CHAPTER 28
THE OCEAN OF SILENCE
The desert stretched out before me, boundless and bare. I had left the ruined landing field behind, limped free of the wreck and carnage of the night and climbed the sloping dune to the spot where the bones of the Cetoscolides thrust from the blowing sands.
Rosy dawn had come to Sabratha, and the desert—dull gray by starlight—was brightening toward the white and pale dun of day. I could hardly remember being so tired.
It was over.
The day would be hot, I could feel it already, and prayed that I would not remain on the surface for long. There were Cielcin still in the camp, the stranded survivors of the battle. Now and again the distant report of gunfire sounded in the field below, accompanied by the violet shout of plasma.
I sank to the ground at the foot of one towering rib, laid the hilt of my unkindled sword in my lap. The dune was not tall, but it was the highest point beyond the westmost margin of the camp, and commanded a view of the desert all round, and of the camp and Phanamhara beyond. From it, I could see the desolation of Ushara.
It was like a mighty tower had fallen, or a ship had crashed to earth.
Fragments of alien stone—some hundreds of feet across and curling like the discarded nails of some immeasurable giant—lay strewn across the entirety of the camp, from landing field to motor pool, a space of more than a mile. The Watcher had taken the energy of our ships, used it to restore her power and her shape. The woman-thing I had encountered in the pantheon had been a shadow, the faintest ripple presaging the tidal wave that had crashed upon Sabratha.
I had read the Gnomon papers, the reports from Project Perseus’s efforts on Nairi. Exposing the Watcher’s energy pattern to an electromagnetic pulse of sufficient magnitude disrupted the energies that composed what passed for the creature’s body. Its energies were variously scattered or reduced to some lower state, condensing into the dark, heavy baryonic substance that littered the world below.
It would have to be destroyed. All of it, and Phanamhara with it. Not a single scrap could remain to fall into the wrong hands.
And they were all of them the wrong hands.
Some spark of the beast, Miudanar, had remained in the bones on Eue. Might it not then be that some fragment of Ushara yet endured, deep within those new-made bones?
I laid my head against the cool pillar of bone at my back. How I yearned for cool water! For sleep! And yet I knew I could not, knew my labors were not yet done. Ribbons of gold flame scratched the sky, bleeding black smoke against the first light of day. Surely it would not be long before Hulle’s fleet descended. Gaston and what remained of his garrison and of the HAPSIS defenders would have to pacify the remaining Cielcin.
They would all of them be killed.
There would be a great burning on the sands. Inhuman bodies piled like cordwood. Soaked with rocket fuel. Burned. Our own dead would be treated with greater deference. They would be burned in time, taken to Markov Station or Williamtown and cremated with the proper ceremony. A chanter would recite the litany and lanterns would be lit. The families of the local men would receive their ashes. The families of the offworlders would receive a letter and the two customary hurasams.
A lone figure had spotted me, was moving toward me from the edge of the camp.
It was one of the Cielcin. The creature looked surreal in the plain light of morning. Such creatures belonged to the night, to the deep night that lies below the ground, and the night deeper still that lies beyond the sky.
I did not have the strength left in me to stand, not even when four more of its kind emerged and followed after it. Seeing them come, I understood a thing I realized I had known since I saw my face reflected in Ushara’s bones and turned to climb this hill.
I had come all this way to die.
I but waited—there, atop my dune—for the coming of the new sun.
I was sweating badly, had been sweating for a long time, and my breath came hard. Had I inhaled too much of the Vaiartu poison? Or was this something else? Some effect of my contest with the Watcher itself?
It did not matter.
I could not fight five Cielcin, not in my state.
I would die at the point of a sword.
But it was not to be.
The Cielcin at the head of the little group had only one horn.
Ramanthanu was several minutes climbing the hill, and finding me there slumped against the bones of the great whale, it knelt. “Ba-Aeta-doh,” it said, “daratolo!”
You live.
“So do you,” I said.
“For the moment,” the captain said. “Your people will kill us, if they can.”
“They cannot tell you from your kin.”
“I know,” it said, and standing looked down upon the ruined camp and the bones of the thing it had worshipped until that night. “You killed it.”
I shook my head. “Veih. It was not me.”
“There were two of you,” it said. “I saw. We all saw.”
“I only . . . bought us time.”
“Your people killed it,” Ramanthanu said. “Your weapons.”
“Yes,” I said, whispering the word in my own language. There was no Cielcin word for yes, only a sharp exhalation. I made the sound, and said, “I think they did.”
One of the other Cielcin raised its face to me. “Was he not a god?”
“No,” I said. Privately, I was not so sure. When Ushara held me in the air, impressed herself upon me, I had felt her fury, her torment, her pain.
Ina sippirāti sha dāriātim annepish.
“I was made in the morning of the world,” I said, translating—though it was a language I had never learned.
“Dein?” Ramanthanu was eying me, head to one side.
I had spoken in my own tongue, and looking up at the xenobite, said, “Raka kasamnte.”
It’s nothing.
Ushara had said she was made. Created. Designed. By the Quiet? It seemed so. And yet the Quiet and the Watchers had been at war since the uttermost beginning of time. Why would he have created them, if only to struggle against them for uncounted trillions of years? I could sense the answer in me, left there . . . by Ushara? By the Quiet himself? But I could not find it. I could remember knowing more, could remember being her, but they were memories clouded as by alcohol, and I could not call them up.
Only slowly did I understand that Ushara had for a time possessed me; just as Kharn Sagara had possessed the homunculus woman, Naia; just as Urbaine’s worm had possessed the biologic circuitry of Valka’s mind. Ushara was gone, had departed from me, but her fingerprints remained, pressed into the soft matter of my brain.
“That was not a god worth serving,” I said to my Cielcin coterie.
Ramanthanu stood still as stone. After a while it raised its face to the morning sky, eyes narrowed to mere slits. Presently, it fumbled in a pouch at its waist and drew out a pair of what seemed to be jeweler’s glasses. One by one, the captain socketed these to its eyes, slit nostrils flaring. “I have seen a god,” it said. “How many of the People can say this?” It looked to its companions. “I have fought a god and lived.”
One of the others shaded its eyes. “We should be dead.”
“And yet we are not, Otomno!” said Ramanthanu. “The god would have killed us but for Utannash and his Oranganyr, his champion. Our prince!” Here Ramanthanu pointed at me. “You saw him drive the god from the sky! Saw him be in two places at once! It is a miracle! A miracle of Utannash!”
“Koramsamte wo!” said another of the five. “A miracle, you say? A lie! Have you forgotten what Utannash is, Ramanthanu? It is the un-god, the lord of lies! You are deceived!”
Ramanthanu snarled, rounding on its inferior. “This is no deception, Egazimn! This is victory! Marlowe is aeta!”
“This yukajji is no aeta!” said the one called Egazimn.
“He slew Ulurani! And Otiolo!” Ramanthanu said. “He is aeta by ikurratimyr and anabitimyr!”
Blood-right and might-right.
The one called Egazimn spit on the sand at my feet.
Ramanthanu seized Egazimn by the horns, pulling it down even as it raised a knee to crack Egazimn across the face. The lesser Cielcin stumbled, fell to its knees. The other three watched as Ramanthanu kicked its subordinate to the dust and lay one clawed foot upon the beaten Pale’s cheek.
“You are mine, Egazimn,” Ramanthanu said. “You think Muzugara’s death has ended your bondage? You are mine, and you will obey. We belong to Marlowe, now. He is ba-aeta. Our lord. And if Utannash is the greater god, then he will be our god.”
“Enough!” I said, not rising. “Enough fighting.” I turned my face away, peered out across the desert. Flat and broad it was, and white almost as alabaster in the day’s new sun.
Haltingly, Ramanthanu removed its foot from Egazimn’s face.
How was I to keep them?
They believed me some great prince, some king of humanity—but I had no station, no power, no household or retinue. No armies. No command. The Troglita was destroyed. What little remained of HAPSIS in-system answered to A2, not to me. Of all the people on Sabratha, of all the people in the world, the only ones I might reasonably call mine were Cassandra and Neema. The Irchtani would obey me, acting out of a sense of religious obligation little different from Ramanthanu itself, but they were answerable to the Imperial hierarchy, to the Legions, to HAPSIS.
These five Cielcin had most like defected only to die. Their reward would be the White Sword. The gallows. The firing squad.
Seeing them, I was unable to quell the loathing and deep revulsion in me. These warred with the child I had been—the child I had thought long dead—and the hope of a better world.
Of better worlds.
I would try to save them, if I could.
Ramanthanu extended a hand to help me stand.
I took it, almost fell when I stood.
The captain steadied me, and I clenched my hands to stop them shaking.
It was the poison, I decided. It had to be. I felt so weak.
I stood there, swaying, trying not to fall. I looked out over the Mare Silentii, the Ocean of Silence, and felt the morning wind cool across my face.
“What’s that, there?” I pointed.
There was something red out on the dunes.
“Dein?” Ramanthanu asked. “Ti-saem gi ne?”
“There!” I pointed again, held my arm in line.
“I do not see it.”
“It’s there!” I thrust my finger as though it were a sword.
Only belatedly did I remember that the Cielcin could not see red, and the gray of it would not stand out against the desert’s white and dun.
But I saw it plain, a mile off or more.
I spared a glance for the sky. There was as yet no sign of the Ascalon or of Hulle’s fleet descending. Not yet.
“Help me to it,” I said.
This was not the day I would die, after all.
Necessity forced me to lean against Ramanthanu as we went, moving slowly toward the object lying on the dunes. It took us the better part of an hour, but we reached the spot where the thing lay, and I saw that it was precisely what I had expected . . . and feared.
The body lay below the swell of the vast, shallow dune on which I’d sat and waited for the end that had refused to come. There the sands ran smooth, flat almost as the horizon.
The body that lay there sprawled beneath a cloak of heavy scarlet samite, fringed in gold, his body clad in a suit of golden foil, his head englobed beneath a bubble of tinted glass.
It was Gaizka.
The sorcerer had escaped the ruin of Phanamhara, had wandered out onto the sands to die.
“He must have broadcast his thoughtform offworld,” I said, though I was not certain the Cielcin understood.
“He is dead,” said Otomno.
“The witches shed their bodies as the jishiara sheds its skin,” said Ramanthanu. What a jishiara was I thought I could guess. “He is alive. He returned to Rugubur.”
“Rugubur?” I asked.
“Our ship,” the captain replied. “It must have been the witch who ordered my people to flee.”
I turned to look up at the Cielcin. “Flee? Back to Dorayaica?”
Ramanthanu’s nostrils flared as it breathed that sharp breath by which its kind signaled the affirmative. I made Ramanthanu release my arm, and staggered toward the body. The captain’s voice followed me. “The Elusha-Shiomu will know you have killed the god.”
“Good,” I said. “Let Dorayaica know it was me.”
How quickly our defeat had turned to victory. Had I caught Gaizka in the tunnels and slain him as I had slain his slave, the Cielcin might have remained in orbit, and battled to the last. It was a battle Hulle and his paltry defense force might not have been able to win. We had won out by sheer chance, and slain the Watcher, too.
“He might still be alive,” I said, and stumped toward the wizard’s body.
Crack.
I froze, felt the sensation of crushed glass coruscate from my heel. My blood—which mere moments before had warmed my heart with thoughts of Dorayaica in a cold fury, prowling the dark halls of the Dhar-Iagon—ran cold. As though I had tread onto the path of some serpent, I slowly raised my boot, stepped back to look at what I’d tread upon.
I already knew.
The fulgurite had broken into countless fragments, smashed to powder where my heel had struck. Dropping to one knee, I found the end of a piece still intact, and lifted it from the sand. It lay just beneath the surface, like the root of some young tree. I pulled it up, a curling piece of gnarled green glass. It curled toward Gaizka’s body, had perhaps encircled it.
I dropped the fulgurite and stood, moved hurriedly to the dead man’s side.
Crack. Crack.
Going to one knee, I turned the body over. Numb fingers felt Gaizka’s neck, but the seal of his helmet stymied me. Hissing, I felt for the catch that would open his suit. The neck flange whined as pressure equalized, and a strange, orange gas vented from the broken seal. I drew back as it dissipated, though I caught the incense smell of cassia as I twisted the helmet free, recoiled at the sight of the sorcerer’s face.
Gaizka’s head was strangely bloated, hairless and obscene. In place of a nose, the Extrasolarian possessed a series of ridgelike slits that fell in chevrons over a pursed and lipless mouth. They looked like gills, and indeed they must have been. His ears were shrunken almost to nonexistence, and his flesh was a pallid orange stippled with white. He resembled nothing so much as some deep-sea creature swollen for want of pressure.
“He is not yukajjimn,” said Ramanthanu.
“He was,” I said, “but he sold the human part of himself long ago.” As I spoke, I turned Gaizka’s head, revealing the mechanism embedded in his skull above one vestigial ear. Its black metal drank the morning light, but blacker still were the burns that blistered the flesh about it. The skin of his face and neck had split, as lightning splits a tree, and blood dripped from it. “No . . . ” The word escaped me in a thin moan. “No no no no no . . . ”
“Dein raka ne?”
A simple transmission should not have so dissolved the magi’s flesh, so burned skin and bone alike. It would have taken tremendous power to boost a signal through Sabratha’s magnetosphere, but the device had nearly been destroyed, from the look of it. Glass wires had melted, fused to the cooked flesh, and the delicate mechanism seemed reduced to slag. More power had coursed through it than its makers had ever intended, of that much I felt sure. I looked to the strip of fulgurite I had cast aside and knew—though our boffins had yet to run the proper analyses—knew that more than Gaizka had escaped with Gaizka.
I felt a hideous smile creep across my face, and an absurd swell of glee blossomed in my heart. A wicked laugh escaped me, and it was a moment before I mastered myself, hunching over the body of the dead magus. Turning that laughter into a howl of impotent rage, I hammered on the corpse of the dead sorcerer, pummeled the armored chest until my wounded palm wept blood afresh.
I was free.
“No!” I shouted the word.
Not me, not Hadrian.
Ushara was free.
I was Hadrian. Hadrian. Not Ushara.
The part of her that remained in me was jubilant, and would have leapt into the air if it were any more than a memory.
Fingerprints.
Shaking fingers found my face, and abruptly I recalled the way in which Urbaine’s worm had moved Valka’s hands, how I had to stop her clawing out her eyes in the quiet of that medica on Edda, how she tried to strangle herself. It was the same.
As Urbaine had left his fingerprints on Valka, Ushara had made her mark on my mind.
With heavy hands, I smoothed my rictus grin away, and whispered a scholiast remonstrance against joy to master the unholy glee that had brought forth that wicked laugh. I was blessed that my only companions in that moment were Cielcin, and that Cielcin little understood our moods and feelings.
Ushara had escaped, had not died beneath Albé’s bombardment.
Or a part of her had not.
The Watchers were pure energy, pure spirit—save when they put on matter like old clothes. But the word spirit means breath, and is not our every breath each a little copy of the other, each a little new creation, each divided from the last by the actions of lung and diaphragm? Ushara must have breathed into the fleeing Gaizka, inspired him, possessed him, transmitting but the smallest portion of herself, which—reaching its destination—would be free to grow again. The Watchers were a pattern of energy, a pattern whose whole might be regenerated from its smallest part. They died only when the whole of that pattern was wiped away, scattered by the inescapable light of a weapon like that Project Perseus had made.
“Perhaps his machine betrayed him,” said Ramanthanu, misinterpreting the Extrasolarian’s tormented flesh. “Perhaps he is truly dead.”
“No,” I said, certain my understanding was correct, for it came from her. “No, he reached your people.” I hesitated. Ramanthanu’s faith in me was predicated on its belief that I had killed its god. I dared not break that faith, not then, not there, when I was outnumbered and so desperately weak.
Very well. Utannash was the Liar in the ancient tongue of the Cielcin.
I would lie.
“How do we signal your people?” the captain asked. “They must come for you.”
“They will,” I said, and standing, put my back to Gaizka’s corpse. I had no comm, no flare gun, nothing to do but wait. “Give it time.” Drawing my coat about my narrow frame, I took half a dozen steps from the body of the dead magus, fulgurites cracking beneath my feet. When the noise stopped, I sank to the pale sands to wait.
Dry and ceaseless thunder broke upon the upper airs perhaps half an hour later, and looking up I saw the friction fires of entry, and the black shapes of our ships falling like a hail of arrows. The Irchtani in the camp took wing and rose in a spiral cyclone to greet them. It was like watching the hungry crows clamoring above the slaughter on some blood-soaked field.
I shivered, despite the sun and the heat of the newborn day.
The men who found us fired on my Cielcin guard, and Ramanthanu’s four remaining subordinates—Otomno and Egazimn, Bikashi and Atiamnu—survived only by the grace of their shields. It took all my faculties to keep them from responding in turn. Still, Egazimn kept its hand on its coiled nahute, and the others clutched their swords. In time, I persuaded both Hulle’s men and my Cielcin to stand down, and we were escorted to where the relief team had landed.
Men froze as we passed, and many made warding gestures, or simply glared. Still more shouted questions, or jeered at my inhuman entourage. I had no time for them, moved in a kind of dream. The memory of that awful laughter sounded terrible in my ears, and I felt myself chivvied along, like a leaf tossed upon the surface of some rushing stream.
We had failed, and yet everyone was cheering. Men clambered atop the wreck of shuttles or upon stacked crates, raised their guns and thumped one another on the back. The Irchtani still circled in the air, crying aloud in victory.
They did not know . . . they could not know that we had failed.
Commandant Vimal Gaston, haggard but very much alive, met us at the edge of the camp. His paracoita—the short-haired, slim-figured girl who had brought the man his armor the night before—hurried in his wake, the black tape of a medical corrective applied to a wound on the left side of her brow.
“They said you had the Pale in tow,” he said, looking at Ramanthanu and its compatriots. “ . . . I did not believe.”
“These saved me in the night,” I said. “They are defectors.”
“Defectors?” Gaston frowned, surveying my unlikely companions. “Is that . . . possible?”
I looked to Ramanthanu myself. “I don’t rightly know. But they are not your problem, Commandant. You must annihilate this site. The whole thing. Clear all your people out, and see that none of them have taken anything from here. No trophies, no spoils, nothing. Not even a splinter of that black rock. Do you understand?”
“What was that thing?” Gaston asked, looking to the nearest shard of Ushara’s bones.
“Once everyone is clear, annihilate the site. AM bombs. Destroy everything.”
“Everything?” It was one of the diggers. “The ruins?”
“Everything!” I said. “It would be better to evacuate the planet, entire.”
Gaston looked utterly lost. “Evacuate? We are victorious!”
“We have triumphed here,” I said, “and for today. But this is not over.”
The commandant shook his leonine head, and I was struck—not for the first time—by how much he recalled so many officers I had known. Titus Hauptmann and William Crossflane, even old Lord Karol Venantian. One might be forgiven for thinking the Empire kept a mold in some far-flung corner of the realm, and pressed such men from it on occasion. “I don’t understand any of this, lord. I saw a . . . was it a ship? A beast? I saw the thing with the eyes in the sky, and everything lifted toward it. Is that what’s been killing our people? And some of my men say they saw a giant! A woman, they say, fifty feet high! I’d have them whipped for liars if there weren’t so many.”
“They’re not liars,” I said.
Gaston swore. “Impossible! Nothing that big can exist! What the hell is going on, Marlowe?”
I stared at him. Gone was the affable country officer, the man who had kept posters of the Hero of Aptucca on his walls as a little boy. He had met his hero, and that hero was keeping secrets from him. In the end, Gaston folded in the face of my silence and staring eyes. Seeing him cede ground, I pressed. “Do as I say, Gaston. Prepare the site for annihilation.”
“Those orders should come from the governor-general,” he said.
“They will,” I said in response, stepping well inside the reach of the other man’s arms. Gaston was perhaps two inches shorter than I was, and patrician. He bowed his head reflexively. “I will sail for Williamtown at once and speak to Lord Genseric. Under no circumstances are any of your people to take anything from this site. Am I clear?”
“But why?” Gaston puffed out his chest. “If you would but explain—”
“These are Imperial matters, Commandant,” I said, advancing until I stood within inches of the man. “Who do you think I serve? Who do you think I report to?”
Gaston blinked, retreated half a step. “I . . . why, the Emperor, my lord.”
“It is the Emperor I owe an explanation to, Gaston. Not you.” I brushed past him, limping on my injured knee. I needed medical attention, needed to wash, to rest, to eat.
I needed water most of all, needed not to bandy words with Vimal Gaston.
Ushara had escaped, and only I knew it.
Something solid collided with me before I’d made it five steps past the addled commandant. I felt arms about me, and it was only slowly that I realized I was being embraced. I recognized the top of the head pressed against my shoulder, the tightly wound twin braids.
“Altapho arram mita,” she said.
I thought you were dead.
Matching her Jaddian, I said, “Abdain, Anaryan. Never.”
One fist hammered my back, and I groaned, breath stopped short.
“Don’t ever send me away again,” she said. “I could have helped you.”
“Non tora,” I said. “Not now.”
“Not now?” She drew herself to arm’s length, gripped me by the arms, glared up at me with those great, bright eyes. “Not now! Abba!”
Still in Jaddian, I said, “The Watcher escaped.”
Cassandra’s face—pale already as my own—went white as Ramanthanu’s. “What?”
“It escaped,” I said again. “It used that Extrasolarian’s transmitter to break free of the planet’s magnetic field. The Cielcin got what they came for.”
She looked round. “Edouard said we won. The bombs!”
It was not the time or place for this conversation, surrounded by the men. Better to let them have their victory, better to let them guess at what it was they’d seen in the sky that night. If I had my way, the Empire would evacuate Sabratha entire.
“Where is Edouard?” I asked, switching to Imperial standard, taking her by the arm and making her walk beside me.
“On the ship,” she answered, following my change of language. “We only just landed; I came as fast as I could. You wouldn’t answer your comm.”
I raised my left wrist in demonstration. “It’s dead.”
“Abba, are you all right?” Cassandra stopped to look up at me, an expression like horror in her eyes. “You’re shaking.”
I shook her off. “I’ll be all right,” I said, and tried to walk forward, realized after several unsteady paces that I had no notion where the Ascalon was moored. “Where?” My vision swam, and it seemed almost that Ushara had returned, for two Cassandras twisted across one another in my field of view.
But I was only delirious.
I felt my daughter’s hands upon my shoulders, felt her try to steady me. She was shouting for help.
“I think,” I tried to speak, but my mouth was dry as the desert. “I think . . . I need . . . to rest.”
Then the sands of the desert rose to swallow me.
The last thing I remember—before the darkness took me—were Cassandra’s eyes as she fell to her knees beside me.
They were green as emeralds.