Carmela leaned against the wall, gazing into the darkness, thinking. “Maybe they wouldn’t put an index out at the edges,” she said, “but in the middle?”
“Makes sense to run with your hunches on this one,” Nita said. Together they walked across the great expanse of dark floor. Nita pulled out her manual, holding the wand underneath it to light the floor where they were walking, and started paging through the book in search of “steganography.”
Carmela craned her neck up to see where S’reee was headed. “How high do you think that is?”
Nita paused, glanced up. “Two hundred feet?”
“Might be.”
Nita shook her head and kept walking, her attention on the manual. “Well,” Carmela said, “I guess the shopping can wait a while longer.”
Nita snickered. “You sure? Don’t let us keep you. We’ve only stumbled into some kind of alien library thousands of years old. You really sure you wouldn’t rather be trying on designer exoskeletons or something at the Crossings?”
“Oh, Juanita Louise...” Carmela said, shaking her head as they made their way through the darkness. “You are mean to tease me.”
“Carmela, you just keep on saying that word!”
“Yup. And I’ll say it again unless you appease me,” Carmela said, peering through the dimness at the floor ahead of them.
Nita rolled her eyes. “Okay, fine. Every time you say my middle name, I’ll say yours!”
“Like I care!” Carmela laughed, glancing around them. “Go on! I’ll help you. Emeda! Emeda, Emeda, Emeda!”
Nita shook her head, the irritation passing; it was hard to think petty, mundane thoughts for long when surrounded by such massive and ancient strangeness. “Mine’s just a pain, but yours is weird,” Nita said.
“Why did they hang that on you?”
“It’s my aunts’ and uncle’s fault,” Carmela said. “Mama said they were fighting so much over which one was going to be my middle name, she took all their initials and made a new name out of them.”
Nita cracked up. “I bet that shut them up.”
“Nope,” Carmela said. “Auntie Emma and Tante Elle are still arguing over which of them is the first E. And I won’t tell them, because it’s too much fun listening to them fight.” She paused, looking ahead. “Neets, you see that?”
“What?”
“Look at the floor over there. Is something shining?”
Nita looked where Carmela pointed. “Something green,” she said. “Come on—”
They broke into a trot, heading for the center of the huge floor space. It took a while to get there, but as they drew closer, the glint of green grew stronger and stronger in the light of Nita’s upheld wand, spreading more widely across the floor. By the time they were still a hundred feet or so away, they could see that they were heading into a circle of green designs nearly that wide— a tangle of broad curves or ribbons of verdant color against the paler stone. Some of these green ribbons arced away from the central design, ending in sharp points: some of them seemed to twist back on themselves, narrowing, broadening out again, dividing and sharpening to points again.
At the edge of the design they stopped, Nita holding her wand out over it. The color wasn’t flat: it gleamed, metallic. And there were subtle changes in its color and in the way it reflected the light when Nita moved the wand slightly. “Mela,” she said, “it’s not solid.”
They both got down on their knees to look at one of the broad strokes of the design. “It’s all inlaid,” Nita said. “Little thin pieces of metal...” They bent over it together. It was surprising to Nita how closely she had to look to see the separate elements in the delicate tangle of inlaid metal. “How in the worlds did they do this?”
“Wizardry?” Carmela said. “Are there wizards who’re artists?”
“Sure. And if a wizard did this, no question, he or she or it was an artist.” Nita looked more closely at the end of the nearest ribbon, a sharp point. “But look how this line starts, and then it starts weaving back and forth in the main design ...It’s like the letters on the walls.”
“But curved, not straight,” Carmela said, putting out a finger to touch one long, curving letter or character. “A different font. Don’t know if it’s more formal or less. But this is soooo detailed...” She bent close, squinting at the long, delicate thin-and-thick strokes of the alien lettering as they tangled among many others, all making their way like twining plant fronds toward the center of the design. “This part is— I think it’s just names. Nouns, but no verbs.”
After a moment Carmela shook her head, got up, and stood with her hands on her hips, looking over the design. Nita realized that Carmela was trying to get to grips with the whole pattern. But it was hard, from way over at one side like this: and if you ventured into the design, it made even less sense, or you got caught up in the fine detail—
Hmm, Nita thought. Bobo?
You rang?
Got the stair-making routine on tap?
Right here.
Nita watched the air beside her harden into an almost invisible flight of steps up over the design. She felt for the first one, found it, made sure of the width and the depth of the treads, and then trotted steadily up about two storeys into the air. Carmela watched her go. This high enough? the peridexis said.
Just fine, Nita said, looking down at the great design. From up here, her sudden suspicion was instantly confirmed. The design wasn’t random. Up here you could see the larger shapes—the four uplifted claws, the six rear legs, the long tail with its fierce spine. Is it really a sting, or something else? But the whole creature had been designed as if in calligraphic pen strokes, thicks and thins, and was bent back on itself almost into a spiral: the head and foremost claws in the middle of the design, the rear legs and finally the tail defining the outside of a circle or disc. “Mela,” Nita said, “it’s one of our scorpion guards. The design’s stylized, but you couldn’t miss it.”
“Okay. Where’s the head, and where’s the tail?”
“The head’s near the middle. No, more to your right. The tail’s at the edge, on your left.”
Carmela headed for the center of the design. From above, more light came dropping slowly down in S’reee’s wake, her near eye glinting in the silver light of Nita’s wand. “Nothing different,” S’reee said. “More words that I can’t read, all the way up.” She cocked that eye down at what lay below her and Nita. “But you two seem to have found something.”
Together they made their way down to floor level. Carmela had come to the scorpion’s head and was kneeling on the densely inlaid metal. As Nita walked over, Carmela looked up with an expression of absolute excitement. “This is it!” she said.
“What?” Nita said.
“Where it starts,” Carmela said. “Not an index. It’s the start of a story. The words are simpler here. I can see them like I couldn’t right away on the walls.”
Nita went down on one knee again and touched the green metal of the design. From within it she got a faint, faint sense of some power stirring. “It may be helping you,” she said.
“I can use some help,” Carmela said, without looking up. “This isn’t easy...” She put a finger on a spot that was a shade of green darker than the rest of the design, in the right position to be an eye.
“‘First there is the Old World,’” Carmela read. She leaned in to look more closely at the long, twisting line of alien charactery. “The tenses in this are all present tense, as if it’s happening now for them. Does that make sense?”
Nita shrugged. S’reee flipped her tail. “There are any number of species who see the present and past as one. Go on.”
Carmela squinted at the writing, tracing it with a finger, occasionally shuffling along a little way on her knees to pick up the next part. “‘And the Old World has swung in its— old orbit?’ Mmm, no, it’s more formal: make that ‘its ancient round’— ‘since the First People awoke in the heart of the worlds.’ No— ‘in the centermost
of the Circles.’”
Carmela paused, then went on with increased certainty. “‘So that when the World awoke, life and thought at last— were company for?— companioned with the star which for long had burned alone in the night at the Circles’ heart.’” Carmela scooted along as the sentence stretched away from the scorpion’s head, then picked up the thread again as it twisted and coiled among many others. “‘Yet’—Wait a minute. No, I see it. ‘Yet with the new life came the promise of a death that should come out of the darkness, as the light and life had done.’” She paused, and scowled at the next sentence for a moment as if perplexed, before translating it: “‘And the First People swore that it might be so for others, but should not be so for them.’”
“Huh,” Nita said. “Is that a species having its Choice, or fighting it? Or just refusing it?”
“No telling.” Carmela scooted farther along in the diagram on her knees, then sat back on her heels for a moment as she looked down at it. “But I think maybe they had different ideas about how to keep this death from happening.” She bent down to look more closely at the long, inlaid sentences, seeming to read them more quickly now. “Let me just paraphrase; the straight translating is tough to do fast. The people here— or the countries? Maybe the cities. It doesn’t say anything about how many people we’re talking about— Anyway, it looks like they split up in a lot of different ways.” Carmela paused, frowned. “It might mean in terms of distance, or mentally. Or both. But it looks like the biggest and strongest groups swallowed up the smaller ones, or stamped them out. Finally there were only two big groups left. All the clans or cities ended up either in one camp or the other...”
As Carmela spoke, Nita felt herself coming up in goosebumps. A twitch, a tingle that wouldn’t go away along the skin and the nerves: the feeling of little feet scurrying, scurrying over her brain. And out at the edge of things, a sense of darkness leaning in from those walls, the world going quiet to listen...
“hNii’t,” S’reee sang very softly. “Look—”
The darkness of the space out past the edge of the scorpion pattern was becoming less complete. Shadowy shapes were forming between them and the distant walls: transparent shadows on the dark air, almost impossible to see. “It’s such an old wizardry, I hardly felt it start,” S’reee said. “Whatever was set to power it is very weak now.”
“And this is part of the hot-spot wizardry that brought the scorpions in?” Nita said.
“Probably,” S’reee said. “If the scorpions were the defensive part of the wizardry, they might have been activated often enough to siphon a lot of power away from this part of the spell. Now it’s using whatever other power it can find to do its job. And even our sensitivity to the fact that there’s a story here could be helping.” She glanced around at the almost-unseen, multitudinous engravings in the distant walls. “The Speech isn’t the only language with power. If a story hasn’t been heard in a long time, much power can lie in it, tightly compressed until it’s told again...”
Nita nodded. Bobo, she said silently, this might be important. Can you add some power to the equation?
Some, the peridexis said. But this wizardry is fragile. I’m limited in how much I can help without interfering, maybe even destroying what it’s trying to do. Also, the power must be paid for.
That was no surprise. Okay, let’s do what we can— “Mela,” Nita said, sitting down, “Bobo and I will try sticking a little juice into this.”
Carmela nodded, absorbed. Nita closed her eyes and started a little exercise that Tom had taught her: concentrating on her breathing, and then imagining herself breathing a little of her power as a wizard out into the spell around her with every outward breath. It was one of many ways a wizard could manage the way he or she paid the energy price for a spell— a gradual, steady outflow of intention, rather than a single unmanaged moment of payment that left you limp. Nita imagined that she could see it, a hazy cloud of light surrounding her, more visible with each breath. Shortly it seemed that out at the edges, that cloud was thinning, being drawn away. We getting some uptake? she said to Bobo.
Some. It’s slow. Take a break for a moment; don’t feed it too fast...
Nita opened her eyes again, feeling faintly fatigued, the normal result of this kind of power outlay. Out past the edges of the pattern, those shadows in the dark air were more substantial. She tried to see more detail. There were spiky shapes, jagged, rearing up against deeper darkness. “Mountains?” Nita said.
Carmela didn’t look up, just nodded. “Neets, whatever you did is just helping. I’m getting a lot more of this now...”
“Great. What kind of people were they? Much further out from the Sun and you’d expect something that wasn’t based on carbon.”
“There’s not much about that here,” Carmela said, standing up to move along down the pattern, as around them the shadowy landscape became less obscure. The mountains becoming visible all around them seemed to cover all of a vast landscape stretching away in all directions. It was as if the pattern-disc was at the top of some peak supereminent above the others. All around, in endless shades of navy and sky blue and violet, the narrow, spearlike mountains cast long fingers of indigo shadow away behind them in the light of a Sun that made Nita blink, for— considering the distance they were discussing— it shouldn’t have been so bright.
“Not a friendly-looking place,” S’reee said, “to our eyes, at least.”
Nita had to agree. In this vista, at least, there didn’t seem to be any flat land: it was all ups and downs. A haze of atmosphere was visible, hanging low, completely covering some peaks, reaching only partway up others. On those lower peaks, Nita could make out the glitter of lights, scattered down from the pinnacles like snow. On some of the nearer mountains, she thought she could make out buildings partially mimicking the structure of the peaks to which they clung— upward-jutting crowns of stony thorns, artificial spires spearing up from the passes or saddles between peaks. Here and there, dartlike shapes soared or arrowed between the city-mountains, but it was impossible at this distance to tell whether the moving shapes were creatures or machines.
In the imagery surrounding the pattern-circle, time sped up, fled by. The world changed with the passage of thousands of years. Mountains eroded and crumbled, pinnacles shattered and fractured to sharper points; on those heights where the Sun reached best, low-domed cities now clung to the ancient cliffs. Like glassy nodules of some exotic gemstone, by night the cities gleamed and glowed from within; by day the Sun glanced from them, blinding. “It’s brighter than it should be,” Nita said.
“The Sun’s much younger,” S’reee said. “And it did have a variable period early in its history. This is a long, long time ago.”
The machines that rode the violet-dark sky grew, changing shape, as more cities budded from the peaks their view included. “Those people were there for a long time,” Carmela said, looking over more of the writing. “And they got really technologically advanced. Antigravity, ion tech, a lot of fancy stuff. But no worldgates.” She left the long curve of pattern she’d been reading and stepped to another. “Isn’t that strange?”
“Not always,” S’reee said. “The technology’s not universal, as Mamvish could tell you. There are worlds that can’t conceive of other planets or dimensions, or even other ways of life: yet they still have wizardry.”
“Mela, you see anything about what they called this planet?” Nita said.
Carmela shook her head. “I’m not sure,” she said. “There were lots of names for it, at the beginning. Probably as many names as we have for Earth. But then they start to get fewer. In all this later stuff, there are just two left, and I don’t know which one to use. One of the two groups that dominated the planet called it Shamask. The other called it Eilith.”
“What do the words mean?” S’reee said.
Carmela looked up then, and her expression was grim. “‘Ours.’”
Nita and S’reee exchanged a glance.
; “They don’t seem to have liked each other a whole lot, the Shamaska and the Eilitt,” Carmela said, getting down on her knees to look at the writing embedded in that part of the pattern. “All along here, it’s descriptions of things that one side did, or the other side did—” She shook her head. “I don’t understand most of it. But the tone’s never friendly. Then it gets angry. Then—”
Nita started in surprise, and so did S’reee, as the first flashes and impacts of energy weapons erupted among the spires of the First World. Mountains fell and buildings crumbled in a newer and deadlier sort of erosion. “Surprised it took that long,” Carmela said, getting up again to head farther down that stroke of the pattern. “Their first really big war...”
“Why were they fighting?” Nita said.
Carmela stood where she was and looked all along that stroke of the scorpion pattern with her hands on her hips, hunting an answer. “I’m not sure,” she said. “There are so many reasons and excuses here. A lot of them don’t make sense. I think each side thought the other had cheated them out of something, or stolen something, that they needed to survive.” She shook her head, annoyed. “So they started having wars. This one went on for—” She hunkered down to trace out, with one finger, a specific sequence of the long, curved characters. “Twelve or thirteen thousand years.”
Nita and S’reee exchanged a glance. “This one??” Nita said.
S’reee blew out an unhappy breath. “There are species,” she said, “that are very advanced at science and technology ...but the technologies of being in harmony with one another just elude them. They tend to have more wizards than most.”
“You’d think species like that would blow themselves up quicker,” Nita said.
S’reee flipped a fin, resigned. “In such cases, the Lone One can have Itself a long, ugly playtime. Often It tries to keep the combatants from ever destroying each other completely, so the ‘fun’ can go on for as long as possible.”