The Pearl Saga - Mistress of the Pearl Part 22

"My Lady, I-"

"Minnum, listen to me. We are in the Temple of the Avenging Spirit. It is a holy place. Well, of course all of Za Hara-at is holy. But this temple is the Holy of Holies. It is place where the entire engine that is this city was controlled. Do you understand me? In the language of Za Hara-at, 'holy' may be translatedas 'power.' " She looked around them. "Once, there was power here. The secret is that it abides. The power has never left Za Hara-at. It only lies sleeping, waiting for all the pieces of the puzzle to be fitted into place, waiting for the day of its resurrection."

Her gaze gathered him in, surrounded him, enfolded him. For him, there was nothing else but her.

"Minnum, I will ask you for the second and last time. What else did you find here?"

"There was something else, Lady." Tears began to leak out of Minnum's eyes. "It lay just beneath the dagger you hold."

"I know," she said. "I knew it the moment I held it."

He felt as miserable, as alone as he had in the bowels of the terrifying Museum of False Memory.

"Now you must tell me."

And receive my punishment, he thought. I am trapped by my own stupidity. How on Kundala could I have lost the thing? He sighed deeply. "It was a banestone, Lady. Sornnn and I found a banestone here."

Giyan closed her eyes for a moment, and it seemed to him that in that moment she aged ten years. She said, "And where is it now?"

Minnum was weeping again. "Well, that's just it. I do not know."

Giyan sat watching him, silent, patient, waiting as Za Hara-at to avenge itself on those who had been foolish enough to believe that they had destroyed it.

"It. . . Lady, it just disappeared. As of its own accord."

"A banestone can do many things," Giyan said, "but walk off on its own is not one of them. What, then, is your conclusion?"

"Lady, I do not-"

"But you do, Minnum. You did not lose the banestone. It was stolen."

Oh, avenging Mima, now what? he thought. This is what Sornnn had warned him of, what he had refused to believe because the possibility made him deathly afraid.

"Minnum," she said softly, "who could have stolen it?"

"Not Sornnn."

"Don't be absurd. It would never enter his mind."

"One of the Beyy Das, then. The archeological a.s.sistants are known for their venality."

"They trade in petty trinkets. Small objects they know they can smuggle out undetected. Of course you know the penalty exacted if they are caught."

Minnum shuddered. "It must have been a Khagggun."

"A Khagggun would never come this deep into Za Hara-at because they escort only the V'ornn architects. Even they who know no fear are afraid of this place."

"Then who?" he cried. "Who could have stolen it?" But he knew. He knew as surely as he knew his own sins.

Giyan rose, and now she led him back down the aisle. Minnum was in an agony of despair. He had known from the moment he had discovered the banestone missing that he had made the gravest error by not hiding it more thoroughly.

When they had returned to the Plaza of the Unfinished Rune, she said to him in her gentlest voice, "I know you think you are about to be punished."

"I do, Lady."

"Well, stop it. We must both turn our thoughts from what has happened to what is about to be." She stopped them near the stone cenote at the center of the plaza. "We must a.s.sume the worst has happened."

He almost choked. "The sauromicians."

"Yes. It seems likely that they have stolen the banestone. That would explain how they were able to block Perrnodt's opal exploration, and the means by which they were able to introduce the Madila into her system."

"Lady, what can I do to repair the damage?"

"Not feeling sorry for yourself would be a good place to start. Ensuring that you do not repeat yourerror would be another." She put a hand on his shoulder. "As for the rest, have patience and faith." She looked around them and took a deep breath of the stirring city. "It is good to be in Za hara-at, Minnum, for I feel as if I have come home."

"I, too, feel an affinity for this place. But this makes my foolishness all the more egregious."

"I don't know about you," Giyan said, rubbing her hands together, "but I am suddenly famished."

They returned to Minnum's tent in time to save the haunch of sling-bok from being charred through and through, but the blood-rose stir-fry was beyond redemption. They ate their fill of the meat, along with hunks of spicy flatbread the Beyy Das made from the flour of pedda-pads. Afterward, they drank ba'du until it was gone. Then Minnum broke out a bottle of naeffita, a jade-green liquor, whose smokey richness held hints of cloves, cinnamon, and burnt orange.

They lounged on Han Jad carpets, and, as the night wore on, wrapped themselves in patterned Beyy Das blankets to keep the chill at bay. They spoke of many things important and trivial, happy and sad, and each was pleased to get to better know the other.

"Tell me something," Giyan said at last. "This sauromician herb Madila, is it commonly grown and harvested among sauromicians?"

"Oh, no, Lady," Minnum said. "In fact, because the soil in the Kor-rush was inhospitable the archons had no access to it for all the time I was there."

"Then we can deduce that the archons have left their exile in the Korrush. More evidence that they have gained a powerful ally."

"I would say that is an inescapable conclusion."

"Since they now have access to Madila, they must be inhabiting an area where the mushroom naturally grows, for they would not have had enough time to sow spores and bring them to harvest."

"Again, a clever deduction, Lady." Minnum nodded. "In my experience, there is only one place on the northern continent where this herb is naturally occurring. I myself used to go there, from time to time, in order to pick it. But that was many long years ago."

"And where would that be?" Giyan asked patiently.

Minnum took a long draught of naeffita. "Ah, in the West Country. High in the Djenn Marre foothills in the far northwest quadrant of the Borobodur forest. On Receive Tears Ridge."

"Prepare yourself, Minnum, for that is where we are bound."

The little sauromician shuddered. "Oh, my Lady, would that you would ask anything else of me."

Giyan's gaze caught his in its web and would not let go. "But this is what I am asking of you, Minnum.

We will go together."

"Alone?"

"Why?"

A cold wind had sprung up, moaning through the bones of the ruined city like mourners at a funeral.

Minnum grabbed a cloak, wrapped it around him.

"The West Country is dangerous," he said, "and the territory around Receive Tears Ridge most of all."

"I know." Giyan nodded. "The Khagggun patrols."

"The V'ornn and their weapons will be the least of our worries, my Lady." He shivered. "If the mushroom fields are still there, then chances are so are the sauromicians."

Sahor could not sleep. However much he tried to calm himself, he failed. He rose and, lighting lamps that guttered in insidious drafts, padded out of his sleeping quarters and into the warren of galleries of the Museum of False Memory. This curious structure, guarded by gar-goyled and crenellated stone walls, crouched like a hunchback at the end of Fifth Division Street in the far western district of Axis Tyr. From its ramparts, if one dared to walk them, could be seen the Great Phosphorus Marsh, where nocturnal hunters had, for centuries, stalked the large and dangerous amphibious claiwen. The gargoyles crowning its forbidding parapets were, in fact, artful depictions of daemons, those frightening creatures whom the Great G.o.ddess Miina had imprisoned in the sorcerous Abyss eons ago, and whose sole purpose, so thelegends said, was to free themselves and overrun all of Kundala.

Sahor was immensely excited to be there. When he had been the Gyrgon Nith Sahor he and Eleusis Ashera had spent much time there, learning all they could about the mysterious treasures housed in the museum. But that excitement, intense though it was, did not account for his insomnia. Ever since he had left Za Hara-at, he had thought of nothing but his father.

Now, as he prowled the dim, packed galleries, he knew what he must do. In fact, he had known ever since he had arrived weeks earlier. What had stayed his hand was the sheer danger of it. He did not know how many enemies Nith Sahor still had among the Gyrgon Comradeship, but under Nith Batox.x.x that cabal had been both numerous and powerful. Now they believed him dead. The risk that they should think otherwise was, at that moment in time, unacceptable. He was still getting used to his new body, still struggling with not being Gyrgon, not being Nith. He did not yet know the extent of his powers; for, despite being reborn through technomancy into Eleana's son, he still retained much of his Gyrgon DNA.

It had been irreversibly fused to the child's hybrid DNA.

He paused before a mirror, staring at his face. It was long, angular, predatory. He could not get used to the cruelty etched by the acid of heredity into its physiognomy. There was no avoiding the truth. It was the face of Stogggul Kurgan, the baby's father-his father, now that he was inside this body. He shuddered at the thought. His father was Nith Einon. To think otherwise was to court madness. Sahor he might now be, but he could not let go of his Gyrgon roots.

Swiftly, he returned to his quarters and dressed in patterned black robes of Kundalan design and manufacture. This was one aspect of his new life that he enjoyed immensely, for as Nith Sahor he had had to keep secret his love of all things Kundalan.

Clouds made phosph.o.r.escent by moonslight sailed in the black night sky. A small dusting of the brightest stars could be seen through the harsh V'ornn-made light haze that emanated from the softly thrumming city.

By back alleys and narrow deserted streets, he made his circuitous way into the northern district, home to the hardworking Mesagggun and the alluring Looorm. Several times he halted, shrinking back into shadowed doorways or runed arches to avoid being seen by Khagggun patrolling on foot and in hoverpods. Not that anyone would recognize him, but he had no desire to be stopped and questioned.

Presently, he arrived at the section of the city that was his destination, all crooked streets and dead-end lanes. On Black Chronos Street, he stood watching the dumb, unlovely facade of the warehouse Nith Sahor had known so well. Under various false ident.i.ties, he had over the decades acquired s.p.a.ce in several quarters of Axis Tyr, there recreating parts of his lab-orb in the Temple of Mnemonics. His devious strategy served two purposes. First, its forced redundancy ensured that his research would survive even the most catastrophic cataclysm. Second, it protected both him and his work from the legion of enemies that over the years had grown up around him.

That was hardly surprising, given the sundering of the Kundalan Comradeship. Its shift from the pursuit of science to the ama.s.sing of political power had broken the whole into fractious blocs. It had been the late unlamented Nith Batox.x.x who had engineered this tragic alteration in the Gyrgon way of life. But it was Nith Einon's central theory that haunted his son's every waking thought. From the moment we first engaged the Centophennni, nothing inside the Comradeship has been the same, Sahor's father had posited. That one act tainted us with what the doctrine of Enlil spoke of as the Original Sin. How could he be wrong? Sahor asked himself. There seemed little doubt that this fear, as deep-seated as it was unspoken, was what had moved the Comradeship officially to repudiate the religion, to ban its worship, to systematically destroy its priesthood and persecute those who stubbornly refused to surrender their faith in the V'ornn G.o.d Enlil. It was not coincidence, Sahor knew, that his swarm of V'ornn had come upon Kundala at just this time. Ever since he had set foot on this planet, Sahor had felt a deep and abiding conviction that the V'ornn had reached a nexus point in their existence.

And he had posited his own theory, an adjunct to Nith Einon's: Here we will make our stand. Here, the great scythe of evolution will reach us. Here, we will, as a species, either survive or be plowed under.

There were shadows in the street, shifting, and he tensed. But it was only a wyr-hound, thin of legs,belly grotesquely distended, sniffing its way through strewn garbage and regurgitated sewage. All at once, it stopped, lifted its head. Its glittering eyes searched for the source of the scent it had picked up. It watched the shadows, the rhythmic rise and fall of its rib cage its only movement. It growled, baring its yellow teeth as it lowered its hindquarters.

With a swift, practiced stride, a Khagggun emerged from the doorway where he had been hidden and, drawing his shock-sword, dealt the animal a fatal blow.

"Why did you bother?" a voice said from the deep shadows of the same doorway.

"Disease-ridden pests." His companion wiped off the twin blades on the wyr-hound's patchy fur.

"I know you too well." The other Khagggun emerged into the street. "You're just bored."

"Who wouldn't be?" The first Khagggun sheathed his weapon. "Standing out here, night after night, guarding this abandoned building. What for? What have we done to deserve the short stick?"

The second Khagggun shrugged. "Part of the job."

"No. We are being punished, I tell you."

"Well, anyway, it's almost dawn."

"You can play at being the obedient little Khagggun for all the good it will do you. For my part, I've had more than enough boredom for one night. What say we go find some Mesagggun and mete out our own brand of punishment?"

The second Khagggun took one last look at the entrance to the warehouse. "To N'Luuura with it, let's go."

Sahor watched them stalk off in search of b.l.o.o.d.y mayhem. He might have pitied the Mesagggun those two would ferociously attack, had not his mind been working at fever pitch. He crossed to where the wyr-hound lay in a pool of its own blood and touched it in a kind of benediction. Without it, he would have run afoul of the Khagggun. He knew why they had been sent there to guard this "abandoned warehouse." But who had sent them?

Some clever Gyrgon, one who had been with Nith Batox.x.x when he had launched his near-fatal attack, was doubtless behind the Khagggun guard. The fact that the auxiliary laboratory was still being watched so long after his "death" gave him pause. The unknown Gyrgon was ensuring that no other Gyrgon loyal to Nith Sahor would gain entrance without his ident.i.ty being noted. All this made him approach with extreme caution. He could, of course, have gone to either of the other two locations in Axis Tyr, but there had always been an uncharacteristic sentimental streak in him. His transformation into a hybrid corpus had only enhanced that atypical V'ornn trait. Eleusis Ashera had possessed it; so had his son Annon.

This warehouse was where he and his father had last been together. By means of complex technomancy, he had resurrected Nith Einon. In secret, he had labored many months to manufacture a fiendishly complex bio cortical net in the form of a Teyj to house Nith Einon's electromagnetic force. His father had been with him at the time of the attack. Sahor had managed to collapse the bio cortical net into a stream of iconic positrons just before the final conflagration that would make the body of Nith Sahor unable to support life.

Thus he had returned to the place of his father's temporary interment in order once again to bring him back to life. He could not accomplish that from another location. He needed to resurrect him from the place where he had been deconstructed.

It was well that his guard was up. Upon reaching the musty entrance, he discovered a null-wave net, much like those deployed in and around the Temple of Mnemonics. Upon close inspection, however, he discovered that it was a very special one. Entering it would not only immobilize any intruder, even a Gyrgon, but it would send a photon pulse of a wholly unfamiliar sequence that only the Gyrgon who had constructed the net would pick up.

The truly astonishing thing was that he still saw as a Gyrgon without in any way being connected to the Comradeship neural net. How this was possible he was yet to understand.

He went swiftly around to the side of the warehouse. A dust-blown sysal tree spread a kris-spider web of shadows onto the blank facade. Scaling the tree, he reached a place perhaps midway to the sloping roof. There, he stretched himself full length on a st.u.r.dy branch.Taking out a slender dagger, he tapped its hilt against sections of the facade until he heard the hollow sound he had been seeking. He used the dagger point to dig into the whitewash. Chunks of it pattered to the ground at the base of the tree. He continued in this fashion until he had outlined a square more or less three-quarters of a meter across. Then he pushed with the heels of his hands, and the square fell into the interior. Sahor followed it in.

The single chamber was completely bare, devoid of any sign of habitation. The first thing he did as he crouched in the dark was to search for another null-wave net. Finding none, he retrieved the whitewashed wooden panel he had constructed and set it back in place. Needing no light, he crossed to the baseboard in the far corner, pressed the center of it three times, then twice, then five times. A section slid back, and he manipulated a small panel he had hidden within.

In an instant, pale blue fire flared and flickered, causing the entire chamber to shimmer. Into view popped all of Nith Sahor's equipment neatly arranged and cataloged just as he had left it. Quickly, he activated the center touch panels, entering the formulae that would return his father to life.

Nothing happened.

a.s.suming that in his haste he had made a mistake, he reentered the figures, more slowly this time. An empty void loomed where the bio cortical net should have been. Sahor stepped back. There could be no mistake.

In a frenzy, he entered another formula, one far simpler than the first one. Death was so much simpler to fabricate than life.

In a trice, he was out the escape window he had made, shinnying down the sysal tree. Happily, heavier clouds had rolled in, obscuring all three moons. Only a dismal smudge indicated their location low in the western sky. Dawn was almost upon him.

Like a wraith, he stole silently from shadow to shadow, certain that his movements remained undetected. On Green Canthus Lane, he entered a small, gritty, unmarked tavern. A cadaverously thin, stoop-shouldered Mesagggun stood behind the flyblown counter picking on a plate of grey sc.r.a.ps. Sahor ordered and sat at a corner table, watching two bleary-eyed locals play warrnixx. The stoop-shouldered Mesagggun brought a goblet of crudely made ludd-wine. Sahor drank it anyway.

What worried him was this: some Gyrgon knew the formulae to bring the bio cortical net out of stasis.

Whoever that Gyrgon was must have been in on Nith Batox.x.x's attack to know of the laboratory's location. Doubtless, he was the one who had set the traps around the warehouse. How he had known about the bio cortical net's existence was a complete mystery, one that Sahor knew he had to solve as quickly as possible. He would not rest until he had his father back.

He was munching on a plate of freshly fried leeesta when the explosion rocked the tavern.

Somewhere, crystal windows blew out with the tinkling of tiny bells that filled the awful silence following the percussion. The two warrnixx adversaries leapt up and raced out the door to see what had happened. The stoop-shouldered Mesagggun did not look up. He wiped the counter with an unspeakably filthy rag and kept his own counsel.

12

The Forest Primeval