Light on The Sound (v1.0) Read online

  His shimmercloak was fullgrown. The dark blue fur blushed, shivers of pink rippling through the living material. He turned; the shimmercloak whipped around, echoing his movement.

  Then he saw the dawn. They had sought to copy his homeworld, the lost planet he had not seen in three centuries. Did they think he would feel at home, more secure, then? But time dilation had stranded his homeworld in an unreachable past. Some time between, while he sat and watched the fire of the overcosm counting the years like seconds, they had obliterated his homeworld. There had been some war … well, that was what it was like, being an Inquestor. You got an overview.

  The dawn pained him, more than he thought it would. Was the Inquest playing a game with him, subjecting him to psychological tortures while he was caught in their trap?

  He clapped his hands.

  It was the Lady Varuneh who answered his call, materializing in the middle of the room. She came forward, stepped down from the displacement plate, slid gracefully into the required obeisance.

  “Lady Varuneh,” he said, studying the face, (tl want the dawn changed. I want the shields deopaqued so we can look at the real Gallendys all the time. I want to begin my reign honestly, if I can.”

  The shadow of a smile surfaced on the Lady’s face and melded into the mask of humility. “Til see to it,” she said.

  She looked about eighty—old for a woman not of the Inquest—and was severely clad in a black tunic with only a wisp of clingfire around her neck and waist.

  Suddenly Davaryush thought, Maybe she’s a watchdog of the Inquest. “Who ordered this dawn?” he said, selecting his coldest Inquestral voice.

  “I did.” Deceptively simple.

  The woman looked straight at him. It was an ugly face, gray-streaked and lined and without cosmetics. Her hair was still black, but parched like a blasted field … her eyes were young, blue, powerful. Again the thought that she might be more than she seemed gnawed at him. “Discard the dawn, please.”

  The woman froze her features for a moment; presumably she had cyberinputs to the buildings themselves.

  He remembered from his hypnobriefing who she was: a member of Gallendys9 old aristocracy from pre-Inquestral times, now technically a planetary bureaucrat, directress of the shipyards—in practice a kind of court lackey, one who knew her way around the complexities of local protocol and could be expected to know many secrets of many Inquestral rulers.

  I’ll get rid of her as soon as l can, he thought. Curse her for springing the dawn on me like that!

  Then came an image of his dead homeworld, of his dead parents. He was afraid of this woman too….

  Abruptly he turned to look at the sea. The sky was shattered. Shards of the purple light broke off and faded in the painful brightness of the two suns. They had hardly moved, then, since the previous day.

  And the towers glistened.

  “Your Highness is ready for the official ceremonies of induction and coronation? Shall I inform the court?”

  A little stiff, a little hurried, he thought, appraising her by instinct.

  “Yes. Yes,” he said absently, wishing she would leave.

  “I’ll inform them….”

  What was she dawdling for? She must be a spy of the Inquest, observing him, watching for a clue of weakness so that they could close in on him and punish him—

  “You may leave.”

  She rushed towards him then. He put out a hand quickly to ward her off. Then she knelt at his feet and thrust something into his hand. Cool, Flat.

  “Kill me if you have to!” she whispered fiercely. “You must be the one!” Then she whirled around and hurled herself onto the displacement plate and faded away.

  “What is this?” Davaryush cried. And then he stood alone in the huge chamber. It had been an unnerving experience; for a moment he had thought her an assassin.

  Then—

  He saw that there was a messagedisk in his hand. It was of the crystal parchment that scribes used. It was written in the Inquestral highscript, with a fair, firm hand, but it was not in the highspeech. It was the tongue of Shtoma.

  And he knew what it said.

  The words were:

  Qithe qithembara

  udres a kilima shtoisti—

  “Soul, renounce suffering:

  you have danced on the face of the sun.”

  Davaryush shook. Did the Inquest know then what had happened on Shtoma? Were they only waiting for him to reveal the cankerdarkness in his heart?

  Even now, Shtoma haunted him. Shtoma in the cadent lightfall.

  The planet where he had found his own heresy. Underneath the passage was a message in the high-tongue. It was a different hand: nervous, spidery.

  We think you are the one who will change the way things have been. To challenge the past. We think you know that utopia may yet exist. On the tenth day of the week, come stand by the firefountain of Kenongtath. You will be contacted.

  Then the words dissolved. The ink had been timed, giving him a chance to read it only once.

  They were all waiting for him to catch the bait, to show that he was still the heretic inside! Gallendys was a trap!

  … Shtoma in the cadent lightfall..,.

  Could it be that there were human beings somewhere, waiting for him to come as a savior? Could it be that the Lady Varuneh was not a spy, but simply driven by desperation to reveal herself?

  Davaryush knew how devious the Inquest could be.

  He filed the information carefully, suppressed it with an effort, in case the Inquest had mindhearers planted nearby. And turned his thoughts to the coming ceremonies.

  And looked out over the cities. The spires, hanging down and pointed up, like the teeth of a monster ready to swallow him. A single false step.. •

  The image of the homeworld dawn crept back into his thoughts for a moment. Then he knew that it had been no accident; it had been planned as a sign for him, to jolt him into an emotionally receptive state perhaps. There was no end to the Inquest’s deviousness!

  Selfishly, he wanted the mauve dawn back then. He wanted the sky streaked with half-remembered purples and the sea sparkling like liquid amethysts and the green grass tinted black by the sunrise….

  Tomorrow he would look into the history of the woman Varuneh. He would find out once and for all who it was who was trying to manipulate him, and why.

  The ache of homeworld swelled in him.

  Outside, the city glittered.

  The trap yawned, waiting.

  mor ombrel eyáh

  dhánata ombrel eyáh

  chadáh y’ombren evendek

  a tembris kíndaran endek

  The shadow is mother

  The shadow is death

  The shadow falls forever

  On the children of darkness

  —Text inscribed on all gateways

  into the Dark Country

  FOUR

  THE DARK COUNTRY

  Girl-before-Naming wasn’t human and she knew it. And she knew she could never tell anyone. She knew what would happen.

  The Dark Country. That was what would happen.

  She was a girl just past puberty and cursed with a gift that made her not human and she was terribly alone.

  Like now. In the family catacomb, she was sitting with her arms folded, not touching the ground, and she knew where every object in the room was. Without feeling for the vibrations. Without tapping the floor with her fingers, easing along until they encountered an object, carefully identifying it by its texture, its smell, its taste….

  She could feel with her eyes and ears.

  Look! The others-before-Naming in the room were playing ball. Sensing the caress of wind against their faces, reaching out and catching, sometimes stumbling over stray rocks.

  She felt the ball come to her with her eyes. She caught it with impossible accuracy. A boy tensed, feeling the sudden stillness of the air. Then he clambered toward her.

  He grabbed her arm. Cheat! Cheat! he signed, his fingernails rasping her skin. She winced, moved away.

  I’m not cheating, she signed.

  All of them were around her, suffocating her, smelling her and each other to check who they were… . She felt everything press her in, she felt as though the fax dark above would fall on her and crush her….

  Wildly she reached out to the first children within grasp and signed—each hand mirroring the other—Let me done! With her eyes she felt them pass the message down.

  With her ears she felt them leave, through the circular machined opening in the rock. The curve-fed that meant door.

  It always ended this way. Someone would start to get angry, to sign cheat, cheat, and then they would be signing it around and around; she could even feel them sign it with her eyes sometimes, she could make out the finger motions almost, she could almost figure out the code of the eye-feelings; sometimes it blurred for her. But there had to be something to it

  It must be hallucinating, she would think sometimes. Logic said there couldn’t be any senses apart from feel, smell, taste. And her eye- and ear-senses were feeble, shadowy senses, not like the real ones.

  Sometimes they worked better than other times. It was in those rooms where a diffuse force flowed out of the walls themselves and widened the periphery of her feeling. She never could tell why this was, why some rooms accentuated her strange senses; for there seemed no source to the mysterious undarkness.

  Now she pushed herself hard against the jagged wall of rock. Every well-memorized furrow grated on her back. Then she straightened her crotch-shield and tried to smooth down her new breasts, a little worried at them. With her eyes she paced the twelve paces to the other wall.

  In a week she’d be normal.

  A presence by the round door. A boy-before-Naming. Her
Touch-brother, in fact.

  He came toward her, inching with his toes, sensing her sweet young girl’s smell. Then he sat down in front of her and reached for her arm.

  You’re a strange girl, he signed. With a twiddle of perplexity, a twist of anger. The ceremonies of adulthood coming up, so soon, and you still throwing balls with the other children.

  She signed, I’m scared.

  Why? So they take out your eyes. Useless organs any-way. Nobody has ever figured out what they were meant for physically. So we consecrate them to the Windbringers, who are the source of everything. He was signing in neat mechanical strokes—Girl-before-Naming knew he must have just come from his instructor, that he had just memorized another sacred text.

  It’ll hurt. Of course she did not dare tell him what the eyes really meant to her •.. even now her eyes touched his face and she felt sweat there, almost as clearly as if she had wiped the wetness with her own hands.

  Oh, Girl-before-Naming, her Touch-brother signed, are you a coward even now? How much use will you be on the hunt? When we sail into the thick wind, with our snares laid and the Windbringer’s breath flying over us and the windstorms churning?

  (More memorized texts,) she thought. You know Fm not a coward, she signed. But her fingers trembled on his palm*

  Remember that we are Touch-siblings. Our scent is one. We were so promised at birth….

  Somehow she knew that he was frightened too. So she drew him to her in the profane touch that is reserved only for Touch-siblings, and they both drew an awkward comfort from each other.

  Touch-siblings, she signed tenderly. Our scent is one.

  With her eyes she felt the fear on his face. With her ears she felt fear escape from his mouth, a windshape piercing the blur of air.

  Girl-before-Naming reached the gatherchamber in time for a funeral. The Windriders had come home from the hunt, and three were dead. The whole settlement, some twenty catacombs, came to touch the dark ones.

  She held hands with a stranger and they began the journey to darkness. The passage to the Dark Country, where the dead went to join the angels, was only manwide, and dank-smelling. Girl-before-Naming was hemmed in by the closeness and the breathing of strangers with their unrecognized smells. Once the passage roof scraped her head. They inched their way to darkness—

  The dark! The ugliest sign in the language of her tribe.

  To be dark. To reach out with your arms and touch nothing at all, to stretch out forever and still not reach the rockwall that meant you were still in a real place.

  Dark is death. Death is dark.

  They pressed on. Slow down, she signed weakly to the hand that clutched her in front.

  A soft fingerpelting sign, repeated over and over in her hand, showed that the hand was the hand of a bereaved one.

  —muscletwitching as someone stooped for a roofdip—

  Then they filed past the bodies of the dark ones. Girl-before-Naming reached out to touch the cold, hard flesh that had become one with stone. The dank smell crammed her nostrils. She was shaking. And she felt the hand of the person in front tighten. The procession hurried on.

  They reached the tunnels to the Dark Country. A man she could feel standing opposite her in the corridor handed her a glove-amp; she slipped it on, stood against the wall, waiting to feel the last rites.

  It was Stonewise, her family elder, who signed first. She felt the glove tickling her hand; it transcribed the sign into her palm accurately but emotionlessly, so she could not tell what he was thinking.

  We say farewell to these as they enter the darkness. We leave them in the Dark Country where the wails are further than an undark man can walk without going mad from lack of sensation.… Angels will come out of the darkness and destroy their human forms. They will become one with the hearts of the Windbringers, they who gave their lives for the life of the Windbringer.

  … Behind her was a child, breathing as if bored. In front, the hand of the widow or widower gripped like a sandwich of stone slabs. Girl-before-Naming had been to funerals before, but now that it was so near to her own rites of passage, she was tense. (This could happen to me,) she signed in her mind.

  And then she thought of losing her eyes. With her eyes she strained to feel something, but that secret sense was dark for her. But with her ears she felt strange windshapes escaping the mouths of the others, stranglesounds that frightened her, that reminded her of the signs for terror and anguish—

  O Windbringers, we thank you. For your first flight over the empty waters, when you made the humans and the corridors carved of stone. For your second flight over the waters, when you made the secret chambers where the food appears, so that your children would not die or perish into darkness.

  From darkness we come; to darkness we return your children. May the angels you have made bear them home, to the chambers of cushioned rocks in the heart of your eternal darkness….

  With her hands the widow sobbed, signing the grief-touch over and over.

  Windbringers! Windbringers!

  Girl-before-Naming lost interest in the ceremony. She began to think of the future. How she must soon sail into the void and help bring home a Windbringer. How she would get a piece of his windsac for a loinpiece and a cutting from his tailflap for a mattress to sleep on, to share with her Touch-brother. There were only two types of people: hunters and waiters. And she already knew—even before the dream that she must have to confirm this—that she would be a hunter. Not for her the waiting at the food-gate for the bales of food that appeared as gifts from the Windbringers, a lifetime of waiting and cleaning the catacomb and being widowed perhaps, losing a Touch-brother to the darkness.

  Even as she knew this, she was afraid.

  The ceremony was coming to an end. The Elder Stone-wise had pressed the stud that opened the gateway to darkness. Had placed the bodies on ceremonial mattresses woven from the headfeathers of the Windbringer. Had pressed the stud that tipped the bodies into the Dark Country.

  A strange thing happened then. She was nearer the gateway than she had ever been before at other funerals, through some chance of the order of the procession, and—

  At the moment the gateway opened, a softness she could not touch flooded her eyes. With her eyes she could touch—

  All the people. She touched them, flicking her eye from

  one to the other. She touched the knobby ceiling that was hardly a handspan from her head. And then …

  The chain was breaking now. A body or two squeezed past her, children ignoring the etiquette of processions in their rush to get home and eat—

  Without warning, the hands that clutched her on both sides were gone. She stood alone for a distance of ten or fifteen paces in either direction, and this glowing softness from the open door bathed her, made her feel lightheaded. It was an eerie thing, this softness.

  She took a step toward the gateway. She could feel the whole circle of doorway with the eyes alone. She didn’t have to inch along even though the corridor was alien to her.

  She stepped out as though it were her own home.

  She was at the circular doorway now. She felt with her eyes….

  Below—without the real senses she could not judge distance—were the three bodies.

  (How tiny they are!) she thought. (Do people shrink so, when they come to darkness?) She reached out. with her eyes. It was one of those caverns that glowed with the quiet, sourceless thing that let her eyes reach farther. (Why is it,) she thought, (that I can feel so clearly in this darkness, touching nothing at all? Why does it awaken the secret senses so strongly?)

  It was still. No wind touched her face. She turned upward.

  With her eyes she touched—

  Things. Alien. Huge, spidery, glinty-sharp. There was no ceiling, it seemed; there her senses were truly dark. But the things up there in the height—

  They were coming down towards the bodies!

  They were growing bigger, bigger—

  She closed her eyes, cursing the secret sense. Then she turned around and began to walk home. Even without touching the door she knew with her ears that it had made a wind of closing. (It can’t have been real,) she thought. (Maybe I dreamed the whole thing.)