Artemis Awakening (36 page)

This is what we sought, the place the Old One was forced to abandon after Lynn discovered his secret. Now to see if we can turn it to our own use. He will not make it easy.

Nor did he. Five or six times Adara had to stop and patiently dismantle some device that would have harmed someone without her gift for seeing in the dark. Two more times only Sand Shadow’s basic distrust saved her from blundering into something that escaped even her careful inspection.

Once the place would have overwhelmed Adara with its peculiar layout. Not only was it larger than the buildings she had known, but the seegnur had built with a different sense of priority than her own people. Moreover, there were repeated signs of destruction—burn marks, slagged metal, ruined machinery—that even the Old One’s later use did not conceal.

Adara thought that Griffin might have been able to guess the place’s original purpose, but it was a mystery to her. All she could do was patiently search corridor by corridor, room by room, trying to find anything that might be useful.

The facility had been stripped of its furnishings. They found evidence of how it had been refitted for modern needs. Clumsy chimneys made from clay pipe fed into ventilation ducts, probably meant to serve stoves no longer in place. Smoke marked walls and ceilings where lanterns had been hung.

Occasionally, Sand Shadow’s sense of smell added a detail. This room smelled strongly of blood, that one of food, this one of smoke. In the end, it was Sand Shadow who found where another door was hidden.

Here,
the puma sent, pressing her nose to an otherwise unpromising wall at the end of a wide corridor.
Human scent, fresher than the others, also older scent, piled up as if many, many went over this place.

Adara understood and quickly found the outline of a door. She found the controls, concealed behind a panel that matched the surrounding wall. The concealment, although quite good, looked as if it had been done since the time of the seegnur. Probably then, long ago, this door had not been hidden.

However, try as she might, Adara could not open the door. The fail-safes did not work as did the ones in the crew quarters. Frustrated, she sat on the floor and considered.

I wondered at the outer door why it was not better locked. There the lock had been burned away. Here it remains. Did the Old One somehow work out its secret?

Almost unwillingly, Adara found herself admiring the Old One’s cleverness. He might be colder than the never melting ice of the highest mountains, but there was no denying his brilliance.

I must not let myself forget that Griffin comes from a culture that—although fallen—is still far closer to that of the seegnur than any we know. The Old One may have had centuries of life, but still he is of Artemis. That he has learned so much without teachers such as Griffin had … No. I must take care not to underestimate him. That brilliance of mind is as dangerous as the fangs of any pack of winter starved wolves.

She tried to solve the lock a while longer, but failed. Eventually, she decided to seek Terrell’s aid. Terrell had a loremaster’s education. Possibly he would think of something she had not. Perhaps this door was useless to their cause. However, the Old One had closed it and locked it as he had no other. If for no other reason than that, Adara wanted to get through.

*   *   *

Griffin’s apparent eagerness—and perhaps the Old One’s desire to make him an ally, not a mere prisoner—quickly earned him privileges. One of the first was being offered a mistress, such as both Julyan and Dierks enjoyed.

He knew that to refuse would be to lower himself in Julyan’s estimation—Julyan was very much the sort of man who enjoyed flaunting his sexuality—but Griffin had no desire to force himself on a woman. Then again, the women might be willing to tell him things he wanted to know: about the Mender’s Isle routine, how often the inhabitants were permitted outside, all those things that could enable him to plan an escape.

In the end, Griffin decided to express interest but also a degree of choosiness—presenting himself as a connoisseur of female beauty, unwilling to waste himself on just any woman. Julyan already thought he was odd, and readily accepted this excuse. However, this meant that each day some woman or other—bathed, groomed, and dressed provocatively—was paraded before Griffin. Some even seemed willing, which made Griffin’s self-restraint even more difficult. It had been a long time, and he was lonely as well.

If it hadn’t been for the odd dreams he kept having, for his chats with Dierks and, more rarely, with Julyan or the Old One, Griffin might have accepted a mistress just to break his isolation.

As it was, he found that remembering passages of Winnie’s story were quite effective in cooling his ardor. Her voice saying
“Is it enough to say that the Stablekeeper took me and showed me what happened to one girl who had rebelled? What I saw was enough to convince me to give in”
was usually enough to stop him.

Scientific assessment also helped. Griffin tried to look at the women not as women but as specimens, speculating as to what trait they had that the Old One desired. Occasionally, there was a clue. One slim blonde had eyes with pupils like Adara’s. Another showed thin lines on her throat that might be gill slits.

A final restraint to his sexual urges was that Griffin had no desire to be part of the Old One’s breeding project. As far as Griffin knew, he had no adaptations, but might the Old One want to add off-world genes to his collection? The idea of some son or daughter of his being raised in captivity, bred, perhaps to a sister or brother to bring out shared traits, was enough to make Griffin impotent.

Oddly enough, Griffin’s sexual self-restraint gained him freedom in other matters. Apparently, as Julyan saw it, if Griffin could resist the assortment of feminine pulchritude paraded before him each evening, then Griffin could also resist other temptations. Therefore, Griffin was given free run of most of the facility. The only areas off-limits were those where the women and children lived. Dierks assured him he wasn’t missing much of scientific interest.

“I was there before the space was converted into living areas,” he said. “The Old One and I went over them with great care. As best as we could tell, they were probably used to park a shuttle when it was no longer in use, just a huge, empty area with a door that—from its angle—probably opened directly under water.”

“You didn’t open it?”

“We couldn’t, even if we’d dared. The seegnur may have had a way to keep the water out, but we don’t. I was nervous the Old One would try anyhow—he is fearless when it comes to seeking knowledge—but the locks had been melted shut. You must remember, both this place and the one under the lighthouse were in horrible shape when the Old One found them. Only the arrival center was left in good shape, though sealed against intrusion.”

“Under the lighthouse?” Griffin tried not to sound eager. He remembered how Adara had located the general area where Lynn had said the Old One had originally housed his breeding project. They hadn’t found a way into the facility there but, to be fair, they hadn’t looked very hard. There had been too much else to occupy them.

“That’s right,” Dierks said. “It’s closed now but it was the first place the Old One found. He came to Spirit Bay because he had heard about the arrival facility and how it was still intact. However, even with the help of the loremasters, he couldn’t find a way in. Instead, he concluded that if the seegnur had one facility in the area, they might have had others. Proximity would have been useful since they refused to use their flying machines.”

“Yes. That would have ruined the ambiance,” Griffin agreed. “So the Old One went looking…”

“He had already learned that if the local lore said a place was scenic or otherwise restricted, it often held hidden evidence of the seegnur’s technology. The Haunted Islands were of great interest for that reason, but even he could not figure out how to bring a boat safely ashore.

“Therefore, he went looking for other places. There were tales that there had once been a very elegant lighthouse some distance from the town of Spirit Bay. It’s still depicted in mosaic art from the time of the seegnur. However, it had been completely destroyed. The Old One realized that the destruction had likely happened during the slaughter of the seegnur, for destroying the buildings they made is not easy.”

Griffin nodded, thinking of the houses in Spirit Bay, still intact, still with paint apparently pristine after five hundred years.

“And the Old One was, of course, correct.”

“He was more than correct,” Dierks went on, enthusiastic now that he was praising his mentor’s cleverness, “for he found not only the place—it was overgrown after several hundred years of neglect, as you can imagine—he also found the hidden facility beneath it. Clearing that facility without arousing local ire—for the area was ruled as a restricted zone in the regional lore—was his first challenge.”

“But he succeeded.”

“He did. It took years. As he did so, he cultivated friendships with the people of Spirit Bay and surrounding areas. He had long been an advocate for the adapted. In Spirit Bay, as elsewhere, there were conflicting reactions. I think there was some relief at someone who would take responsibility.”

“But the Old One’s work didn’t stop with finding the area below the lighthouse,” Griffin gently prompted.

“Not in the least. Eventually, he found a tunnel from that facility to the Haunted Islands.”

Griffin noted the difference in Dierks’s account from what the Old One had told him. The Old One had implied that he had reached the islands from the Sanctum.

Interesting. So perhaps he does not want me to know about the lighthouse. Did he forget to tell Dierks to stay silent? Or is this a sign of increasing trust?

“The facilities on and beneath the islands had also been ruined,” Dierks continued. “This time, though, the Old One changed his focus. He now knew that here—as elsewhere he had visited—the seegnur had hidden their workings beneath earth and water. He estimated where a tunnel into the sealed facility on the edge of the town might be.”

“He found it,” Griffin guessed, “and managed to get into the sealed facility that way. Clever. The locals didn’t mind? After all, the Sanctum must have been restricted as well.”

Dierks shook his head. “By the time the Old One found his way into the Sanctum, enough time had passed that the locals accepted his right. He is the Old One Who Is Young. He had outlived generations unchanged. Many thought he was one of the seegnur, either returned or reawakened. He never made that claim…”

Griffin nodded.
But he did everything he could to quietly create that impression, from how he styled his hair and dressed, to implying that he remembered what he had only learned. I suspect his greatest asset was that he never tried to convince anyone of his right to do as he wished. He simply did it and left it up to them to accept or not.

Aloud he said, “That’s fascinating. Now, where’s my pencil? I want to copy these icons. It wouldn’t do to have the Old One get impatient with our lack of results, would it?”

Interlude: Battle Won, Search Begun

Passing sleepers unleashed in dreams,

Twined souls finding root and soil,

—growing when seeming least alive.

                 Can I?

Does someone listen?

     Someone search?

Without ears, I listen.

Without eyes, I seek.

Searching for my heart.

20

Whispered Confidences

When Adara brought Terrell to the area under the lighthouse the following day, he had no more luck than she in figuring out how to open the door.

“It might be a good idea if we didn’t open it,” he remarked, sinking down to sit on the floor, back pressed against the wall. “It seems to be facing the bay. We might end up flooded.”

Adara paced back and forth, speaking with a confidence she didn’t feel. “Sand Shadow says there are numerous layers of human scent here. I think this door is how the Old One took all those people away without them being seen.”

“Maybe he drowned them,” Terrell said darkly. Then he shook his head, acknowledging his own irrationality. “No. We’ve agreed he wouldn’t do that. Humans breed too slowly for him to destroy the results of his experiments. Fine. Let me think on it. I’ll go visit the loremasters’ archives in Spirit Bay. It’s possible I might come across something that will give me an insight.”

Adara nodded approval. “I’ll sneak back into the Sanctum and take a look at the door fastenings. If I meet up with the Old One, I can say I came to see if he needed any help seeing in the dark.” She spoke quickly to forestall Terrell’s inevitable warning. “Terrell, do you still have that feeling, the one that says Griffin is alive?”

The factotum nodded. “I do. There are dreams … unsettling dreams. I don’t know why I should feel that somehow they are
his
dreams, but I do.”

Adara decided not to mention her own unsettling dreams, dreams in which an unseen someone joined her and Sand Shadow in their mental realm. There wasn’t much she was certain about these dreams, but she was sure they had nothing to do with Griffin.

“I’m glad.” Adara squeezed Terrell’s shoulder. “Don’t worry about why you dream so. Be glad we have this reassurance.”

“You don’t think I’m crazy? Fooling myself because I feel guilty about letting Griffin drown?”

“No and no again. I think that Griffin is a strange person, a change-bringer, such as the legends tell. Why shouldn’t those of us who have been closest to him be changed? A factotum might be changed most of all. Your profession was made to serve and protect visitors to Artemis.”

“I’m glad you don’t think I’m crazy. I wish I were so certain.”

“Forget it. You go look at architectural drawings. I will brave the Sanctum. Perhaps between us, we will find a way to open this door.”

*   *   *

Terrell sought Adara some mornings later. She had slept outdoors, as was her custom, but since the Trainers always served an excellent breakfast, she had returned there.