C J Cherryh - Gene Wars 1 - Hammerfall Read online

  Norit winced, and set her eyes on him, her back straightening.

  "Marak."

  Someone else was there. Someone else framed that word through Norit's lips.

  "I see you," the stranger said.

  "Don't hurt her," Marak warned the stranger, not remotely knowing how he might separate this stranger from Norit. "Don't hurt her."

  For an instant there was a break, a less rigid backbone. "She isn't hurting me," Norit said. "But she scares me. She wants me to say. she wants me to say exactly the words, and not to think about them. All these things. I'm scared. But she says I'm safe if I don't get up. She wants to talk to you."

  "Then, damn her, why doesn't she come talk to me herself?"

  "She says you'll believe it if it comes through me. She says she wants you. She wants you, most of all, to listen to her."

  He was not well-disposed to anyone in this place. "To do what?"

  "I think-" Norit began. "I think-I don't know. I don't know what she wants."

  "What do any of them want?" he retorted in anger at the powers behind the walls. Norit squeezed her eyes shut and held her hands to her ears. "Damn it, where is Hati?"

  Marak! Marak! Marak!

  The roaring grew and grew, and deafened him, and he flung himself down onto the bed, took Norit in his arms, and held her and rocked her against him, both of them rocking to the tides in the sound and the light and the noise. He would not surrender her to them, he would not surrender Hati, or himself.

  "Don't!" Norit cried, pushing at him. "Don't, don't, don't!"

  He began to understand it was at him Norit shouted. He relaxed his hold, letting her pull away, and tried to still the voices in his head. Marak, they said. Be calm-when his being calm was only to their advantage, none of his.

  "We are mad," Norit said, having captured half a breath, "we are mad because we have these creatures in our blood. And they have them inside, too. Luz has them, very, very tiny, so tiny no eye can see; but they move through our blood and through our ears and our eyes and they make us have the visions. They make the fever. They heal us. They make the sound and the pain and they build the lines we see in our eyes: they trace them on our eyes, and they whisper them into our ears. They take words out of the air, from the tower, to a place in the sky, to us, wherever we are."

  "Why?"

  "They're our gift."

  "A gift, is it?" He pushed Norit back to look at her, to see within her eyes whether he could see any trace of these engravings on her eyes. "Is it a gift, to be outcast from every civilized village? Is it a gift, to be whipped across the desert and die within a day of a village?"

  "I am Luz," she whispered, this woman almost within his arms, this body he had held tenderly at night and held now at arm's length, like some venomous animal. "I say it is a gift. A gift we give, Marak Trin Tain, risking our lives!"

  "Damn your gift!" he said, and shook her, and then was appalled, because it was Norit he had hurt. "Damn your gift. We're the ones who die for it. My mother and my sister will die because of your gift! I've sworn my life to the Ila because of your gift! Take it back! Let us go!"

  "You need it."

  "For what?"

  "Life," Norit's lips said, whispered. "Life, if you'll take it. Life for more than the ones you've brought if you'll listen."

  There had been a time he had chased the truth. He was not willing to find it in what this Luz dictated things to be. He would not take her word for the truth, not her desires, not her rules, not her half promises like some seller in the bazaar. None of it. He rose up off the bed, or began to, but Norit reached for his wrist.

  He would have rejected the effort. It was the fumbling, desperate character of the grip that restrained him and reminded him that Norit, too, was there to suffer for what he said and did.

  "She wants you to listen," Norit said. "Please listen."

  There were many, many hostages, in the Ila's hands, in Luz's hands.

  And where could he go? What could he do, to find Hati, and to rescue Norit?

  "Listen to what?" he answered not Norit, but Luz.

  "She wants you," Norit said. "She wants you, because you're Marak Trin Tain, because she knows your name, she knows who you are, she knows what you did in the war, and she knows the Ila sent you."

  "Yes the Ila sent me. The Ila gathered all the mad together and chose me to find her answer, to find out what we see and why we walk off into the desert to die like damned fools." Temper rose up, the temper that was Tain's curse, and his, and he choked it back, because it was only Norit he could hurt if he let it fly. "So what is this great truth? Why have we been tormented all our lives, and what good is it to anyone, and why should this Luz or the Ila care about a handful of madmen?"

  "She's given us a gift," Norit's lips repeated, trembling at every word. Her eyes were immense, dark and haunted. She drew a deep breath, shut her eyes, and the tremor went away. "We have had our thirty years. Thirty years to gather in those that will listen, thirty years to store away your knowledge, so what you know. will not. will not perish." She spoke. Then terror overwhelmed Norit. Her lips trembled into silence, as if she denied all that had flowed through her mouth.

  Pity moved Marak's hand to her cheek, gently, gently, and wiped a tear. "You are not to blame," he said. "Norit. You are not to blame."

  "I love you," Norit said. "You were kind to me, and I love you. Remember it if I can't."

  It was like a good-bye. It haunted him. And there was nothing he could do to help her. He brushed her cheek, straightened her hair.

  "Let her speak to me," he said. "Let her speak. Let's see if we can make sense of this. And damn this Luz, she'll give you back your right mind again when she's done."

  "I hear," Norit's lips said. And Norit's eyes were in torment.

  "Then tell the truth! Why do you do this to her? Why not come in here and speak to me yourself?"

  Marak! roared in his head. Marak, Marak, Marak! so loudly that he flinched.

  "Speak to me, damn you, don't shout!"

  "I've spoken to you," Norit's lips said, "for nearly thirty years, and you won't hear me. You hear what you want to hear." Norit hesitated, trembling. "You recast everything the way you want to hear it. You're very stubborn."

  "It's my father's inheritance," he said. He caressed Norit's cheek and found his own hand trembling. "I'm here. Tell me whatever she wishes, Norit. I love you. For your sake, I'll listen."

  "I can't think!" Norit said in a faint voice. "I see things and I can't think about them, and I hear words and they don't make sense. She hates me; she says she doesn't, but I know she does!"

  "Let her be!" he said to whoever possessed Norit. "Talk to me, and let her be!"

  "Norit is far easier." Of a sudden Norit's head drooped, and her whole body sank into his arms, so that for a moment he feared Norit was dead. but Norit lay in his embrace, aware, and breathing as if she had run for her life.

  "Luz wants you to listen," Norit whispered against him, teeth chattering. "Luz wants you to listen and not to fight her."

  "Hush," he said. "Hush. I'll try." He did try. He shut his eyes and tried to make sense of the whisper in his skull.

  "She thinks things," Norit said, at the limit of her expression, trembling. "She wants things. My ears buzz. She's angry because you won't listen to her."

  "I'm trying! Let her give us Hati back. Let her make sense and come into this room and talk to us face-to-face. It was she I saw in the metal hall, wasn't it? She's flesh and blood like the rest of us. Why won't she come here to talk?"

  "Will she be safe, she asks."

  "I swear she'll be safe. Just let her leave you alone." He wiped a strand of hair from Norit's cheek. "Luz! Do you hear me?"

  Somewhere a door opened. Theirs closed. He looked up from over Norit's head.

  "We're locked in," Norit said in a faint voice.

  "We've been locked in," he said. "This whole damned place locks us in." He thought of Hati, who never but in the Beykaskh itself had
experienced a roof. He thought of Hati shut in a little room, with no way out.

  "She says." Norit whispered. "She says. I should say exactly these words, and you have to listen."

  "I'm listening."

  "We have to go back. You promised the Ila to go back, and we have to. We have to tell the Ila. we have to tell the Ila."

  Suddenly the walls of the room went black, and the vision of the stars spread itself all across them. Norit cried out. Marak held to her; and suffered a vision of stars lit with lightning.

  The tower rode that blue-glowing fire to the ground, and reached out arms and dug into the earth, substantial as a mountain, on a plain of glass.

  And they still sat on a pale, foreign bed, clinging to one another.

  "The beginning," a voice said from above them. "Your beginning. The First Descended."

  Marak leapt up, but all around him was the desert, limned square, on the walls, a moving image with neither wind nor smell, and square-cornered.

  From the tower, walkers went out across the desert.

  Vision blurred, and caravans plied their trade, and all seemed ordinary.

  "Do you see it?" he asked Norit, who had stayed seated on the bed. Her face said yes before she nodded and half hid her face in her hands.

  "The tower of the Beykaskh," the voice said.

  He turned slowly and Norit turned, until they saw the tower again, set against the red, saw-toothed upthrust of the Qarain.

  Had they come a circle? Was that where they had come, after all their journey? Were they within the Beykaskh?

  That tower stood, and the vision rose up on wings like the birds of the air and turned until he swayed on his feet and Norit leapt up and held to him for her own balance.

  The tower became domed, and they swooped down at the level of the sand, dizzied, and powerless to stop the rush of vision.

  The tower put forth walls, and the walls rose up, and the dome rose, and the walls shone with the sun.

  "From this," their voice said, Luz said, "all else comes."

  The Beykaskh suddenly poured out the Mercy of the Ila, and the Mercy of the Ila formed the reed-rimmed pool as he had seen it, but subtly changed.

  Creatures like the beshti, but not, drank there, and he saw into the water, and saw moving creatures, and saw spirals and dots and chains, and them composed of smaller and smaller chains, and finally of small structures, not like the structures he had seen built of fire.

  These structures were dots, only dots of colors, and they changed and multiplied, and faded into larger things, and larger, and larger, and larger, threatening, and enveloping, until he saw the dots become small packets, and those packets become rows, and those rows become sheets, and those sheets become the skin of a man, and his ear, and his face, and his head and his body. He had no idea why this vision so terrified him, but the rapid shifts had made him both dizzy and afraid.

  "These are the makers," Luz said. "The Ila understands. Now you know what she knows. The makers flowed out into the pool and the beasts she had brought drank, and bred, and changed as the Ila directed. The beasts changed, and men changed to fit this land. Doesn't your scripture say that she divided the beasts from the vermin?"

  "I know nothing about it," Marak retorted, because none of it made sense at all, and he cared nothing about it, only for escaping this place and taking Norit and Hati with him. It was not the act of friends to try to awe him with such a show. "I don't believe in the scriptures or the priests. And if you want anything from us, open the doors. Bring the walls back. Give us Hati back. And the au'it."

  "This was five hundred thirty-eight years ago," Luz said, "when she created the pool and sent out this new breed of men, under priests she instructed. This was five hundred thirty-eight years ago when the First Descended took this world and hid from their enemies."

  There was a new thread. "What enemies?" he asked.

  "Enemies her predecessors made. She found a desert and transformed it. She sent out the makers and by them she fitted her creation to survive. She set up the priests to teach a history she wrote. As far as the priests' god exists, she is that god, and the devil of your belief is her enemy. Both are false. But we're not here to argue philosophy. We're here to save as much as we can save, before her enemy destroys this creation of hers. You are a resource to us, a threat to them, and we've won a reprieve: we've won this world, we've won the chance to save you, if you'll only listen. That's why we've called you here. to save your lives."

  It was too much to swallow at one taking. All around him, within his arms, was the evidence of intentions not as benign as the promise. And all his knowledge a lie? He refused to fall down and worship their truth, either.

  "What do you think of us, Marak Trin Tain? Do you want to listen?"

  "I'll listen," he said. "You keep your damned hands off us. And bring Hati here!"

  The sunlight grew on the walls, and whitened, and the vision was done. He found Norit's trembling had spread to his own limbs. Nothing he knew was true? Where did lies start and stop?

  The door whisked open. He expected a monster. He saw instead a perfectly ordinary woman, in house clothes, without a robe, like a prostitute. She had no definite age. With robes, she might have been a baker, a potter, a weaver. But she was very, very pale. Only the Ila had such skin.

  The Ila, and, he guessed, Luz.

  "Marak," Luz said in her own voice, and with an accent neither westerly nor easterly, only mildly strange. "Norit." This with a nod to his companion, who clung trembling to his arms.

  "So what do you want?" Marak asked. He held Norit close, and then on a second thought, put her apart from him. He had drawn the Ila's lightning. He might draw this woman's: he expected it, because he was not in a mood to bow down, with Hati unaccounted for. "One thief calls the other a liar. What does it mean to the man who's lost his silver?"

  "Bad news," Luz said. "The Ila could tell you, but she erased all the records five hundred years ago. The Ila settled here, where she had no right to settle. Her enemies have found her, they've set about to wipe this earth clean of life, and we've argued that we can unmake her makers and create benign ones. There, do you understand it?"

  "I understand you want something from us, and I doubt you're telling more truth than the Ila does."

  "Are you willing to die for her sake?"

  "No, I'm not willing to die. No more than the rest of us."

  "Yet you promised to go back to her."

  "I've reason."

  "So you will go."

  "I may."

  "You might save no few lives if you did. But I warn you that you may lose your own. There's safety here, and if you leave it, you run a risk of not getting back in time. It's moments before the destruction."

  "And this is a safe place?"

  "It will remain safe. Her enemies have agreed. They let us be here, to work out this problem."

  "Problem," he scoffed.

  "Not that we don't share it, Ian and I. We've agreed to be down here. We've agreed not to leave this place, ever. That's no small thing."

  "Down here. Where is here?"

  "On this world, so to speak. This earth. This patch of land. You're on a round world circling a star, Marak Trin Tain. That's knowledge she took from your grandfather's grandfathers."

  "Does it matter?" He disbelieved anything she offered. "Does it matter, except that I get out of here with the people I walked in with?"

  "Direct and to the point. I know your reputation. I can see why you got here. Dare I believe you're one who might get back?"

  "I'm supposed to tell the Ila what I find here."

  "Tell her. Perhaps she'll want to come here."

  The Ila, travel across the desert? Join madmen?

  "She won't."

  "Don't be so sure. I'll send you with a message. She may hear it."

  "What message?"

  "The same she sent to me."

  There was a flaw in the woman's omniscience. Slight as it seemed, he leapt on it, took
perverse satisfaction in that flaw. "She sent you nothing. She doesn't even know you exist."

  "Oh, but she did send, all the same. She doesn't know what I am, but she sent you to find that out. Her message is that she understands what we've done, she understands it's challenged her creation, she understands her makers have failed against ours, and take it for granted that she's tried to cure the mad. But she can't. She's gathered all the visions. She knows their meaning. She knows someone is here, and by the fact we've beaten her makers, she has an idea who we are. But she wants to know what we mean to do, and why, and that's what you're to tell her."