“I think we snagged a tree,” the avatar said, sitting upright. “Everybody all right?”.
“Fine,” said Kabe. “Sorry about this rail.”
“I’ve bitten my pipe in half!” Ziller said. He picked one half of his severed pipe up from the floor.
“It’ll repair,” the avatar said. It pulled back the carpet between the couches and lifted open a wooden door. Wind gusted in. The creature lay on the floor and stuck its head out. “Yes, it’s a tree,” it shouted. It levered itself back inside. “Must have grown a bit since the last time anybody used this line.”
Ziller was picking himself up. “Of course it wouldn’t have happened if you’d been responsible for the system, would it?”.
“Of course not,” the avatar said breezily. “Shall I send a repair drone or shall we try and fix it ourselves?”.
“I have a better idea,” Ziller said, smiling as he looked out of a side window. Kabe looked too, and saw a mainly rose-colored object flying through the air toward them. Ziller slid open a window on that side and turned to his two companions with a smile before hailing the approaching drone. “Tersono! Good to see you! Glad you’re here! See that mess down below?”
10
The Seastacks of Youmier
And was Tersono equal to the task?”.
“More than equal physically, Hub tells me, despite its protestations that it risked tearing itself apart. However I think protestations that whatever empowers its will is also charged with maintaining its dignity and so is normally pretty much fully occupied with that.”
“But was it able to free your car from the tree?”.
“Yes, finally, though it took its time and it made a terrible mess of things. It shredded the car’s mainsail, broke the mast and cut away half the tree.”
“And what of Ziller’s pipe?”.
“Bitten in half. Hub repaired it for him.”
“Ah. I was wondering if I might have made him a present of a replacement.”
“I’m not sure he’d take it in the spirit it was meant, Quil. Especially as it’s something he would be putting in his mouth.”
“You suspect he might think I was trying to poison him?”.
“It might occur to him.”
“I see. I still have a way to go, don’t I?”.
“Yes, you do.”
“And how much further do we have to go here, on our walk?”.
“Another three or four kilometers.” Kabe looked up at the sun. “We should be there nicely in time for lunch.”
Kabe and Quilan were walking along the cliff tops of the Vilster Peninsula on Fzan Plate. To their right, thirty meters below, Fzan Ocean beat against the rocks. The haze horizon swam with scattered islands. Closer in, a few sailboats and larger craft cut through the spreading patterns of the waves.
A cool wind came off the sea. It whipped Kabe’s coat about his legs and Quilan’s robes snapped and fluttered about him as he led the way along the narrow path through the tall grass. To their left the ground sloped away to deep grassland and then a forest of tall cloudtrees. Ahead, the land rose to a modest headland and a ridge heading inland notched with a cleft for one branch of the path they were on. They were taking the more strenuous and exposed route along the cliff top.
Quilan turned his head to look down toward the waves falling against tumbled rocks at the cliffs base. The smell of brine was the same here.
~ Remembering again, Quil?
~ Yes.
~You’re close to the edge. Mind you don’t fall.
~ I will.
• • •
Snow was falling in the courtyard of the monastery of Cadracet, sinking gently from a silent gray sky. Quilan had brought up the rear of the firewood foraging detail, preferring to walk in solitude and silence as the others trudged up the trail ahead. The other monks had all gone inside to the warmth of the great hall’s hearth by the time he closed the postern door behind him, scuffed through the light covering of snow on the courtyard’s stones and dumped his basket of wood with the rest under the gallery.
He dallied a moment, soaking up the fresh, clean smell of the wood—he remembered a time when they’d taken a hunting cabin in the Loustrian Hills, just the two of them. The axe that came with the cabin was blunt; he’d sharpened it with a stone, hoping to impress her with his handiness, but then when he’d come to swing it at the first piece of wood the head had sailed off and disappeared into the trees. He could still exactly recall her laughter, and then, when he must have looked hurt, her kiss.
They had slept under furs on a platform of moss. He remembered one cold morning when the fire had gone out overnight and it was freezingly cold in the cabin and they had coupled, him straddling her, his teeth nipped gently in the fur at the nape of her neck, moving slowly over and in her, watching the smoke of her breath as it billowed in the sunlight and rolled out across the room to the window, where it froze in curving, recursive motifs; a coalescence of pattern out of chaos.
He shivered, blinking away cold tears.
When he turned away he saw the figure standing in the center of the courtyard, looking at him.
It was a female, dressed in a cloak falling half-open over an Army uniform. The snow fell between them in soundless spirals. He blinked. Just for an instant … He shook his head, brushed his hands together and walked out to her, putting up the hood of his griefling robe.
He realized as he made those few steps that he hadn’t even seen a female in the flesh for half a year.
She did not look like Worosei at all; she was taller, her fur was darker and her eyes looked more narrowed and wizened. He guessed she was ten or so years older than him. The pips on her cap identified her as a colonel.
“Can I help you, ma’am?” he asked.
“Yes, Major Quilan,” she said in a precise, controlled voice. “Perhaps you can.”
• • •
Fronipel brought them both goblets of mulled wine. His office was about twice the size of Quilan’s cell, and cluttered with papers, screens and the ancient fraying string frames which were the holy books of the order. There was just enough room for the three of them to sit.
Colonel Ghejaline warmed her hands around the goblet. Her cap lay on the desk at her side, her cloak across the seat back. They had exchanged a few pleasantries about her journey up the old road by mount and her role during the war in charge of a space artillery section.
Fronipel settled himself slowly into his second-best curl-chair—the best had been given to the Colonel—and said, “I asked Colonel Ghejaline to come here, Major. She is familiar with your background and history. I believe she has a proposal for you.”
The Colonel looked as though she would have been happy to have spent rather more time approaching the reason for her visit, but gave a shrug of good grace and said, “Yes, Major. There is something you might be able to do for us.”
Quilan looked at Fronipel, who was smiling at him. “Who would the ‘us’ here be, Colonel?” he asked her. “The Army?”.
The Colonel frowned. “Not really. The Army is involved, but this would not strictly speaking be a military assignment. It would be more like the one you and your wife undertook on Aorme, though even further afield and on a quite different level of security and importance. The ‘us’ I refer to would be all Chelgrians, but especially those whose souls are currently held in limbo.”
Quilan sat back in his seat. “And what would I be expected to do?”.
“I can’t tell you exactly yet. I am here to find out if you will even consider undertaking the mission.”
“But if I don’t know what it is … ”.
“Major Quilan,” the Colonel said, taking a small sip of her steaming wine and then—after a minimal nod to Fronipel to acknowledge the drink—putting the goblet down on the desk, “I’ll tell you all I can.” She drew herself up a little straighter in the seat. “The task we would ask you to undertake is one that is very important indeed. That is almost all I know about that aspect of it.
I do know a little more but I’m not allowed to talk about it. The mission would require that you undergo a considerable amount of training. Again, I can’t say much more about that. The clearance for the mission comes from the top of our society.” She took a breath. “And the reason that it doesn’t matter too much at this stage exactly what it is you are being asked to do is that in one sense what’s being asked of you is as bad as it gets.” She looked into his eyes. “This is a suicide mission, Major Quilan.”
He had forgotten the sheer pleasure of staring into a female’s eyes, even if she was not Worosei, and even if that pleasure, like some emotional internalization of physical law, created an equal and opposite feeling of grief and loss and even guilt. He gave a small, sad smile. “Oh, in that case, Colonel,” he said, “I’ll definitely do it.”
“Quil?”.
“Hmm?” He turned to face the tall, triangular bulk of the Homomdan, who had bumped into him.
“Are you all right? You stopped very suddenly there. Did you see something?”.
“Nothing. No, I’m fine. I just … I’m fine. Come on. I’m hungry.”
They walked on.
~ I just recalled. The Lady Colonel told me this is a one-way mission.
~ Ah, yes, there is that.
~ It is all coming back, isn’t it?
~ Unlike us, yes. That’s the way they’ve arranged it. That’s what we both agreed to. It seems to have worked so far.
~ You knew, too, then.
~ Yes. That was part of Visquile’s briefing.
~ Which is why they kept you backed-up in that substrate.
~ Which is why they kept me backed-up in that substrate.
~ Well. I can’t wait for the next installment.
He reached the summit of the cliff path and saw the town; a scimitar of white towers and spires lying cradled in a bowl of wooded valley bordered by rising chalk cliffs, its bay protected from the sea by a spit of sand. Waves beat whitely on the strand. The Homomdan joined him, standing massively at his side and all but blocking out the wind. There was a hint of rain in the air.
• • •
The following day she left her mount in the monastery stables with her uniform. She dressed in the waistcoat and leggings of a Handed; he was to impersonate a Grafted, so wore trousers and an apron. They both put on nondescript gray winter cloaks. He said goodbye to Fronipel but to nobody else.
They waited until all the work parties had left before leaving the monastery, then they walked down the lower path through the falling snow and the bare husks of spall trees, past the distant wood-gatherers—their songs heard through the quietly falling snow, as though they were the voices of ghosts—down through a level of wispy cloud where the Colonel’s gray cloak seemed almost to disappear at times and then through the drumming rain beneath and the dripping forest of dark leaves that descended toward the valley floor, where they turned and followed the deeply shaded track above the river rushing whitely in the chasm below.
The rain slackened and ceased.
A group of Tallier caste hunters in an old All-Terrain on their way back from the forests after stalking jhehj offered them a lift, but they refused politely. The trailer behind the All-Terrain was piled with the carcasses of the animals. It bounced down the track into the gloom with its cargo of the dead, so that from then on they followed a line of fresh blood-spots.
Finally, in the foothills of the Grey Mountains, toward sunset, they came out onto the Girdling turnpike, where cars and trucks and buses hummed past, trailing spray. A large car was waiting for them by the roadside. A young male who looked uncomfortable in civilian clothes opened the door for them and completed three-quarters of a salute to the Colonel before remembering. The vehicle’s interior was warm and dry; they took off their cloaks. The car swung out onto the road and set off down the route toward the plains.
The Colonel plugged into a military com set in a briefcase on the rear seat and left him to his own thoughts as she sat with eyes closed, communicating. He watched the traffic; the outskirts of the city of Ubrent sparkled out of the gloom. It looked in better repair than the last time he’d seen it.
Within an hour they had reached the airport, and a sleek black sub-orbiter sitting on the mist-curdled runway. He was about to reach out and touch the Colonel to let her know they’d arrived when she opened her eyes, slipped the induction coil from the back of her head and nodded at the aircraft as though to say, “We’re here.”
The acceleration pressed him firmly back into the frame-seat. He saw the lights of the coastal cities of Sherjame, the mid-ocean islands of Delleun and the small sparks of oceanic ships. Above, the stars became bright and steady and looked very close in the ghostly silence of near-vacuum flight.
The sub-orbiter plunged back into the atmosphere in a gathering roar. There were a few lights, then a smooth touchdown and deceleration. He dozed in the closed transport which took them away from the private field.
When they transferred to a helicopter he could smell sea. They flew briefly in darkness and rain and clattered down into a great circular courtyard. He was shown to a small, comfortable room and fell promptly asleep.
• • •
In the morning, waking to a thudding, not quite regular booming noise and the distant screeches of birds, he opened the shutters to look down over a sheer gulf of air at a blue-green sea streaked with foam and breaking waves boiling around a jagged coastline fifty meters away and a hundred down. A line of cliffs vanished into the distance on either side, and immediately opposite him there was a huge double bowl cut out of the cliffs, so that the drop from the bottom of the bowl to the sea was only thirty meters or so. Clouds of seabirds wheeled in the sunlight like scraps of foam blown up from the fretful sea.
He recognized this place. He had seen it in books and on screen.
• • •
The seastacks at Youmier were part of an extensive cliff system on Mainland, one of the Tail-Quiff Islands which lay in a long curved line to the east of Meiorin. The cliffs dropped between two and three hundred meters into the ocean and the seventeen seastacks—the remains of great arches that the ocean’s swells and waves had first created and then destroyed—rose like the fingers of two drowning people.
Local legend had once held that they were the fingers of a pair of drowning lovers who’d thrown themselves from the cliffs rather than be forced to marry others.
The stacks were named as though they were fingers, and the last and smallest of them, which was only forty meters above the waves, was called the Thumb. The others ranged between one and two hundred meters in height and were about the same circumference where the sea washed incessantly around their bases, tapering slightly to their basalt summits.
Building had begun upon them four thousand years earlier, when the area’s ruling family had constructed a single small stone castle on the stack nearest the cliff top and linked the two by a wooden bridge. As the family’s power had grown, so had the castle, until work was started on another stack, and then another and another.
The fortress complex spread across the various rocky pinnacles, linked by a succession of bridges—at first wood, later stone, then later still iron and steel—and became a center of government, a place of worship and pilgrimage and a seat of learning. Over the centuries and millennia every stack except the Thumb had been permanently settled in some form or another, and it had even been a fortress for a while, equipped with heavy naval guns for a century or so. Gradually the seastacks had grown to become a city with its greatest part ashore, spreading out over the heathland behind the cliffs.
It had duly suffered the same fate as a handful of cities around the globe during the Last Unification War fifteen hundred years earlier, falling to a scatter of nuclear warheads which demolished one stack completely, halved the height of another, and had left a crater shaped like a giant 8 scooped out of the cliffs where most of the mainland districts had been.
The city was never rebuilt. The seastacks, cut off from the ma
inland by the twin craters, were derelict for centuries, a place for ghoulish tourism and home only to a few hermits and a million sea birds. Two of the stacks became a monastery during one of Chel’s more religious phases, then the Combined Services had commandeered all of them as a training base and rebuilt almost everything save for the bridges to the mainland before moving off-world before the whole complex was finished and leaving the Stacks mothballed with only a caretaker staff behind.
Now it was his home.
Quilan leaned on a parapet and looked down to the white ruff of surf washing the Male’s Middle Finger’s base, three hundred meters below. The water looked slow from up here, he thought. As though each wave was tired from its long journey across the ocean, from wherever waves were born.
He had been here for a two-moon month. They were training him and assessing him. He still knew no more about the task beyond the fact that it was supposed to be a suicide mission. It was still not certain that he would be going on it. He knew that he was one of several contenders for the dubious honor. He had already agreed that if he was not chosen he would submit to a memory wipe which would leave him, apparently, just another war-traumatized monk in Cadracet Retreat struggling to come to terms with his experiences.
Colonel Ghejaline was present about half the time, overseeing his training. His principal instructor in the arts and crafts of most things martial was a scarred, stocky and taciturn male called Wholom. He seemed obviously Army or ex-Army, but would admit to no rank. Quilan’s other tutor was called Chuelfier; a frail, white-furred old male whose years and infirmity seemed to drop away from him when he was teaching.
There were a few Army specialists he saw every few days who obviously also lived in the complex, a handful of servants of various castes and a number of Blinded Invisibles who had remained faithful to the old ways through the Caste War.
Quilan watched the Blinded go about their duties, their upper faces covered by the green band of their rank, feeling their way with an easy familiarity or using the high-pitched clicks they made with their claws to navigate their way amongst the concrete and rock-carved spaces of the stack. To be Blinded here, with the drop to the rocks and the ocean, was, he thought, to put your faith forever in walls and thoughtful design.