The Waters Rising (61 page)

Precious Wind sighed, turned her head from side to side, the cords of her neck standing out. Xulai reached out and massaged the drawn muscles. “Yes, Precious Wind. When?”

“A century or more ago, in Tingawa, our people discovered an ancient vault below one of the Ten Thousand Islands. It contained ease machines.”

Abasio barked laughter. “The wonderful subterranean vault of legend?”

She shook her head. “I know, I know. This is a story we have ridiculed for generations, though it persists in the public imagination. We ridicule it honestly now, for it is true that there are no more such vaults and the one we found is now empty. It was a cavern in a volcanic island, not a coral island. We believe it was the same cavern where the savior rebels worked, the ones who stopped the slaughterers, because that’s where we found the maps that gave the locations of scores of vaults around the world.”

“Around the world?” cried Abasio. “The whole world?”

“On every continent of the ancient world, Abasio. It took Tingawa a full century to find them all. We destroyed them all, along with most of the machines, devices, mechanisms we found with them. All the devices were originally made in the Before Time, when men flew to the moon, when they signaled other worlds around distant stars, when men could engineer the infinitely small in both genetics and electronics to affect even the monstrously large. Truly, they did marvels then, but none of these marvels profited the human race. All of them were for nothing. The earth had already collapsed under the ravenous appetites of too many humans; its ecosystems had been destroyed, its oceans were all but dead, its atmosphere dilapidated so that its sun bathed the surface with deadly radiation. It is hard to imagine, but the environmental situation was so desperate that the sea dwellers and even some land dwellers welcomed the Big Kill.”

“I was told the environmental situation actually caused the Big Kill,” said Abasio. “Men trying to get rid of other men to make room for their own kind.”

“Where did you learn that?” asked Precious Wind.

“Someone in the Edges, I think.” Actually it had been from the library helmet. It was all there. First the Big Fat epidemic, the mass starvation, the barking asthma, the lethal skin diseases, then the rich retreating to enclosed redoubts with filtered air, filtered water. And finally, the assault on the redoubts by those who had no redoubts. Air could not be filtered if the air intakes were blocked with bodies. Solar power did no good when millions laid themselves down on the grids. Not everywhere, not all at once, but enough, when added to the work done by the slaughterers, to make a very big kill indeed.

“That could be true. The Big Kill did leave the people who remained more room in which to breathe, though many of them moved near the poles, where the radiation was less severe. They ended up living mostly in caves, coming out only at night. Many groups lost the ability to read, write, or build. It was a darker age than any that had come before. Now we call it the Time When No One Moved Around. Indeed, men did not move around. There was nowhere to go.

“Here and there, mostly in caves or underground redoubts, an abbey survived. In Tingawa, certain monasteries survived, also underground. In such places, we lived like moles. From what Abasio has told us about the Edges, it is probable that some learning survived there. It is certain that in Abasio’s Place of Power there were deadly technological survivals. In abbey, or monastery, or Edge, learning was kept alive, ancient things were stored away, and people held the hope there might be an eventual enlightenment.

“When we discovered the ancient vault below the island—”

“How long ago?” Abasio interrupted, wondering vaguely if there were some alive who could be blamed for all this.

“Well before any now living were born, Abasio. The vault we found had monitors showing locations, scattered across the entire world. At first, we didn’t know what would be found at those locations. Up until then we had not given our full attention to the records stored in the vault. They were in old languages, hard to decipher, and we had thought we’d get to them later. The new findings demanded that we do it immediately. So, while some of our people tried to find the places being monitored, others of our people burrowed into the accounts, the procedures, the reports.

“The places weren’t easy to find. All were very well hidden. When we found the first one, we realized we had discovered the slaughterers that committed the Big Kill. Each one of them was still being monitored by some kind of everlasting atomic device; each one was dormant but still capable of being wakened to kill again. The old technicians had caught them in the so-called maintenance loop, but they hadn’t been able to destroy them.” She held up her hand, quelling Abasio. “Don’t ask me why because I don’t know. No one knows. Personally, I think they simply couldn’t get to them, not the way the world was then. By that time, people who tried to go anywhere usually died trying it.

“Difficult or not, we of the clan Do-Lok determined to destroy them utterly. One by one, over a long, weary time, our people found and demolished them. As each one was shattered, one of the ancient monitors went dark. Now only one of them registers the existence of the last slaughterer. We knew from the first that this one was different, for it showed movement where the others did not. We knew where the maintenance machine had been, but we
could not find it or find where the creature was
! This one, unlike its fellows, had never been completely dormant. It had either been designed differently or it had adapted in ways its creators never considered. The monitor didn’t tell us where either the maintenance device or the slaughterer could be found. It told us only where they had been a hundred years before.”

“As though the inventor was looking ahead, preventing his creature from being found,” said Justinian bitterly.

Precious Wind nodded assent. “Very possibly, Duke of Wold! A hideous joke from the remote past! We went to the place it had been a hundred years ago—a deserted city along the Great Dune Shore, south of Orez’s country, north of Elsmere. We asked questions. Was there a monster here a century ago? Do you know where it went? Men do not live long enough to remember, but sometimes there were local legends, old records. We picked up clues as we went. We tracked the creature through time: to the Big Mud southeast of Merhaven, onto the Highlands of Ghastain, then down toward the Lake Country. Eighty years ago it was here, seventy years ago it was there. We found it, finally, some twenty years ago when Xu-i-lok was stricken by a technology that should no longer have existed!

“You have asked why Alicia and her mother hated Tingawa. They hate Tingawans because they were created by the Old Dark Man to hate the land and the people who destroyed the other slaughterers, and also, perhaps, because in Tingawa there is much intelligence that does not conform! Or, perhaps, merely because they are out of reach.”

“The war with the Sea King!” cried Xulai in sudden enlightenment. “It was to keep Tingawa safe from him.”

Precious Wind heaved a great breath. “Yes. The fictitious war with the Sea People was to keep the slaughterer away from the islands. There had been some slaughterers near Tingawa, but we’d already destroyed them. The Old Dark Man, however, had been created to be more adaptable than the others. It was a new and improved model. It could move its maintenance device from place to place. It did not kill indiscriminately. It made plans. It deferred killing so it could kill a better target. It had not struck at our embassy. It did not strike at me or Bear, not until recently, after the princess died, and it struck at her through its creations.”

“Mirami and Alicia,” said Xulai. “Both of them. The creature made them, taught them, trained them.”

“Directed them,” said Precious Wind. “So we believe. The thing can think a century ahead, and its long-range plans would involve Tingawa directly. So far, we hope, the creature remains ignorant of our larger concerns.”

“Do we know anything else about it?” Abasio asked.

“Prince Lok-i-xan’s group believes that its flesh part dies periodically. It is thought that perhaps it reproduces itself, over and over, using egg cells from some human female coupled with its own DNA. Rebirth, however, would not explain the fact that this particular monster remembers where it has been and what it has done in the past. It has a continuous memory. It knows who it is and what it has done and what it plans to do.”

“I doubt it is reborn,” said Abasio. “Repaired, yes. Maintained, yes. It may grow spare parts using cellular material, yes. Or the flesh of the original volunteer may have been divided up to be used at maintenance time. And maybe it hibernates in its maintenance cocoon from time to time, like a toad encasing itself in mud until the next rainy season. It could live for millennia that way, coming back for a while every century without actually being reborn.”

Precious Wind said, “The cellular material could have been its own. Each slaughterer we found held only parts of the brain and a small amount of the living body tissue from the original volunteer.”

Xulai said, “Then my grandfather may be right about its using cells from women.”

“Perhaps he grows bodies he can harvest from,” said Precious Wind. “We’ve considered that. We now know the creature came to the Old Dark House before or at least during Mirami’s childhood, and we didn’t know that much until Mirami left the place and married Falyrion. She actually spoke of her childhood. Word began to circulate about the things she said. We had people everywhere listening for tales of ogres, monsters, ghosts. By the time we figured out that the creature that had lived in the Old Dark House might be the creature we were seeking, Mirami had left and the Old Dark House was empty. Our agents went there very soon after Mirami left the place. It was closed up, locked. We can deal with locks, even highly technological locks. Some of the people from the embassy took part in the search and know more about it than I do.

“I do know the first thing they looked for was one of the maintenance containers, something like the ones we had found in every other case: a large easy-to-open case about waist high, shaped like a huge coffin, the top made entirely or partially of glass, with various dials and controls on the outside, a man-sized vacancy inside, and a place on the side of it to insert the tubes that held whatever the monster needed to go on living. There was nothing resembling that at the Old Dark House. The cellar did have several small devices and machines and one large, upright machine that seemed to keep the environment properly warm and ventilated. Little lights and sounds on the smaller devices made our people believe some of them might be still functioning. We found cartons of maintenance tubes there, so we assumed the maintenance container had been moved, as it had been many times before. We thought the creature would return for the books, or some of the maintenance tubes, or some of the other devices; when it did, we didn’t want the creature to know we’d been there, so we left no sign.

“Many of the people who lived in the area claimed to have seen the creature, it, him, in recent years. The same people also told our people they had seen a unicorn, a goblin, and a sleeping giantess. The unicorn turned out to be a goat with one deformed horn; the goblin was a midget; the giantess turned out to be a small hill.

“We left the place undisturbed and kept watch on it, hoping the thing would return. If it did, we would destroy both place and creature. If he did return, which we now think probable, it was by some way we could not trace.”

“Just a minute!” said Xulai. “Some way you could not trace?”

“We were keeping careful watch on the place.”

“But what did you just tell us about that thing mother left me? That it could transport people from place to place in an instant? If it moves that fast, presumably no one can see it happen.”

Precious Wind was shocked into silence. She had not thought of this! No one had thought of this! “Of course,” she said at last. “Of course, it may have had
ug ul xaolat,
a thing master of its own.” Her face was gray. She felt ill. “We believed that the Old Dark House stood empty until Alicia was named duchess and reopened it.”

“But if the creature had been there, somewhere, and if he had one of those gadgets, he could have gone to Kamfels and brought Alicia back to the Old Dark House, even as a child,” said Xulai. “Perhaps repeatedly.”

Precious Wind only nodded. Oh, yes. He could have.

“Then that would have been how she learned about the machines!”

Justinian, seeing the sickness in Precious Wind’s face, drew their attention away from her. “Falyrion and I spent less time together after he married, but we still rode and hunted together from time to time. He talked about Mirami. She told him she was born at the Old Dark House, so she must have had a mother there, but no one ever spoke of her. Falyrion thought she was very beautiful, very interesting, but he was puzzled by her as well, puzzled by the children she bore him. He was fond of the girl, baffled by the boy. Now that Xulai has told me she killed Falyrion and his son, as well as others, I understand his puzzlement. How my friend would have hated fathering such . . .”

Xulai frowned. “Chances are he didn’t father either one of them. No. But Mirami doesn’t slaughter indiscriminately. One would think . . . but no. She always has a specific reason for killing someone. Unless she has killed people we don’t know about.”

Precious Wind said, “The fact that the creature has suspended general slaughter has been discussed by Clan Do-Lok. They think the creature has gone beyond its original function and has set itself some other goal.”