CHAPTER 10
THE EYES OF ANOTHER WORLD
The sand that blew across my face carried with it the taste of eternity. There are places—the port in Williamtown was one—where all things are new and the years are flavorless as water. But the vast desert of the Mare Silentii was no such place, nor the great plateau that towered over it. There ancientness hung over everything like a shroud, like smoke. One could taste it in the salt and the grit of the desert air, hear it in the forlorn whistling of the wind through the rocks, see it in the fossilized remains of the leviathans and pseudocarids that recalled the vanished seas.
And one could feel the countless chiliads in the oppressive weight of the dead city itself: Phanamhara, City in the Sea of Silence. Phanamhara, City of the Enar. Of the Vaiartu. Of the servants of the Watchers. How strange it is, to come to a place and know you are among the first to see it in a thousand thousand years of men. Almost it recalled the ruins of Annica, the great city in the mountain, except that those ruins had filled me with wonder and not with dread, for I knew which powerful and unrecorded race it was that once had dwelt in that annihilated place, and shuddered, and knew that like the Cielcin, they had been servants of that final darkness.
The day was fading, and the white sun—fast falling to the horizon—had turned fat and yellow as the yolk of an egg. Already I could feel the desert air leeching the water from my face, and I paused to turn my collar up at the wind. Still, it was not hot—it was never hot at that latitude—and the nights would be bitter cold.
“Welcome to Mount Sark, my lord!” The speaker was a gray-haired patrician in the desert camouflage of the planetary defense, white and dun. Behind him, a loose confederation of dig workers: a man in high boots and brown leathers, a woman scholiast in leggings and a short tunic in the traditional green, a pair of engineers in padded white, all escorted by a half dozen peltasts in the same dun camouflage, each clad in sagum cloaks of undyed wool. The patrician officer surveyed Neema, Cassandra, and myself with curiosity. “Is Director Oberlin not with you?”
“The Director will be following on shortly, on his own ship,” I said, leading my small party down the Ascalon’s rear ramp. I did not bow. “He will not be remaining on-site. I will be.”
The officer shook his head. “When the governor-general’s office said we had Hadrian Marlowe himself come to oversee the dig, I hardly dared to believe it. I used to have the old recruiting posters they did with you on them, back when I was a lad. The Hero of Aptucca!”
“I’ve been called worse,” I said, turning to look sidelong at Cassandra, who seemed—if anything—even more bemused by this development than I was myself. “And you are?”
“Ah!” Remembering himself, the officer saluted, striking his breast with a fist. “Commandant Vimal Gaston, Tribune. I’ve the command of this camp.” He bowed.
The man had the look of the classic upper-crust Sollan officer. Strong jawed, blunt featured. He wore his hair court fashion, neatly clipped and combed to one side, with thick sideburns that ran down to the corners of his face and fearsome mustache. With a start, I realized who he recalled. He might have been a facsimile, a perfect copy, of the late Sir William Crossflane, a man cut from that same Imperial archetype.
I returned the gesture, shallower than he. “An honor, commandant,” I said, and turning aside introduced Cassandra. Looking back at the Ascalon, I said, “I trust our berth is not inconvenient?”
“Not at all!” Gaston said. “We’ll have her hooked up to central water and our reactor by end of day. Our engineers here will take care of it.” He gestured to the two men in white, who saluted on cue. I acknowledged them with a bare nod, but Gaston was unfinished. The scholiast woman and the man in brown had caught him up, and he lay a hand on the shoulder of the brown man, saying, “This is Doctor Valeriev, our lay magus. And this is Tor Carter.”
The man in brown—whose lank, muddy hair hung nearly to his shoulders—thrust out a hand. “Tiber Valeriev, sir. Xenoarchaeology. Niverzitet u Thalma.”
“Thalma University?” I said, taking his hand. “You’re Durantine.”
“Da,” he said. “All my life.”
I shook the scholiast’s hand after his, saying, “Counselor.”
Carter smiled and bobbed her head.
The three of them made a curious set: the demure scholiast, the foreigner, and the stodgy old officer. Yet the dig site was their charge—or it had been. Oberlin had made it clear that he intended to have the locals removed once the situation on the ground was firmly in hand. A portion of Clavan’s Legion was landing even then, their troop carriers settling on the flats beyond the ruins of the city.
“Have you all been at Phanamhara long?” I asked.
“No, lord!” Gaston replied. “Carter has been here longest. I replaced good Sir Oliver but six years back. Valeriev’s been here . . . how long has it been?”
“Nine years, Gaston,” the Durantine scholar replied.
In a quiet voice, Carter replied, “Thirty-one years, liege. But I’ve spent as much time in the city as here. Or in Markov Station.”
Markov Station was a climate research site more than three thousand miles to the northwest, in upper Victorialand. We had passed over it on our flight down from Williamtown. The local navigator Governor-General Hulle’s office had sent with us had labored to point it out: a miserable pile of prefabricated white buildings arranged in a grid about the atmospheric refinery. Precious few were the worlds in our universe that could natively play host to human life. Far more common were those—like Sabratha—that ill-fit us, like bad shoes.
“You’ve been here for most of the dig then?” I asked her. We had been thirteen years in transit from Jadd. I had slept for all of them, less a month or so on either end. That made it sixty-one standard years since the discovery of the Asara Cylinder, and fifty-nine since the work at Phanamhara had begun. I realized my mathematical error then and amended myself, “Nearly half, I mean.”
“Yes, lord,” the scholiast said.
“I’ll want to speak with you,” I said. “With each of you, as doubtless will Lord Oberlin or one of his agents.”
Thunder pealed in the distance, and turning, I looked out across the lone and level sands. Away to the east, a castle of black cloud marched against the darkening sky, lit beneath by pale lightning.
“Are we due for a storm?” asked Cassandra.
“This time of year, likely,” Tor Carter said, her short, dark hair bristling in a stiff wind. “The fronts move down from the equator, get funneled through the Salt Gates between Victorialand and Prince Cyrusland.”
Gaston interrupted, “There’s little enough rain, but the wind’s fearsome. You won’t want to be caught out in it. We keep a team of spotters in the air most days, and you can see where the balloons are tethered over the camp.” He spent a minute then detailing which comm frequencies were used for the weather reports.
I surveyed the layout of the camp and the ruins beyond while he spoke. We had settled the Ascalon upon its outermost margin, as far from the plateau as anything man had brought to that desolated place. Like those of Markov Station, the buildings were all of prefabricated white, heavy plastic, carbon fiber, and alumglass, every one of them low and long and studded with the fluted chimneys of wind-trap turbines. I saw the lines of the weather balloons Gaston had spoken of; silver threads tethered to the camp’s outermost buildings.
The great plateau of the Cetorum Mensa rose above all, blacker still. Upon its nearer face and shoulders, I could see the arms of the ruined city reaching out as if to gather our camp in its embrace. Still, it was easy to see how the original flyover surveys had missed the ruins. The great mass of the city lay beneath the plateau itself—indeed it was the plateau, or rather the plateau was it. A million years of wind and weather had worn the greater structure down. And there was more: great projections of green stone, ramparts like fingers fanning out into the desert. These had been buried by the desert entire, and Gaston’s men and Valeriev’s had spent more than half a century digging that sand away, so that dunes a third as high as the cliffs themselves stood mounded about the site, and one entered the ruins by a long and shallow ramp. I could see the red-enameled arms of heavy excavators and drilling equipment: huge vehicles not unlike the colossi who walk our battlefields like gods themselves.
“I’d like to see the ruins, if I may,” I said after what felt like long reflection.
“Of course, lord, plenty of time for that!” said the commandant breezily. “Once Lord Oberlin arrives.”
“If it is all the same to you, commandant,” I countered, “I would like to go into the ruins now.” Some part of me, childlike and half-forgotten, wanted desperately to see that ancient place, though the rest of me—the greater and older part—felt most sharply the fear that the sight of Enar architecture engendered. The truth, I think, was that I simply wanted it to be over. On Eue, Miudanar had perceived me at once, had spoken to me as soon as I had come into sight of its corpse . . . its fingerprint. I know now that it was because it had sensed the touch of the Quiet’s hand upon me, had felt the pressure of my own higher vision as I had felt the weight of its eyeless gaze.
I hoped that my mere presence, then, might draw our prey.
Such had been Oberlin’s hope, when he called me foxhound. Perhaps that was why he had permitted me to take the Ascalon with the advance team. Oberlin had planned to descend with Commander Vedi and the frigate—a Rhea-class light frigate, little larger than my Ascalon—that was to serve HAPSIS as a command base on the ground. Nominally this had been a security measure, but I wondered if the old fox had not sent me ahead as bait, to beat the bushes while he readied his shot.
The weapon, a modified NEM209-type electromagnetic pulse atomic, codenamed Perseus, would be housed aboard the Rhea. I had studied it with the documents Oberlin had given me relating the secret history of Operation Gnomon: the Ragol mission that discovered Nairi. The Atropos Expedition. The suicide of Sir Damien Aradhya, the deaths of his crew. The research base HAPSIS had built on the planet. The thousand-year research program. The deaths. Their silent war on the Watcher. Their eventual victory—if indeed it was a victory. Nairi remains unsettled to this day, watched by a fleet of Chantry Sentinels.
The Chantry knew of the Watchers, it seemed from Oberlin’s reports. Not the local priors and grand priors. But the Synod on Forum surely knew, and the Choir that oversaw the Sentinel fleets. I had long ago ceased to marvel at their hypocrisy. They were an organ of the state—as all religion wrongly ordered must inevitably become—but in being so, they served a higher good: the common good, which is highest of all the goods of this world save one.
“That . . . can be arranged, Lord Marlowe! Certainly!” Gaston said. “I would have liked to take you down myself, but I must oversee the landing and prepare for Lord Oberlin’s arrival. Valeriev, I don’t suppose you would do the honors?”
As I have said, the desolation of Phanamhara was approached by a long and shallow ramp. The great berms of sand created by decades of excavation rose at first gradually, then precipitously, to either side. The sand beneath our feet had been compacted by years of machine passage and tramping feet, and felt hard as flint beneath us. Still, I was glad to reach the pale-green stone that once had been a boulevard at the bottom.
“How far from the mountain does the city extend?” I asked Doctor Valeriev when we reached the alien road.
“About two kilometers,” he said, using the ancient measure still in use in backward lands beyond the Imperium. It was a little over a mile. “There may be outlying structures. We’ve sonared the desert for miles around, run gravimetric scans and the like, but it’s hard to know.”
Cassandra spoke up. “You haven’t tried digging?”
“We’ve had our work cut out for us excavating the city proper,” Valeriev replied in his thickly accented standard. “Thrice before I got here, the governor-general halted the work entirely.”
“After the incident with the engineer?” I asked. Cassandra knew there had been a murder, and without my showing her the holographs knew it had been ghastly and . . . unreal.
“That was the last time,” the doctor said. “The first was for the storms. Local year is nearly six standard, and the windy season runs nigh half so long. Starting out, the camp wasn’t up to spec. Lord Hulle had the place evacuated twice, and each time the men had to spend the winters digging the camp out as much as the city. Took more than a decade to make any real headway against the storms.”
The air was still as a tomb at the bottom of the dig, so still almost it seemed we were inside, and the lowering clouds were recast in my mind, playing the role of some cathedral vault looming and yet . . . infinitely remote. “Is it the windy season now?” I asked.
“Nearly at its end, in fact,” said Tiber Valeriev. “Static field generators hold much of the sand in place. They’re what draw most of the power from the camp reactor. It took them years, but they solved the desert problem.”
As he spoke, he led us along what must have been one of the city’s main roads, a boulevard some fifty feet across and straight as a laser. Ahead, the square pillars and trapezoidal windows and doors of the city yawned from the face of the plateau. To either side—half buried by the sand—ran the arms of Phanamhara. Like the ringed city of Akterumu they were, but smaller: each a monolithic projection of stone, building after building contiguous with the last, so that the city seemed more one mighty palace than an assemblage of disparate structures. There were no towers, no domes, and nowhere was there to be seen a pane of glass or delicate arch, nor any color but that faintly luminous green.
“This is the main avenue,” Valeriev said. “We’ve dug out many of the buildings to either side, excavated most of the next avenue.” He pointed to the left. “And have started on the adjoining two on that side.”
“How many in total?”
“Six, counting this,” Valeriev replied. “Two on the right, three on the left. They all converge at the base of the Whalemont.”
“The Whalemont?” Cassandra asked.
“The Cetorum Mensa,” the doctor answered. “The plateau. Mount Sark.”
“But why Whalemont?” she pressed. “Why does it have so many names?”
“You must have seen the bones out in the desert!” Valeriev called back over his shoulder. “When Sabratha still had her seas, this place was all underwater. You can see the bones of sea serpents that used to live here all over the Mare Silentii. Biggest they’ve found was nearly three kilometers from end to end. Virtues of the low gravity! They say they were filter feeders, like terranic whales, lived off the little fish and pseudoplanktons.” He continued talking, explaining how certain of those planktons had survived the loss of the planet’s seas, how they remained and metabolized carbon dioxide to make the oxygen that made it possible for us to walk around unmasked. They were growing stronger as man labored to free the carbon trapped in the planet’s crust, and there were talks that water might be brought down from comets, as had been done on my own homeworld, Delos, by the great world-builders of old. Provided the Vaiartu site could be protected from the fresh and rising seas.
But the great sea snakes, the whales of Sabratha, would not return. True whales would swim in their place, and in time generations might come to think it was for terranic whales the Mensa got its name, and not the extinct native life. Privately, I thought the Empire would reject all plans to develop Sabratha further. Nairi remained uninhabited, but for the vestiges of HAPSIS and the Chantry Sentinels who kept their guard. Sabratha seemed doomed to join it, the second—if it was second—in a list of dead worlds forbidden to the tread of men.
“The city goes far back beneath the plateau,” Valeriev continued, stopping in the shadow of a pillared entry in the hall to our left. “We’re still digging out the deepest chambers. It’s been hell trying to clear the inner chambers. Since I’ve been here, we’ve lost two work crews to cave-ins.” His tone became melancholy.
We’d reached the level space before the walls of the plateau by then, and stopped to look up at the façade. Above us for perhaps a thousand feet, the gates of the city loomed. A million years of sand and of water had worn the great friezes nearly all away, though here and there could be seen the bent profile of an arm, a claw, of the many-legged carapaces of the lost Enar. Mighty square pillars marched along to either side, some cracked, others broken. Bright scaffolding supported the mighty lintel that ran across the graven capitals, and surrounded certain of the inner ranks of columns, complete with harnesses where workmen labored to scratch away the dust of eons and reveal the stone beneath.
“It must have been incredible in its day!” Cassandra said, and I thought I could detect the ghost of her mother in her hushed voice.
“The whole thing would have been painted!” Valeriev waved a hand at the pillars. “Bright colors! Lots of yellows and blues. Deeper in some of the murals have survived a bit better, but out here the wind’s worn everything down to the plascrete.”
“Plascrete?” I asked. I had been trying to picture Akterumu freshly painted, a gleaming, inhuman Babylon.
“That’s what all this is, lord!” Valeriev tapped at the paver beneath his feet with the toe of one high boot. “Polymer-reinforced concrete. The Vaiartu didn’t do much quarrying, but they liked their stone.” Seeing Cassandra crouch, he said, “Nien, young miss! Don’t touch! The green is copper arsenite. It’s poisonous.”
“Arsenic?” I looked round at the Vaiartu city with renewed horror, recalling legends of the queens of Earth dying in green gowns, of children wasting to bone in rooms bright and floral. I had needed little reason to explain my illness during my short stay in Akterumu, but I slept at least two nights upon the green stones with open wounds.
“Evidently the stuff was not poisonous to the Vaiartu.”
“Are we in any danger?” I asked. Surely some of the dust blowing about us was the aerosolized powder of the old stones.
“A small amount. It’s worse inside when the men are working, but the climate keeps the toxins manageable. You’ll want to wear a suit for prolonged exposure, but . . . to take a look . . . ” He shrugged, “Nien problema.”
I put my hands in my pockets, and looked round with renewed disgust.
“You’ll want to see this, I think!” said Valeriev, and the Durantine grinned from ear to ear. “It was among the first things we discovered here! Come, come!”
And so we passed within, beneath the square pillars and the gridded beams of the vaults above, their sections like honeycombs of poisonous stone. The chamber within was a geometric horror. The antechamber was vast and cuboid, hundreds of feet high. Doors and passages opened at every height along the walls. I guessed that once the xenobites who built it must have swum to reach the various apertures, but Valeriev’s men had placed ladders against the countless passageways. Glowspheres hung in the air, some stationary, others moving along programmed tracks, patrolling the halls. Almost it seemed that stretches of the walls and ceiling were paths in and of themselves, and I could imagine the hulking Enar clinging to them like spiders.
But it was the wall ahead Valeriev had brought us to see.
The colors of the mural upon it were chipped and faded—revealing the arsenic green beneath—but the relief carvings were still to be seen, save where they had cracked and fallen in the lower right corner. We were standing in what—to the lost Vaiartu—had been a city square. It was not hard to imagine the thronging creatures scuttling about and over one another as crabs do, filling that watery space, looking up in awe at the image as they entered the subterranean heart of their inhuman city.
The image was taller than it was wide, and built on a looming rectangular slab of stone that leaned out over the square itself, wider at the top than at its base, which rested above the capital of a massive column that delineated the two branching halves of the central passage that led deeper within the ruin. Near the base the inhuman artist had rendered in lifelike miniature the shapes of myriad alien forms. I saw arms and fins, tentacles, wings, horns, pseudopods and hands contorted, faces curiously blank, as though the artist had given no thought to the pain he should have portrayed. The Enar stood above them, triumphant, strange weapons in their clawed, curiously human hands. Their lowest ranks stood upon their victims, while the higher ones turned, their many arms upraised, swords lifted to greet or honor the being that stood above all.
It reminded me of the image from the temple of Akterumu, but here was no many-handed serpent. The style was different—the frieze at Akterumu had had no pigment, only that sickly green—but akin. Above the graven Vaiartu legions rose a roiling mass of tendrils, arms curling and spiraling, bifurcating to touch the upraised swords. Above these, but curiously apart, were several concentric rings of stone. The tendrils seemed to flow from it, as the arms of a cuttlefish flow from its head. Upon each ring, inscribed with geometric precision, were the round anaglyphs of the Quiet’s speech.
My blood ran cold at the sight of them, and at the sight of what they encircled.
The circle had three eyes. One above, two below, describing the points of a triangle, each equidistant from the center of the great disc. Something about those eyes disturbed me, but I pushed the thought away.
Cassandra swore in Jaddian, and in the same language asked, “Hadha es?”
“One of the Watchers,” I said, half expecting to hear the strange language I had heard on Eue whispered in my ears.
Arkam resham aktullu.
Arkam amtatsur.
“Do they all look like that?” she asked.
“No, Anaryan.” I came to a halt at the foot of the central pillar that upheld the mighty frieze, so that it looked down upon me, a terrible and unmoving god. I thought that this must be the most honest depiction that I had ever seen. A form of the formless, a conveyance of the abstract. Of the idea of the gods themselves.
It was a Watcher indeed.
“They’re each different. I’ve never seen one like this before.”
“My lord, if I may,” ventured Tiber Valeriev, “what does an Imperial war hero have to do with the Vaiartu?”
I only stared at him. After a moment, the brown-clad xenologist quailed. “I might ask you what a Durantine doctor is doing with knowledge that could get him into trouble with the Terran Chantry.”
To my surprise, Valeriev waved this down as though it were nothing. “I was invited,” he said. “I worked a dig on Sadal Suud—many years ago now. Your governor-general put out word he needed archaeologists. I didn’t know anything about the Vaiartu when I got here. Carter’s the expert. She and your Rassam are colleagues, I understand.”
My gaze had returned to the mural of the Watcher. There was room enough in me to pity Valeriev. Had he known, when he took Lord Hulle’s job, that he was never going home? Had Hulle known? Here was a man in possession of at least a piece—if only a piece—of the secrets that form the foundations of the Empire, secrets I have here recorded for you, dear Reader.
Whatever Valeriev said next, I do not recall. I recall only those eyes. Something about them filled me with disquiet, something I did not understand. I turned my attention to the writing, the Quiet’s anaglyphs. These concerned me, if anything, even more. The Cielcin used the Quiet’s symbols, misappropriated the characters of their—of his—seeming-speech to form the rude caricatures of their own. That had always bothered me, though I had comforted myself with the thought that it was some black mockery. But always in the back of my mind—unanswered—there remained that terrible question, echoing again and again.
Was the Quiet a Watcher himself?
Why else would those same markings appear there? On that wall? About the image and icon of that many-eyed monster? “Valka,” I whispered, and shook my head—though I could not tear my eyes away. “I need you, here.” There had to be something, something I’d missed. Something I’d failed to see. Valka would know it. Valka would remember it.
The Vaiartu sculptor had carved square-tipped rays emanating from the three-eyed disc, as though it were luminous. Oberlin had said they were creatures of pure force, of light shining from dimensions we cannot perceive.
My breath caught.
“Abba?” Cassandra had heard me mention her mother, had circled nearer for my sake, and so heard me.
The eyes! Realization ran through me like a shock. I think I retreated a step. “The eyes!” The words escaped me that time.
“Abba?” Cassandra circled to stand in my line of vision. “Abba, what about the eyes?”
“You don’t see it?” I asked, looking from her to Valeriev. I could almost laugh. It had to be a joke, a prank, a falsity. It was so obvious. How could I have taken so long to see?
They were human eyes.