling to dwelling.
And the aether had burst into life again. She
could feel thousands of minds spread out over the
valley; a few of them felt like cloaked Silent
Ones. But most of them impressed her as human,
though they were stronger than any other human
minds she'd ever encountered save her own; the
atmosphere of the place felt quiet and calm, but
there was a quicksilver responsiveness to it that
she'd never encountered anywhere else. The moods
of the inhabitants apparently fed back to each
other, rapidly and continuously.
She stared at the valley for a long moment, and
then turned back to the Silent One. So this is
what became of all the others. Her
never-used aetheric voice sounded hoarse and
unsteady.
The Silent One lowered itself to a seat on a rock,
its draperies flowing out around it like a black
mist, to drift so slowly toward the ground that
they seemed to be falling in low gravity. You
look on the Place of the Memory of Stars. Its
sending was soft enough, but it had the harmonics
and the reverberation that Astren had come to
associate with creatures that could effortlessly
make themselves heard across the whole length of
the Valley. I am the One That Sets Lights in a
Silver Array, and Remembers the Singing of Stars
in the Aeons of Brightness.
You're a pneumavore, aren't you? The one that's
been haunting my dreams.
I am.
Why am I alive? She gestured toward the
valley. Why are they?
Do keepers of bees rifle all the hive's honey at
once? My kind are not bound to destroy when we
feed.
It paused, seeming to regard her; and then it
stood, floating up from the stone. Descend,
and ask of the others all you would know; tell
them I said it is well that they find you a
dwelling.
You're going somewhere else, then? Astren
felt that the question was forward even as she
asked it, but she could sense something in the
Silent One's mind -- a distracted pondering that
felt not wholly placid -- which sparked her
curiosity.
The Silent One regarded her for a moment. The
House Near the End of the Road is proving a
trial. The People of Fear seem not to be
comfortable neighbors.
Then it turned its attention away from her, and
the aether rang with the complex cry that it
uttered as it called to the others of its kind.
Astren turned and walked down toward the village.
Why am I obeying so easily? Is it influence, or
pure intimidation? she wondered to herself.
But even as she asked the questions, a part of her
mind, less cynical and analytical, whispered of
the strange cold beauty of the Silent Ones' works.
© Keran
Parizek 20 april 2003
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