As ever, I could not help wondering how the city had survived the shifts in the earth that had buried it under a mountain. How had the enormous dwellings, hundreds of floors high, not been crushed in the geological upheavals of the Great White? Was it yet another impossible feat of technology of the Beforetimers that kept the city intact?
Or had fate saved the ancient city for some purpose of its own?
I shivered.
“This way,” Garth panted, an undercurrent of excitement in his tone. He moved along the path and around the perimeter of the ancient city with an energy and agility that belied the Teknoguildmaster’s bulk.
Behind him came the Teknoguild ward, Fian, with Rushton and myself at the rear. We were moving in single file, because the ledge path was too narrow to walk two abreast. I stared at Rushton’s back, wondering what had possessed him to permit an expedition of guildleaders into the least accessible water caves. Ordinarily, he was violently opposed to our taking part in anything dangerous, considering us too valuable to be risked. Garth must have presented a compelling case.
It would have been nice if either of them had thought to tell me what we were going to see, I thought with a flicker of irritation. I glared up at the broad space between Rushton’s shoulders. As if he felt my gaze, he glanced back, but I let my eyes fall quickly.
“Damn!” he muttered as he stumbled in the darkness. “How much farther is this?”
“Nowt far,” Fian assured us, holding his lantern higher. His eyes, gleaming with amusement, met mine fleetingly over Rushton’s bowed head. In spite of my mood, I found myself smiling in response. There was something irrepressible about the highlander. His eyes sparked with intelligence and a wry humor that stopped him from being as painfully earnest as so many of his guild in the pursuit of knowledge.
And he was one of the few at Obernewtyn who had not treated me with stultified awe since my return from the high mountains last wintertime, which had been deemed miraculous by some, since I’d been assumed dead.
We came to a place where only a brief, murky stretch of water separated the ledge from a sloping island of rubble formed by the collapse of one of the towering Beforetime monoliths. Dark water lapped sluggishly on the makeshift landfall. Garth leapt across the intervening space with a grunt, and on the other side made his way to the foot of an intact building. The light from the lanterns reached no farther than the row of square windows on the second level; black shadows obscured the floors above. At this end of the caverns, the ground sloped up so that most of the towering building was above the water line.
“This is it,” Garth wheezed, flapping his hand in a flourish at the construction. “All five hundred floors. Oh, you needn’t worry,” he added, seeing my look of horror. “It’s quite stable, because a good deal of it is buried in the rock above and behind, including what would have been the front door. The astonishing thing is that we discovered this at all, especially with so much of the city underwater or tainted. Of course, the very fact that so many buildings are still standing is incredible in the first place. We are becoming convinced that this city was one of the last built before the holocaust. The degree of technology here is far superior to that of other ruin sites and may well explain how this city survived when so many others did not. But there are certain strange facets to the architecture.…”
“Garth, get on with it,” Rushton said brusquely.
Garth gave Rushton an offended look and turned to enter the building through a hole that had been cut in one of the immense walls. I glanced up, and the row of empty windows seemed to look down like eyes.
“It took an age to knock th’ hole in the wall,” Fian said, coming through after us with the second lantern. “Them Beforetimers built solid.”
“And we had to be careful. Our main fear was that we might destroy something irreplaceable,” Garth explained.
The building was cast along the lines of all Beforetime constructions, walls and floors bare, squared and uniform with no ornamentation. The Beforetimers were admittedly inspired at construction, but they lacked imagination. Garth led us along the hall and up three featureless gray flights of stairs. Stepping out of the stairwell onto a small landing, the Teknoguildmaster lifted his lantern to reveal that the wall facing us had words carved into it: “Reichler Clinic Reception.”
I stopped dead.
My mind rushed back to the moment when I had found the book called Powers of the Mind in a Beforetime library.
Standing in the darkness of another ruined city, I had read enough to understand that there had been Talented Misfits before the holocaust. The book had spoken of tests performed at the Beforetimers’ Reichler Clinic that proved conclusively that human beings of their era possessed Talents not unlike our own, though these had been largely latent. The clinic had claimed that, in time, more and more people would be born with such powers, though it would take a great catalyst to awaken the conscious mind to latent abilities on a grand scale. We had taken this as proof that we were not mutated freaks, as the Herder Faction and Council claimed, but a natural progression in human evolution. And what greater catalyst could have occurred than the Great White?
However, the teknoguilders had regarded the book with skepticism after their initial euphoria, fearing it might merely be one of the fictions the Beforetimers had produced in such number. But the discovery of the actual Reichler Clinic must resolve all doubt.
“Worth a bit of a walk through the dark, eh?” Garth sounded pleased by our reactions. He poked at my arm. “I thought since you discovered the book and argued so strongly that it was true, you should see this, my dear,” he added.
“Strange to think of Beforetimers comin’ here to be tested to see if they was Misfits,” Fian said dreamily.
I felt a strange chill at the thought that, a thousand years before, a girl like me might have come to the clinic, wondering if she was a freak because she could use her mind to speak to animals or to other people.
Garth led the way through a door, and we found ourselves in a large room with metal benches. Windows along one wall opened to the darkness of the caves, while along another wall was a line of boxlike metal structures that were unmistakably Beforetime machines. These were smaller than the ones in the Teknoguild cave network in the mountains to the north.
“We know the Reichler Clinic was a paranormal research center,” Garth said in a lecturing tone of voice. “Paranormal was a Beforetime word for ‘Talented’ or ‘Misfit.’ As Fian said, people would come here to be tested. We had no expectation of finding the clinic, and once it was found, it never occurred to me that we would find much in the way of information, because damp has destroyed all but the most impervious materials in the city. And even they will not resist decay forever.”
“Garth …,” Rushton began.
“Patience,” Garth said, as if Rushton were an importunate novice. “As I was about to say, I did not expect to find anything here, but I was wrong. It appears that the people who ran the Reichler Clinic were forward-thinking, and they sealed much of their information in a slippery, waterproof, transparent material they called plast.” He bent down with a grunt and opened a cupboard, lifting out a sheaf of what first appeared to be pieces of paper. On closer examination, they proved to be made of some sort of pliable material. There were words on the sheets, but I could make nothing of them.
“The plast-covered paper is absolutely impervious to water, although it is not resistant to heat. As you see, a good deal of the matter contained on the sheets is in one of the peculiar linguistic codes the Beforetimers were so fond of using. Hiding their information in this way always seemed to me a paranoid and pointless business, but as it transpired, they had cause to be careful and secretive. My guild is beginning to fathom many of the codes, and these sheets are in one that the Beforetimers called Jerman. Fian has specialized in this code, and he was able to translate enough to come up with some very odd intelligence—not about the Reichler Clinic but about another Beforetime organization.” He n
odded regally at Fian, who took up the narrative.
“I believe th’ code was used to store information that th’ folk who ran th’ Reichler Clinic wanted to keep secret,” the highlander said. “I’ve only just begun decodin’ th’ plasts, but it’s clear from what I’ve read so far that they wanted to conceal th’ fact that some of th’ Misfits they tested were not latent.”
“Conceal it from whom?” I wondered, and Fian nodded.
“That’s what got to me, too. Why would they want to hide what was basically proof of th’ things they wrote in that book ye found? Th’ answer was in th’ plast sheets. Th’ Reichler Clinic were bein’ investigated by a powerful organization called Govamen, which was connected to huge weapontradin’ houses that made a profit out of sellin’ weaponmachines. Govamen was supposed to be stoppin’ wars an’ finding other ways to resolve conflict between Beforetime factions, but in reality it reaped coin from th’ very people who wanted th’ wars to go on—namely th’ weaponmakers. Of course, th’ connection between Govamen an’ th’ weapontradin’ houses was illicit. Th’ Reichler Clinic folk learned of it by chance when they was tryin’ to find out why they were bein’ investigated.”
“You mean this organization conspired to promote war for profit?” Rushton demanded.
“I would not go that far,” Garth said. “However, it does seem to offer an explanation as to why the Beforetimers had so many wars. It is a thing that has always troubled me about them.”
“I still don’t understand what this had to do with the Reichler Clinic hiding things,” I said. “It wasn’t forbidden to be a Misfit then, was it?”
“No. But th’ Reichler Clinic people learned that th’ part of Govamen investigatin’ them was devoted to research an’ development of paranormal abilities as weapons,” Fian said. “This was th’ symbol of th’ research cell from Govamen.”
He stopped to point to a tiny picture atop one of the plasts. It showed three minuscule birds flying in an endless spiral around a word I could not interpret.
“Look closely,” Garth invited.
I did, and my eyes widened at the realization that the birds pictured were Agyllians—Guanette birds, as Landfolk called them.
“Fascinating, eh?” he demanded.
“Yes,” I agreed faintly, thinking he had no idea how fascinating.
The Land resonated with myths about the huge red birds, which were believed to be virtually extinct. But I knew that they dwelt in nests on high citadels of stone in the tallest mountains to the north, because they had once brought me there to save my life in the hope that I would one day destroy the Beforetimers’ remaining weaponmachines. I wondered if it could possibly be a coincidence that their image adorned material produced by the mysterious organization called Govamen, with its sinister connections to the weaponmakers.
“Th’ section in Govamen that used this as their mark”—Fian tapped the design—“had apparently gone a lot further in its paranormal research than simply testin’ th’ minds of volunteers. It had actually tried to alter th’ brains of animals to produce artificial Talents. Seems they had some spectacular initial results that came to nowt. From what I have translated, th’ Reichler Clinic people feared Govamen’s interest in th’ clinic meant they had th’ idea of usin’ th’ people that they had tested as latent Talents. An’ by usin’ I mean kidnappin’ an’ experimentin’ on, against their will.”
I felt sick. That meant Misfits had been no safer in the Beforetime than we were now. Perhaps it would always be so.
“This is all very interesting,” Rushton interrupted. “But you could have told it to us safely and simply back at Obernewtyn. I presume there is some reason you have dragged us into this miserable place?”
Garth sighed. “All right. I could have told you what I am about to show you, too, but it is so momentous I felt you would wish to see it. Perhaps I was wrong.”
The stocky teknoguilder moved to the other end of the room, and as the light from the lantern he carried reached the far wall, I could see a mural had been carved there, depicting a mountain scene in perfect relief and intricate detail. It was a magnificent work, and it seemed vaguely familiar.
“It’s Obernewtyn,” Rushton said in a stunned voice. “Or at least, it is where Obernewtyn is sited. The same spot. The trees are different, but you can tell by the positioning of the mountains. But why on earth would its image be carved here?”
“I think ye’ll find th’ answer to that when ye read th’ inscription on th’ wee plaque,” Fian said, pointing to a small metal square with raised lettering on the wall beside the mural.
Rushton leaned closer, and I heard him suck in a startled breath of air.
“What is it?” I demanded.
He gave me an unseeing look, and I slipped past him to see for myself. The words read “Presented to the Founder of the Reichler Clinic, Hannah Seraphim, by her devoted admirer, Jacob Obernewtyn.”
“Seraphim,” I whispered, staring at Rushton. “That’s your family name. And Obernewtyn … What can it mean?”
He opened his mouth to speak, but abruptly the dazed look of amazement faded into a frown. “Listen,” he said, tilting his head.
Then we all heard it. Someone was calling out.
“It’s Matthew.” I recognized the farseeker’s voice. “He can’t farseek underground.”
I crossed to a window and peered out. From above, the watery caverns looked even more eerie. I spotted the ward by his lantern light bobbing along the ledge path and shouted to him that I would come down. My voice echoed weirdly, reverberating between water and rock.
“I told him to do a routine scan of the villages for new Misfits,” I explained to the others. “Maybe he’s found someone.”
“Be careful,” Rushton cautioned.
I nodded impatiently and hurried back downstairs, wondering why after so many Misfit rescues he felt the need to warn me to take care.
Matthew looked so relieved when I joined him on the ledge that I realized he had something more than a wild Misfit Talent to report.
“What is it?” I demanded, panting slightly.
“Ceirwan farsought me,” the farseeker said. “He says ye mun all come back at once. Maryon’s had a futuretellin’ vision about th’ gypsy woman we rescued—an’ it sounds like trouble.”
We rushed back to Obernewtyn, only to discover that Maryon had fallen into a second futuretelling trance from which she had yet to emerge. The Futuretell guilden had been unable to tell us anything more about her guildmistress’s futuretelling, other than that it concerned the gypsy I had rescued and the future of Obernewtyn.
We could do nothing but go on with other matters until Maryon awoke. The whole affair completely overtook the excitement of finding the Reichler Clinic, and as we made our way to the kitchens for a late nightmeal, Rushton asked me not to speak of the finding until the Teknoguild had prepared a presentation.
“It seems strange to think of your being related to the very people who were interested in Misfit powers in the Beforetime,” I murmured. “Do you suppose Jacob Obernewtyn built this place?”
Rushton shook his head. “My grandfather, Lukas Seraphim, built Obernewtyn as it is now, but Louis Larkin once told me that it had been built on the ruins of an older building. It’s my guess this Jacob built the original house that stood here.”
“I wonder why Hannah Seraphim started the Reichler Clinic in the first place.” The discovery meant Rushton could trace the line of his descent back to the Beforetime—he must surely be the only person alive who could do that.
But Rushton only gave me a look. “It is a long time past, and her world is dead. The teknoguilders’ discovery of the Reichler Clinic is useful only in that it confirms absolutely that there were Misfits like us in the Beforetime. We have the present to deal with, and that is quite enough without wasting time on historical puzzles. I am far more concerned to find out what a nameless gypsy could possibly have to do with Obernewtyn.”
I did not sleep that ni
ght for wondering what had been so important it had necessitated our immediate return.
The following morning, Matthew came to my chamber before firstmeal to inform me that Maryon had awakened. Rushton had called the guildleaders to his chamber.
I was careful not to wake Maruman as I dressed, and on leaving had to resist an urge to gather the bedraggled cat into my lap and stroke the rough fur and misshapen head of my first and dearest friend. Every time Maruman disappeared, I worried, knowing he wandered far from Obernewtyn in the throes of his occasional strange fey fits. On his previous disappearance, he had been gone for almost a full cycle of the moon. When he had returned, his already damaged right eye had been so severely infected that Roland had no alternative but to remove it.
If he suffered for the lack of it, he made no complaints.
I hurried then to Rushton’s chamber. His face was stony as he opened the door and stepped back to let me enter.
The other guildleaders were seated about the small room, their faces grave. My eyes flew to the Futuretell guildmistress standing in a shadowed corner. Her dark eyes glinted enigmatically across the room at me, and my heart began to beat unevenly.
“What has happened?”
“All in good time,” Rushton said tightly, gesturing to an empty seat. I flushed, for he did not normally speak so sharply to me.
He opened his mouth, then shook his head as if thinking better of whatever he would have said. Instead, he turned to the Healer guildmaster. “You’d better begin, Roland,” he growled, flinging himself in a chair.
“Elspeth, as you know, the gypsy you rescued is resisting healing,” Roland said. “We cannot work against her body to force her to heal, and it is impossible to enter her mind, because she has a natural mental barrier.”
“Are you saying she is dying?” I asked.
“Right now, we are keeping her stable. However, if this goes on for much longer, she will die.”
“Maryon?” I said, turning to the tall woman in the shadows. “What did you see in your futuretelling? What has the gypsy to do with Obernewtyn?”