CHAPTER 12
RIPPLES
Morning came, and brought Tiber Valeriev with it. The Durantine xenologist had orders to show me the chamber where Mann had died. I roused Cassandra, and we made the journey through the camp down into the ruins of Phanamhara, stopping to secure the transparent face shields often worn by workers in the Vaiartu site. They were visors of clearest alumglass that fit snugly over the whole face, just before the ears. A small fan whirred below the chin, conducting a current of filtered air across each of our mouths and noses.
The chamber that had once housed the on-site supplies lay along the left-hand side of the main avenue, in one of the basilicas, a pillared hall decorated with narrow, pointed windows, deeply carved so that triangular beams of sunlight fell upon the chipped stone floor. The wall opposite the door and the square pillars within was covered with line after line of Vaiartu sineoform, each line etched deeply into the green stone by some long-rusted chisel.
“They took the stores out right after it happened,” Valeriev said, voice muffled by his filter mask. “Moved them inside the grand hypostyle, into one of the side chambers. Set up another site the next avenue over.”
I was absurdly conscious of the ringing of my bootheels in that hard and empty place. Every footfall returned as the echo of a hundred feet, until I seemed a platoon. Despite the ambient noise of the men and the excavator working outside the basilica, the quiet of that room was like the quiet of a Chantry sanctum. One almost expected to see icons of graven ivory, votive candles, and to smell the fresh fruits of sacrifice starting to sour.
“They were all in the back, not quite up against the wall.”
“What was this room for?” I asked.
Valeriev brushed his lank, brown hair from where it had fallen over his mask. “We think it’s a kind of monument. Recordkeeping, even.”
“Recordkeeping?” I looked at the inscription on the pillar nearest me, a million thin, notched characters arranged line upon line.
Valeriev pointed. “The Vaiartu language—the main one, that is—is agglutinative. I don’t have the trick of it. I know a few of the symbols.” He traced a line with a finger, not quite touching the vile stone. “U re she te . . . that one there is a click. Su te te . . . another click. That one makes a sound midway between a J and an L—I can’t say it.”
“They could click and vocalize that at the same time,” I said, recalling my vision within the temple of Miudanar.
This revelation did not seem to surprise Valeriev. “I’ve seen the reconstructions. We’ve found some bone and metal fragments, but no complete fossils here.”
“You said there is more than one language here?”
“Oh yes.” Valeriev craned his neck, then approached a tight column of writing on the back wall. “See this? See how the characters are more cramped? We call this Type-C. Carter calls it Onharric.”
“Onharric?”
“Onhar is a Vaiartu colony up Sagittarius,” he said. “It’s where they first found this style.”
“Were they different species?” Cassandra asked, squinting up at the cramped alien letters.
Valeriev shook his head. “We don’t think so. Different ethnoi, maybe.” He gestured at the wall with one spread hand. “This whole place was built by a Vaiartu monarch—ethnarch, what-have-you—named A Ra Va Te Te Ap U Lu.”
“Named what?” Cassandra could hardly conceal her amusement.
“Aravte-Teäplu,” the doctor explained, repeating the name in its humanized pronunciation. “It means blessed or chosen warrior.”
“I suppose it could be a title?” I mused.
Valeriev gave a noncommittal shrug. “Moshda,” he said, which was maybe. “It’s hard to know. But!” He waved his hands at the walls. “You see all four of the Vaiartu languages here, all of them praising their king. All praise to Aravte-Teäplu, the Many-Conquering, the All-Conquering! That sort of thing. Much of the inscription details how he ordered his slaves to build this city, and the tribute they offered him.”
“That seems a strange thing to etch on the walls,” Cassandra said.
“Think of it like credit, Anaryan,” I said. “The builders would have wanted it known how it was they contributed to the work. I’d wager much of the inscription is just . . . names.”
Cassandra hugged herself as she looked up and around at the cyclopean green chamber. “It’s close in here,” she grumbled. “The air doesn’t seem to move.”
“Is the fan in your mask on?” I asked.
“Si, Abba,” she answered, but checked the jaw controls. “Don’t you feel it?”
In point of fact, I did. Despite the sawtooth windows and open stone arch leading back outside, the air within felt stale and dead on my skin. So as not to feel it, I tugged my leather gloves from a coat pocket and pulled them over my hands. “Where was the body?”
Valeriev indicated the place with a jerk of his head. “You can still see the markings on the floor, though they’ve faded.”
I looked at the floor for the first time. Great black stripes marred the green stone, many of them smeared or faded to thin gray. The greatest of these must have run for more than thirty feet, a curling stripe of black on green. Others ran onto the walls, while some were so small they appeared as no more than points of darkness on the verdant stone.
“The wind doesn’t much get in here, as the young miss noted,” Valeriev was still talking.
I raised a hand for quiet.
There was no shine, no distortion of the sort I had seen on Mann’s body, though I stretched my vision wide. Turning my gaze sidelong, I peered in that direction no other man could see, and saw myself standing in the basilica again and again and again, reflections in mirrors like those of the Alcaz du Badr.
Nothing.
I let the vision fade.
They were only markings, looping, wheeling scratches in the alien stone, and though many of them were broken and smeared, enough remained intact that I could see the truth of them—from the greatest orbit to the smallest pinprick.
They were circles all.
I crouched to touch one with gloved fingers, felt a slight depression in the stone—no more than the width of several hairs. The glove came away gritty, black powder on my fingertip. A dark smudge peered blearily up at me where my finger had disturbed the circle. Abruptly, I recalled the plains of Deira upon Berenike, the way the silicates in the soil had melted and fused beneath the Cielcin laser blast.
“It’s burnt,” I said.
“Burnt?” Cassandra crouched and imitated me, rubbing stone ash between her fingers.
“That’s what I thought!” Valeriev squinted down at us. “Can you make any sense of it? Is it possible the Vaiartu have some weapon still operational? Something that could burn stone like this?”
I looked at him, but said nothing. He knew as well as I—and perhaps better—that hardly any piece of electronica would remain functional after nearly a million years.
“Have you found anything they built that still works?” Cassandra asked.
“Nien.” He crossed his arms, a touch defensive. “But they look like plasma scores, don’t they? That’s what Gaston said, and Sir Oliver before him.”
I allowed that they did, and stood with a groan and a click in my left knee. The desert dryness was already depleting my skin—so used to Jadd and the Islis du Albulkam. I longed to scratch my face, but could not.
“They look like ripples, don’t they?” Cassandra asked, still crouching above the burn marks. “Like when you throw a handful of rocks into a pool.”
That cocked my head, and I frowned. “I see what you mean,” I said, walking a quarter turn round the site and nearer the wall. Where two of the circles intercepted, each wavered slightly. “I don’t know of any plasma burner that leaves marks like this.” I turned back to Valeriev. “You’ve seen the bodies?”
“I have not,” he said. “That’s Carter’s bailiwick. Gaston has, but he wouldn’t speak of it.
“Doctor Mann was crushed, Valeriev.” I pointed at my ribs with both hands. “About the torso.”
The man swore in Durantine, a steady stream that morphed into Galstani as he said, “I am not some daft provincial. I have heard your reputation, Lord Marlowe. I will not be frightened by ghost stories and sorcery.”
“There is no sorcery,” I said, tempted to perform for the fellow, though I had once refused to perform for the Emperor. “What you call sorcery is only science you do not understand.” I swept my coat around myself. “There are more things in heaven and Earth, doctor, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
The Durantine xenologist laughed, and looking to Cassandra for succor, asked, “Is he always this way?”
Long-suffering, she opened her hands in an eloquent shrug.
I studied Valeriev. It was obvious to me that—though he knew of the Vaiartu as much as anyone not directly on the HAPSIS payroll—he knew next to nothing of the Monumentals, of the Watchers themselves.
It was not for me to tell him.
And yet . . . Oberlin had spoken of fingerprints, of the places where the energistic bodies of the Watchers intersected our world. The body of Miudanar had been one such fingerprint, the condensates of energy into matter in the form of some black serpent-god. Were not these rings another? The trace in carboned stone of contact with that higher, larger universe?
They were the boot print, and poor, ill-fated Doctor Mann had been the roach.
I felt so small. And of what benefit is the knowledge whence the boot may fall to any insect who has not the strength to withstand its blow? Of all the insects called man, it seemed I alone possessed that knowledge and the faculty to do something about it.
It was . . . a profoundly isolating experience.
“You know,” Valeriev was saying, “you’re an odd man, Marlowe. I’m not sure what I expected. You don’t act like a soldier.”
“I’m not,” I said, and amended, “not anymore.”
“What are you, then?”
I looked sharply at him, coat swirling as I turned. After a beat, I said, “A sorcerer.”
Valeriev grinned, shook a finger at me. “Well played!” he said, “Very well played. A sorcerer!” He descended into a stream of Durantine too accented for me to fully comprehend. I caught the word muskara, however.
Bastard.
“You never answered yesterday,” Valeriev said. “Why are you here?”
I had not taken my eyes from him, and held his gaze until he turned away, frustrated.
“I am perhaps the galaxy’s foremost authority on the Cielcin,” I said, and watched the shadow fall across the doctor’s unhandsome face. “The Cielcin . . . developed on a former Vaiartu colony world. They call the Vaiartu the Enar, the First, and consider themselves their heirs. Dedim, the Second.”
“You’re saying there’s some connection between the Cielcin and the Vaiartu?”
“I am saying the Cielcin may be coming here, doctor,” I said, and saw the man grow pale.
“Why?”
Looking to Cassandra, I smiled, “Something killed Doctor Mann. Whether that something is an Enar weapon—as you suggest—or sorcery, the Cielcin will move to claim it. I am here to ensure that does not happen.”
I said nothing to him of the Watchers. Let it remain a matter between Oberlin, the scholiasts, and myself! There was still a chance for Tiber Valeriev, a chance the Empire might let him go, let him return to the serene republic of his home. It was unlikely, but the secrets I held were a hazard then, a danger to all who knew them.
Better he remain director of the dig, and only that.
Better he remain in the dark.
The light—as I have had uncounted occasions to learn—is forever blinding.