CHAPTER 13
OF NOISE AND SIGNAL
If Oberlin had hoped for the Watcher to sense my presence and swiftly appear, he was disappointed. One had certainly been at Phanamhara. What other possible explanation could there be for state of Doctor Mann’s refracted corpse? The files Oberlin had given me detailing the fates of the crew of the Atropos and of the men of Operation Gnomon who set up to work on Nairi after them had contained images of several such refracted corpses, some small as dolls, others large as giants.
The appearance of differential volume is not a property of the material, one Gnomon man had written. Rather, it is a consequence of the relationship between the material object and our three-dimensional plane. Thus, as an object retreats from our dimensional plane, it grows either apparently larger or smaller. Hirata speculates that the appearance of growth or shrinkage is dependent upon the direction of travel relative to what we must call normal space, with diminished objects in a sense below us but intersecting our reality, and enlarged ones above. What the boundaries of such diminishment or enlargement may be is hard to speculate. Objects made larger by the Entity appear diffuse, translucent. It is speculated that an object may vanish entirely, if removed from normal space sufficiently as to no longer intersect with same.
More testing and test subjects are needed.
One of the devils was in our midst. But it did not show itself. Perhaps it was ignorant of our presence, removed from our reality, sulking in some corner of unseen space. On Eue, whatever remained of Miudanar had seen me at once. But had it known I was coming? Was it not possible that some pearl of awareness in what Dorayaica was fast becoming had spoken to the greater part of the Watcher that slumbered in that profane city? Might Dorayaica have alerted its god to my coming?
Or was the Watcher on Sabratha watching even then?
Of the men who had seen Doctor Mann’s body, not a one had seen him die. I spoke to each of them, together and alone, and learned nothing.
I pitied them. The thirty years they’d spent on ice had placed a gulf of time between them and their families in any case. They were plebeians all. Their parents were surely dead, or ancient by the count of common years. Their wives would be twice their age and matronly. Their children grown. It would be a mercy to ship them all offworld, to send them to some far-off colony where they might start again.
But I was not sure even that would be allowed. They knew nothing of substance, and posed no threat, but the barest word of what they’d seen would spawn another rumor in the river of human affairs. I doubted I would succeed, and each successive interview left my mouth increasingly sour.
They were dead men—every one—though Death had yet to find them.
It was night again, and we been for months at Phanamhara. Pha Na Ma Ha Ra, which Carter and Rassam told me meant the Nearest Place in the old High Vaiartu language, though what it was near to—or what Sabratha was near to—was any man’s guess. Phanamhara, City of the Enar. City on the Sea of Silence.
How silent it was!
The wind through the camp as I walked, an unseen and yet substantial presence, was given body by the sand that stung my face—some of which I was sure were the dry-climate plankton that maintained the atmosphere. But for the crunch of my boots and the faint action of the camp behind, there seemed nothing in all creation, nothing save the plateau of the Mensa, which rose flat-crowned but massive in that sea of alloyed white and dun. In the distance, I saw the many-pillared skeleton of the leviathan, Cetoscolides sabrathis, rising from the dunes beyond the landing field, lifeless and grim.
All Sabratha seemed a graveyard in that moment, a planet of the dead.
Disturbed by my passage, a native tataxus—a six-legged creature like an armored badger—hurried across the path beneath the light of one lamp. It was among the largest of the native life that yet endured on Sabratha, the apex predator of that not-quite-dead world. They had taken a liking to the camp, so Gaston said, and were always burrowing beneath the longhouses where it was warmest, sleeping by day and scavenging for scraps and the desert mice and insects we’d introduced to Sabratha by night.
There was life. Lonely and desperate, but life all the same.
“ . . . hard to get any work done with the boss’s man breathing down our necks.” I stopped, surprised by the closeness of the voice. I looked round, spied the shapes of three men huddled around a heater on the porch of the longhouse nearest me on the south side of the main road.
“Ain’t that the truth,” said another man, and paused for the space of a breath. “What’s his fucking name again?”
“Prissy,” said the first. “Prissy Lascaris. Old Sir Friedrich’s batboy.”
“Priscian,” said a third.
“Gives me the creeps,” said the second. “How’s a patrician end up with a face like that, I ask you? Looks like he’s been dead three days. You’d think he could have had a better bonecutter.”
“He’s not bloody palatine now, is he?” said the third. “He is a right prick, though.”
“Pricky Lascaris,” said—I think—the second man, and laughed at his cheap humor. It was only then I realized the men were surely drinking.
Sir Friedrich’s man had been about the camp that whole week, keeping close with Commander Vedi and inspecting the various landers that had brought our men from the Troglita. Routine stuff, though he had press-ganged several of Valeriev’s diggers into giving him a more detailed tour of the ruins. Lascaris was a HAPSIS man, and so shared the HAPSIS enthusiasm for the xenobites. He had spent a great deal of time with Tor Rassam in the hypostyle, studying the inscriptions there.
Oberlin himself had remained aboard the Troglita, bound in part by medical necessity, and in part by his own cowardice. I think it must have taken every erg of fortitude in the man to write the note he’d left me following Gereon’s putting me to the Question. The thought of camping in the desert while a Watcher roamed free was quite beyond him.
I stepped forward, and making straight for the landing field and the Ascalon beyond the main camp, I waved at the men on the porch. “Good night to you, sirs!” I pretended that I had just seen them.
“You’re out late, lord!” called one man from the shadow of the porch. Turning my head, I saw the three men gathered close about their heater, cigarettes in hand. One held a silvered flask that gleamed gold in the light of the heating element. “Cerwyn says storm’s due just after midnight. You won’t want to be caught outside.”
I checked my wrist-terminal. “Midnight’s more than an hour off!” I shouted back. “The landing field’s not nearly so far as that!” Still, the fellow was right to warn me.
“That was last best estimate, lordship!” said the second man, his voice deeper than the first. “Winds move fast once they hit the Salt Gates, and the spotters were saying the airwaves were all full of ghosts earlier.”
I acknowledged this with a wave and trudged on, feet scooping up little fans of dust.
Full of ghosts . . . he’d said, referring to the way the planet’s strong magnetic field trapped and circulated radio transmissions, old messages propagating against the ionosphere, echoes and fragments of yesterday. One heard voices in the old signals, distorted and changed almost beyond recognition. They interfered with all comms traffic, as much or more than the omnipresent static, and so the spotters communicated often by signal flares. The Irchtani had joined them, patrolling the air, watching for storms or other interlopers. They kept watch for the Cielcin, and—though even Annaz and his men knew it not—for the Watcher itself.
Ghosts . . .
I reached the Ascalon not ten minutes later, parked on the near edge of the landing field. Vedi’s frigate and the other landers hunkered on the flat beyond. Here and there the white snakes of the water lines and black worms of power cables showed through the sand, all of them linked together like flies in some Brobdingnagian web.
Pushing this unsettling image aside, I mounted the ramp to the hold and entered in, pausing to acknowledge the quartet of Irchtani soldiers who held the inner door.
I reached the first landing and the level of my cabin when I met Neema coming down. The Jaddian servitor wore a white apron whose ties were secured with brass fittings. The triple diamonds of the Nemrut School were embroidered black upon the left breast.
“Master Hadrian!” he said. “I was just washing up. There’s pilaf in the refectory for you. The last of the chicken they flew down from Williamtown on Sunday.”
“Thank you, Neema. You’re very good to me.”
The Jaddian homunculus brightened at my praise and bowed his head. “It’s only my job, sir.”
“Is Cassandra in her room?” I asked.
Neema shook his head, smoothed his short black hair. “No, master. I thought she was with you.”
“I was in the ruins,” I said—and added, “I need to wash.”
“I’m sure the young mistress has gone into camp. I understand the men place bets on boxing matches many a night.”
I frowned. “Is it not a touch late for that?”
Neema shrugged. “I can use the hardline to wire the Rhea, have Vedi send some men to look for her.”
I hesitated. The Watcher might be watching at all times, could strike at any time, as it had stuck Doctor Mann. Some of the work Lascaris had been sent to the surface to oversee was the installation of magnetometers and other sensory equipment, detectors theoretically sensitive to the energies which comprised the Watcher itself. The men of Operation Gnomon had employed such devices in their efforts on Nairi after Atropos was lost. We would know if it moved in or about the camp—if indeed it could do such a thing. Likewise, if the Cielcin had come to Sabratha, we would know. Even if the comms could not reach us, there would be the hardline from Markov Station, and if nothing else there would be the entry fires as inhuman ships struck the roof of the world.
And there were the men themselves to consider.
But I was being overcautious. Cassandra was a woman grown, and a Maeskolos of Jadd.
“No need,” I said. “She’ll turn up before long.”
I made to pass Neema for the door and a shower, but the manservant said, “Master?”
“Yes, Neema?”
“I must insist you take pains not to track dust back into the ship. This awful sand gets everywhere! And so much of it toxic!”
“Only when wet.”
“Precisely!” Neema said. “Precisely! Suppose any of it were to get into the bath! What then?” Evidently considering his question rhetorical, Neema extended a hand, “Give me your coat, I’ll see it’s cleaned.”
“I’ve decontaminated already,” I said, protesting.
“All the same,” Neema said, wagging his fingers. Sighing, I shrugged out of the coat and handed it to the servant. “I would feel better if you and Mistress Cassandra were to wear full environment suits in the ruins. If they are as dangerous as they say, master, I simply—”
I patted Neema on the shoulder. “The camp doctors say it’s all right. It’s moisture that activates the poison in the stone.”
“Sweat is moisture!” Neema called after me, but I was already through the door.
Clean again, I donned my trousers and the Jaddian silk robe of black-and-white jacquard I wore at night, and went to eat the pilaf Neema had left for me in the refectory. The chicken had come in the shipment from Williamtown, as Neema had said, but the cherries were among the last to make the journey—sealed in brandy and chilled—from the ports of Jadd.
Cassandra had not returned by the time I’d finished, and so I went down to the hold, fastening my shield-belt about my waist, the sword hilt swinging from its hasp. The Irchtani hopped to attention. Their kind do not sit or lie down to sleep, lacking knees in their short legs, but two of the four had huddled and raised their pinions to hide their faces.
“Asleep on the job?” I asked them, smiling.
“Apologies, bashanda,” said one, bobbing his head. He bent rigidly at the waist and collected his long saber from the floor.
One of the two who had been still alert squawked and opened his beak. “We sleep but lightly. I told these two kajeema, these hatchlings, to rest their eyes and wings. All is quiet tonight. As every night.”
“No matter,” I said. “I thought there was supposed to be a storm?”
“Soon, says friend-Inamax,” the leader said, peering one-eyed at his companion, a slim, gray-feathered Irchtani. “He flew but quarter hour past.”
I nodded. So the storm Cerwyn—the camp’s meteorologist—had predicted was moving slower than expected. I checked the chronometer on my terminal display. It was nearly midnight, and yawning dark oozed in from the open ramp at the far end of the hold. “Has my daughter reported in?”
“Girl kajeema-bashanda?” the one called Inamax inquired, his Galstani poor. “No, bashanda.”
My disquiet grew. It was possible that she’d gone into the camp for the fighting. I was not sure if I should laugh or fear at the thought of my Cassandra battling Sollan legionnaires and engineer-laborers in the dimly lit hall of some shuttered mess. She was palatine—and more than palatine, a Jaddian eali in all but name. She would be faster and stronger than any of them, despite her sex. But I was her father, and the thought of her fighting was always sour to me, though I had encouraged it from the start. Abruptly I recalled teaching her to punch when she was just a little girl, kneeling to be nearer her size as I taught her not to use her fist as a hammer—as all young children do.
“Wind’s howling,” I said, marking the sand that floated into the hold, piling in little drifts in its corners. The Irchtani bobbed their heads. “Will one of you go tell Neema to wire Commander Vedi?”
The commander of the four—his name was Enaam—waddled to the door.
Before he could make it three hopping strides, the sound of laughter issued from the darkness outside the open ramp. A woman’s laughter.
I felt my heart unclench at the sound, but felt my jaw tighten a moment later as Cassandra mounted the ramp.
Edouard Albé walked beside her, an antique MAG rifle slung over one shoulder. The two were laughing still. The HAPSIS agent had removed his spectacles, and his hair was uncharacteristically free of the Delian oil he favored, so that it hung down the right side of his face just past his eye. In place of his officer’s blacks, he wore the dark fatigues of a common legionnaire, but the same high, equestrian-style boots. Cassandra was similarly dressed, having eschewed her Jaddian tunic and swordmaster’s mandyas, though the swords remained, strapped to either hip. She wore one of the undyed sagum cloaks preferred by the locals, and her twin braids hung down, one over either shoulder.
“There you are!” I crossed half the hold toward them. “I was starting to wonder where you were! Neema thought you were off fighting in the mess.”
“That’s Wednesday nights!” Cassandra said, and gestured to young Albé. “Edouard and I were out past the landing field, hunting tataxi.”
“Hunting tataxi?” I said, looking from one to the other. “Did you catch one?”
“We caught three!” Edouard said breezily, adjusting the drape of his gun against his shoulder. “You can’t eat them—they’re mostly chitin and bone anyhow. But they make for good target practice.”
My eyes narrowed. “In the dark?”
“She has thermal sights,” the HAPSIS man explained, letting the rifle slide smoothly from his shoulder to his hands. “You’ll appreciate this. She’s been in my family for generations. Your brother and my ancestor dug her up with a cache of weapons in the caves above my village.”
“Don’t talk to me about my brother, A2,” I said, sharply enough that Cassandra’s face darkened. Privately, I wondered again at this man’s connection to Crispin, at his family’s connection to mine. What village was this he spoke of? Some township in the coastlands of Ramnaras beyond Meidua? I might have asked, but I did not trust the Delian agent, and misliked his overfamiliarity with my daughter.
The enthusiasm that had for a moment brightened his handsome, patrician face faded, and the gun drooped in his hand. “My great-great-grandfather, Jean-Louis, saved your brother’s life with this gun,” he said.
For an instant, the lights of the hold glinted off an embossed silver plate on the weapon’s left side, just above the trigger. The Marlowe devil capered there, trident in hand.
If I had doubts about the fellow’s authenticity, they faded then—or nearly faded. I did not like him, or trust him, but I realized that I had doubted his connection to my home entirely, and drew back a step. “Then your family has done mine a service,” I said—though Edouard knew that already. “Good night, sirrah Albé,” I said, and turned to go. “Come, Cassandra!”
“What was all that?” Cassandra confronted me on the stairs, seizing my wrist.
I stared blankly down at her.
“You’re so cold to him! He’s not a bad sort!” She glared up at me with hard, green eyes.
“You must be careful of him, Cassandra,” I said, voice echoing off the walls of the stairwell. Realizing just how loud I was, I lowered my voice. “You read the Emperor’s letter. These people are not our friends. Not Oberlin. Not the scholiasts. Not Valeriev or any of the locals, and certainly not Special Agent 2.”
She planted her hands on her hips, raised her chin in a gesture as much me as it was her mother. “This is about your brother.”
’Tis about your brother.
“This is nothing to do with Crispin,” I said. “These are not safe people, Cassandra. This is not a safe place. You know why we’re here. What we’re hunting. Even if we could trust the Imperials, this may be one of the most dangerous planets in the galaxy. I need you to be more careful. Of Albé, and in general.” I reached out and put a hand on her cheek. She did not shy away. “Please. There is so much you do not understand.”
“Then teach me!” she said, putting her hand on mine. “Abba! You still have not explained what you did with that man’s body! How you did it. And if I should be so concerned about Edouard, why?”
I didn’t understand. “Because he’s one of them,” I said.
“You were one of them!” she said.
“And you know how that ended!”
“But it cannot be the two of us and Neema against the Empire and this thing!” she said, her own voice rising.
I raised a flat hand and lowered it, cautioning her for quiet. Neema and I had been hard at work destroying the surveillance equipment Oberlin’s men had secreted aboard the Ascalon, but I was by no means confident we’d found it all, and the Irchtani were just below and keen eared.
“Why are you so against him specifically?” Her face darkened. “Is it because he’s a man? Abba, I am forty-one standard. I am not a child!”
“You are my child,” I countered.
“I am an old woman by plebeian standards!”
“You are not plebeian,” I said.
Cassandra exhaled sharply, her frustration plain. “We have to trust someone, Abba,” she said, “Why not Edouard?”
I was silent.
“It’s because of your brother, isn’t it?”
“Enough about my brother, Anaryan,” I said, and resumed my march up the stairs. “Psychologizing ill-suits you.”
“Because I’m right?” She followed me.
“You heard what I said.” We reached the door to the second level and the hall to our cabins. “Be careful with young Albé . . . and all the rest.”
Her footfalls faltered behind me, and I turned. She had stopped, her head bowed, her hand on the frame of the door to the stairs. “Yes, Abba.” She seemed strangely small in that instant, a shadow of the girl she’d been. I had not meant to make her feel so, and took a step toward her.
“Cassandra,” I said, and smiled. She smiled in return—the crooked Marlowe smile. “I love you, you know that?”
“I know,” she said. “I love you, too.”
You’re not wrong.
“I’m sorry I brought you here,” I said. “To this . . . terrible place.”
“I’m not,” she said, and raised her chin as she had before. Like her mother. Like me. “Else you’d be here alone.”
Old habit turned my face from hers before she could read the expression there. Masking it with bravura, I said, “Well, there’s Neema . . . ”
“Good old Neema,” she said, and laughed a little.
“Good night, Anaryan.”
“Buon lail, Abba.”